Andrew Bostom

BOOK REVIEW OF ANDREW BOSTOM’S ‘THE LEGACY OF ISLAMIC TOTALITARIANISM…….

 

An excellent holiday gift.

The great virtue of Dr. Bostom’s work is the collection of primary documents and secondary commentary that taken together provide a more accurate picture of Islam than the fantasies concocted from ignorance or political expediency, or the postmodern propaganda manufactured by Edward Said and his followers.

The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism

November 2, 2012 By 

The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior––whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad––is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now.

Our main mistake has been the belief that al Qaeda and other jihadist groups are outliers among Muslims, a tiny minority of fanatics who have “hijacked” the faith that under both Republican and Democratic administrations has been called the “religion of peace,” and so we must reach out to that majority of moderate Muslims and convince them how much we admire and respect their religion. But this desperate search for these moderates has lead to dangerous policies, such as considering the Muslim Brotherhood “moderate Islamists,” an oxymoron that blinds us to the Brotherhood’s long-term goal to recover the global dominance that is Islam’s divinely sanctioned birthright.

Andrew Bostom, a professor of medicine at Brown University, has for a decade relentlessly exposed the distortions of history and Islamic theology that have accompanied these policies. In The Legacy of Islamic Jihad, he exposed the lie that jihad is merely a spiritual struggle to be a good Muslim, amassing evidence from Islamic theology, scripture, and jurisprudence to show that jihad has in fact predominantly denoted the use of violence to subject unbelievers to Muslim hegemony.

In The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, he swept away the rationalizations for widespread Jew-hatred among Muslims that blamed it on imported Western anti-Semitism, once more letting Islamic texts speak for themselves to show that since the 7th century, Jews have been hated, despised, massacred, and subjugated in both Islamic theology and practice. Now Bostom, in the 43 essays collected in his new book, Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, has turned to the totalitarian foundations of Islam codified in shari’a law, the totalizing system that controls every dimension of human life––political, economic, civic, familial, and personal.

More here.

3 Responses

  1. Bruce Thornton illustrates his valuable talent in this review given his ability to summarize into précis paragraphs the meaning and value of each of Dr. Bostom’s scholarly work exposing the many deceptive, deadly and triumphalist facets of Islam throughout history.
    This pristine book, just received this week, will likely soon resemble my personal copies of Bostom’s other works with their many dog-eared pages & highlights as I refer to his scholarship regularly.

    1. WTD, that’s well said, I underline your every word. I’ll forward this to Andy himself, he’ll be pleased.

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