Militant Islam Reaches America
(amazon)Daniel Pipes (View Bio)
Hardcover: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002; Paperback: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003.
Long before September 11, Daniel Pipes publicly warned Americans that militant Islam had gone to war against America. Drawing on his thirty years of intensive research on Islam, he shows the vital distinction between the faith of Islam and the ideology of militant Islam. Among his findings: militant Islam has much in common with fascism and communism; about one in every eight Muslims worldwide supports militant Islam; 70,000 Al–Qaeda accomplices remain at large in over fifty countries; Michael Jackson and Madonna are, in the eyes of militant Islam, "cultural terrorists" who should be brought to trial; militant Islamic groups have raised $1.3 million for the defense of indicted murder suspect Jamil Al–Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown). MILITANT ISLAM REACHES AMERICA is one of the most important and readable books about the grave issues that now confront America.
"Unlike other Middle East experts, Daniel Pipes did not need to reinvent himself or revise his opinions after September 11th. Like so many other events in the Middle East over the years, September 11th bore out the truth of his earlier analyses. Few have been less embarrassed by events than Pipes." — Robert Kaplan, author of WARRIOR POLITICS and BALKAN GHOSTS
"This fascinating (and frightening) book discusses the profound difference, according to the author, between Islam the religion and militant Islam. Pipes, a brilliant, respected political thinker, believes that the latter, which he also terms Islamism, is the greatest threat to western civilization and to security and freedom since the Cold War." — Canadian Jewish News
"Pipes is a natural polemicist, and his collection of essays is engagingly written. His deconstruction of the dubious criminal career of the former Black Panther and Muslim 'activist' H. Rap Brown, a k a Jamil Al-Amin, and a particularly enjoyable jeremiad against the leftist notion that poverty incubates militant Islam, are worth the price of admission alone." — Washington Post
"Mr. Pipes makes a distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism, the latter being the widely used term for Islam as ideology. Islamism, not Islam, he argues, is our enemy. Islamists, Mr. Pipes argues, are more modern and Western than they admit, and their chief Western influences are Marxism-Leninism and fascism. Like them, Islamism is a utopian ideology of political control. [Pipes] is dead right to point out that Islamism is a new thing, not the return to Islamic fundamentals that its followers claim. Why, then did Islamism arise? Mr. Pipes decisively debunks the idea that poverty and repression are the 'root causes.' Rather, Islamism is a response to the cultural difficulties of incomplete modernization, and, like fascism, appeals more to the half-educated than the totally uneducated." — New York Sun
"Highly controversial...worthy of attention and debate in a time of crisis." — Kirkus Reviews
"Daniel Pipes has been warning us for years that militant Islam has declared war on the West and that its legions are already present in the West. MILITANT ISLAM REACHES AMERICA brilliantly demonstrates how Pipes knows his subject, providing us with a rarely seen window into a subterranean world that poses a clear and present danger to us all." — Steven Emerson, author of AMERICAN JIHAD
"Blunt and passionate." — The New York Times
"An original work on an important subject." — John Keegan, author of SLAVE SOLDIERS AND ISLAM
"An extraordinarily useful compendium of basic information and analysis.... Easily readable by the nonspecialist, yet engaging for scholars as well." — National Review
"A singular and alarming insight into ideological Islam and the nurturing — at home — of the extremist and terrorist threat." — National Post
"In the war on terrorism, who is the enemy? Sounds like a trick question — it's terrorists, right? — but Daniel Pipes, more than any other public intellectual at the intersection of scholarship and policymaking, has forced America's leaders and leading pundits to think again. As he argues in this insightful and often prophetic set of essays, the threat to American lives, values, and interests that has triggered the war on terrorism does not come from some featureless group of high-tech criminals, but rather from a highly motivated ideologically-driven slice of the world's billion-plus Muslim population, those who subscribe to what Pipes calls 'militant Islam.'... Pipes is both knowledgeable and sensitive enough to know that the religion of Islam is not the problem; rather it is the ideology of militant Islam that we — the United States, free peoples, and non-militant Muslims around the world yearning for a more liberal, humane version of Islam — all have to fight. Those who denounce Pipes for alleged intolerance toward Islam or Muslims has simply never read what he has written. They — and even more importantly, the American leaders who direct the war on terrorism — should." — Middle East Quarterly
