"Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West" By Raymond Ibrahim (Aug. 2018) w/ 16 pages of b/w drawings of discussed battles. [This review by Col. William Garrison, USA (Ret.)]
The subject matter of this book is pretty well encapsulated by Victor Hanson who wrote the Foreword to this book:
"Sword and Scimitar is a much-needed history of landmark battles between Islam and the West. Ibrahim offers eight representative engagements … from France to the Middl East, and over a millennium from 636 to 1683.
This book "is first and foremost riveting military history. It offers blow-by-blow concise accounts of the eight battles, and interprets them in the context of the times -- or rather, takes seriously what contemporary leaders claimed were their intentions and how they worked out their strategies..... the book advances larger cultural and religious arguments"
..."he has selected four exemplary Western defeats (the fall of Constantinople, Hattin, Manzikert, and Yarmuk) balanced by four victories (second defense of Constantinople, La Naas de Tolosa, Tours, and Vienna). ...Ibrahim's evidence reveals certain recurring themes about the interaction between Islam and the West....
"First, in most cases Islamic armies saw themselves as expansionary and messianic.... Second, while there were localized and intramural political and tribal rivalries, Muslim armies went to war against the West more often as religious rather than as national or ethnic forces.... Third, Ibrahim sees continuity between past and present; that is, Muslim religious leaders and jihadists have characteristically seen Christianity as both antithetical to the Islamic world and inherently ripe for conquest or conversion" (p. viii - ix).
This book is much more than just some military-school analysis of various Middle Age battles that will be appreciated only by infantry officers attempting to discover some obscure, medieval envelopment movements and apply them to the Vietnam War or the current "War On Terrorism" battles occurring throughout the Middle East today.
What is unique and informative about Ibrahim's important book is that he analyzes "that there [is] a much larger but wholly forgotten backstory to this … military history, the recollection of which can revolutionize the way the West understand its past, and thus its present, with Islam" (p. xiii).
Ibrahim notes how many (leftist) commentators today whitewash jihad terrorism as legitimate warfare against modern states that were birthed from European colonialism. Ibrahim observed: "Even among less ideologically charged historians, the macrocosmic significance of the aforementioned millennium, when "Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam," is unintelligible. They talk of "Arab," "Moorish," "Ottoman," or "Tartar" -- rarely Islamic -- invasions and conquests, even though the selfsame rational -- jihad -- impelled those otherwise diverse people to assault the West."
Ibrahim offers "the most timely aspect of this book. It definitively answers one of the most pressing questions of our time: Are militant Muslims -- aka "terrorists," "radicals," "extremists" -- being true to Islam, as they insist, or are they "hijacking" it for their own agendas, as we are told?"
Ibrahim contends that this book "unlike most military histories -- which no matter how fascinating are ultimately academic -- this one offers timely correctives: it sets the much distorted historical record between the two civilizations straight and, in so doing, demonstrates once and for all that Muslim hostility for the West is not an aberration but a continuation of Islamic history" (p. xvii).
Besides discussing the relevance to today of his selected medieval battles, Ibrahim also briefly discusses the Muslim Ottoman attacks in the Balkans during the 1870s.
Ibrahim also opines that the attacks upon Europeans today by Muslim "refugees" fleeing from war-torn Muslim lands are less about fleeing than actually spearheading a new Islamic-jihad invasion of an essentially ignorant European populace to the menace of the Muslims' "right or straight path" (sirat al-Mustaqim) of wanting to convert Europeans to Islam rather than integrate themselves with the liberal and permissive West.
[For a more expansive view of the great multitude of Muslim battles against non-Muslims see: "The History of Jihad: from Muhammad to ISIS" by Robert Spencer (Aug. 2018), and "The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology" by Ibn Warraq (May 2017).
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