Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries by Paul Fregosi

From the start, Islamic fundamentalism has intended to expand the Muslim religion to encompass the entire world through conversion, or, in many instances, violence. Yet until now it has lacked a general historical narrative: "The jihad has been the most unrecorded and disregarded major event of history," writes Fregosi. Jihad in the West attempts to describe the history of Islamic and European conflict over 1,500 years, including moments such as the climactic battle at Tours (if the Moors had won it in 732, much of Europe might be Muslim today), the sieges of Vienna, and the Barbary Corsairs (the battle U.S. Marines refer to when they sing about "the shores of Tripoli"). Such a sweep necessarily sacrifices detail for breadth, yet it still provides a helpful backdrop to understanding a religious movement that has played a prominent role in late-20th-century terrorism. 

Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror by Mary Habeck

Yale historian Habeck takes Muslim terrorists at their word. They aren't envious of liberal democracy or the consumer society. Religion drives them--specifically, an exclusivist, triumphalist vision of Islam that Habeck calls jihadism to point up its holy-war-like character rather than its orthodoxy. The latter is problematic, for while jihadism is based on universally accepted Muslim principles and traditions, what it has forged out of them is highly controversial, not least because jihadists consider Muslims who disagree with them to be unbelievers as worthy of destruction as non-Muslims. Habeck traces the current of Islamic thought that eventuated in jihadism from an early-fourteenth-century scholar and the eighteenth-century founder of the harshly restrictive Islam predominant in Saudi Arabia to four twentieth--century figures who inspired a host of radical reactionary organizations, including Hamas and al-Qaeda.

The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In by Hugh Kennedy

In just over one hundred years following the death of Mohammed in 632, Arabs had subjugated a territory with an east-west expanse greater than the Roman Empire, and they did it in about one-half the time. By the mid-eighth century, Arab armies had conquered the thousand-year-old Persian Empire, reduced the Byzantine Empire to little more than a city-state based around Constantinople, and destroyed the Visigoth kingdom of Spain. The cultural and linguistic effects of this early Islamic expansion reverberate today.

Islamic Imperialism: A History by Efraim Karsh

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam’s millenarian imperial tradition. The author explores the history of Islam’s imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam’s war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.

Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David Dalin and John Rothmann

In 1921, the beneficiary of an appointment the British would live to regret, Haj Amin al-Husseini became the mufti of Jerusalem, the most eminent and influential Islamic leader in the Middle East. For years, al-Husseini fomented violence in the region against the Jews he loathed and wished to destroy. Forced out in 1937, he eventually found his way to the country whose legions he desperately wished to join: Nazi Germany. With new and disturbing details, the book shows how al-Husseini ingratiated himself with his hero, Adolf Hitler.

 

Jihadist's First War Against America: The Barbary Wars

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present by Michael Oren

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy—murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets—emanating from the Barbary states (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

"… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World by Frank Lambert

The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805 by Richard Zacks

Jefferson's War: America's First War on Terror 1801-1805 by Joseph Wheelan

The End of Barbary Terror: America's 1815 War against the Pirates of North Africa by Frank Leiner

Wars of the Barbary Pirates: To the shores of Tripoli: the birth of the US Navy and Marines (Essential Histories) by Gregory Fremont-Barnes

Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation by Joshua London

To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines by A.B.C. Whipple

 

Women Under Islam

ARTICLES:

Women in Islam: Suffering the Barbary of an Ideology

WEBSITES:

International Campaign Against Honor Killings

Women Against Sharia

Women Living Under Muslim Laws

Arabs and Muslims Against "Honour" Crimes

Women's Forum Against Fundamentalism in Iran

VIDEO:

Murder in the Family: Honor Killings in America (Fox News) 

  --Watch the video

BOOKS:

The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror by Nonie Darwish