The Mind of Jihad
- Release Date: 06/11/2008
- Country of Issue: United States of America
- Category: Academic and professional books
“Laurent Murawiec has produced a work of genuine and subtle learning, a book that situates Islamism in the broader context of millenarian movements the world over. I believe that this is a work that will make for itself a sure place in the writings on Islamic Radicalism. An author at once brave and disciplined.”
- Fouad Ajami, Majid Khadduri Professor; Director of the Middle East Studies Program Johns Hopkins University
The deadly aftermath of Islamic fundamentalist attacks has become an all too common part of today’s front pages and evening newscasts.
But with each new report of a suicide bombing or mass killing abroad, Westerners are left with a lingering question: How? How can seemingly ordinary people willingly take their own lives and the lives of innocent men, women, and children when the result will not be sympathy for their cause but instant condemnation from the rest of the world? How can we possibly reason with an enemy that has for centuries expressed the difference between themselves and non-Muslim radicals thusly: “We choose death, while you choose life.”
Laurent Murawiec’s The Mind Of Jihad (Cambridge University Press; November 6, 2008) examines contemporary jihad as a cult of violence and power. Murawiec argues that jihad is integral to Islam, that there is no barrier between jihad and radical Islam. He shows that jihad never disappeared from the mind and horizon of Muslims – it merely retreated as it was put in check by greater Western strength in the 19th and 20th centuries. As soon as Islam was able to reassert itself, it went back on the offensive.
Murawiec explores the history if jihad, characterizing its belief structure as identical to that of Europe’s medieval millenarians and apocalyptics. He argues that both jihadis and their European cousins shared in a Gnostic ideology: a God-given mission that endowed the Elect with supernatural powers and placed them above the common law of mankind.
Although the ideology of jihad is essentially Islamic, Murawiec traces the political technologies used by modern jihad to the Bolsheviks. Their doctrines of terror as a system of rule were appropriated by radical Islam through multiple lines of communication.
The Mind Of Jihad brings history, anthropology, and theology to together in order to understand those who have declared war on the rest of the world.
ENDS
Notes for Editors
Laurent Murawiec is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.
Laurent Murawiec is available for interviews.
The Mind Of Jihad by Laurent Murawiec will be published by Cambridge University Press on November 6, 2008 $24.99 | 352 Pages | ISBN: 978-0-521-73063-1
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