Rave reviews are flowing in for Robert Spencer’s new book, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, which you can order by clicking here now. Some key excerpts: Bruce Bawer in FrontPage:

Rave reviews are flowing in for Robert Spencer’s new book, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, which you can order by clicking here now. Some key excerpts: Bruce Bawer in FrontPage: It’s good to have something you love to do – something that brings zest and joy to your life. For the Prophet Muhammed, as Robert Spencer graphically establishes in the opening pages of his comprehensive yet concise History of Jihad, that something was murder – often followed by beheading, dismemberment, and ostentatious gloating. When he wasn’t committing murder, Muhammed was talking about murder or threatening to murder. Nor, to be sure, was it just ordinary murder. It was jihad – murder for the purpose of expanding the reach of Islam, which, by the time he died in 632, had been spread by the sword to the whole Arabian peninsula. The history of jihad is a grisly one, and for inhabitants of the Western world in the early twenty-first century, no story could be more important. For centuries, Europeans might not have known much, but they knew the reality of Islam. It was an ever-present existential peril. They certainly had no romantic illusions about it – the very idea would have seemed a grotesque joke. ​ If we aren’t familiar with the story told in this book, we’re screwed. The good news is that Robert Spencer tells it in a way no one else could. He not only knows all this stuff cold – he knows just how to tell it. Chapter by chapter, anecdote by anecdote, he makes the most of this macabre material. He makes it gripping, and he keeps things moving; he’s eminently lucid, vivid, economical. By the time you reach the last chapter, which is darkly but not unjustly entitled “The West Loses the Will to Live,” it could not be clearer what a terrible pickle we’re all in. Even if you already know a good deal about the history recounted here, and already grasp its import – which, if you’re reading this review, is not unlikely – Spencer recounts it in such a way as to make that last chapter hit home with the power of fresh revelation. The question is, how to get this book into the hands of the smug and ignorant fools who need it the most? Perhaps the best advice is this: buy one for yourself – and another for the person in your life who can best use this vital wake-up call. Ibn Warraq in Townhall: For those who still think -- and, alas, there remain many -- that Islamic terrorism has emerged only in the last forty years or so, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, Robert Spencer’s carefully researched work on jihad from the beginning of Muhammad’s political and prophetical career to the acts of terrorism of September, 11, 2001, will be a salutary shock. Thanks to Spencer’s book, we can no longer pretend that Islamic fundamentalism is an aberrant form of Islam. The seeds of violence and intolerance are already there in seventh-century Arabia, and in the life of Muhammad. He shatters many myths, such as the myth of the Golden Age of Spain, a putative period of ecumenical harmony, a kind of perpetual medieval Woodstock Summer of love. He also puts the Crusades into perspective, and reminds us that the Crusades were a belated response to years and years of jihad, and persecution of Christians. Spencer brings the story up to modern times, not forgetting the Armenian genocides perpetuated by the Turks between 1915 and 1923. Robert Spencer’s work is essential reading for all of us, for all those who want to defend our values from the relentless jihad that has not ceased for fourteen centuries. Hugh Fitzgerald in FrontPage: Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad tells, in magnificent measure, the story of how, over 1400 years, the votaries of Islam have observed the religious duty of holy war, or Jihad, warfare against the Unbelievers. Reviewers sometimes insist that “if you can only read one book on the subject, read this one.” Here such insistence is not hyperbole. Spencer tells in lively fashion a deadly story, of how what started with a few dozen followers in a dusty town in western Arabia became today’s ideological empire of 1.6 billion members of the Islamic community or umma, mostly to be found in 57 Muslim-majority countries, but now also including hundreds of millions of Muslims in Europe, North America, and India. Muhammad was above all a warrior, who took part in nine battles (according to Muslim legend, Spencer tells us, he took part in 27). Once the enemy was conquered, Spencer explains, only three options were available for the Unbelievers: death, conversion to Islam, or permanent status as dhimmis, who were required to pay a special tax called the Jizyah, as well as to submit to many other onerous conditions. This Jizyah became the main source of revenue for the Islamic state. Those three options have not changed in 1400 years. The history of Jihad is bloody, and the pages of this study are replete with atrocities, but the onward current of Spencer’s vivid narrative pulls us forward. He draws whenever possible, especially in the early centuries, on such Muslim jurists and historians as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun. He keeps reminding us, too, of the passages in the Qur’an and Hadith that explain why Muslims did what they did; every Muslim atrocity is justified by the Qur’anic commands and the example of Muhammad himself. Spencer has telling anecdotes, not always involving rivers of blood and piles of Infidel heads, that convey the bottomless cruelty of many of the Muslim leaders. For 1400 years, Jihad has been conducted, virtually without interruption, somewhere on the globe. Its methods have varied. The Jihad of violent warfare, successful against the Byzantines, the Sassanid Persians, and the Hindus of India, has today been replaced in Europe by what Spencer was the first to call the “stealth Jihad.” This includes a steady chipping away at the institutions and values of the Unbelievers, including the establishment of No-Go areas where the writ of the Unbelievers does not run, the demand for accommodation to Muslim ways, from dress (opposing limits on hijabs, burqas, and niqabs), to the setting aside of both rooms and of times for daily Muslim prayers in schools and at work, to the rewriting of textbooks and curricula to depict Islam in a favorable light, to continuous efforts at Da’wa, the Call to Islam, especially among prisoners, leading in Europe to a steady inexorable rise in the percentage of Muslims in the population, and much, much more. If the West manages to avoid what Spencer gloomily foresees on his last page (371) as “almost certain doom” from the forces of Jihad, it will be in large part due to books like this. Or rather, since there really are no other books quite like this, it will be due in large part to this very book, which needs to find its readers, in the right places, capable of learning, and acting upon what they have learned, about the history of Jihad. Christine Douglass-Williams at the Mackenzie Institute: Robert Spencer’s extraordinary new book, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS (Bombardier Books), tells the little-known yet crucially important story of the victimization of Christians, Jews, Hindus and other non-Muslims in jihadist warfare for 14 centuries. The History of Jihad goes right up to the present day, and is a new and important confirmation of George Santayana’s famous dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The epic story as it unfolds in this book is breathtaking. Is not presented as an unapproachable history manual but in a story form—an entertaining chronicle of a dismal history—that leaps out of the corridors of centuries past to meet the reader in the current day. Spencer tells this account primarily in the words of eyewitnesses and contemporary historians, which gives this book a particular vividness. The History of Jihad is no dry exposition of names and dates and forgotten incidents drawn out of dusty books. On the contrary, it is a virtual tour of the battlefield, highlighting the heroism and courage of those who tried through the centuries to resist the jihad, the bloodlust of the jihadis, and the cravenness of the non-Muslims who compromised with the jihadis and enabled their advance throughout history for their own short-sighted ends. Spencer also details the centuries-long and horrifyingly brutal jihad against India, an important story which the west is in need of education about. The History of Jihad is not just a history book, it is a veritable key to understanding present-day conflicts that still dominate the news. It also illuminates the reasons why negotiated settlements have failed repeatedly to bring peace between the Jewish state of Israel and the Palestinians, why the Muslim migrant influx into Europe is ill-conceived, why the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran is much greater than most people realize, and a great deal more. The History of Jihad is a monumental book. Steve Gruber in Newsmax: Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS contains a wealth of information that Americans (and perhaps especially those entrusted with our foreign and domestic policies) do not know, and need to know. At the same time, it is a sweeping historical epic of an astonishingly broad scope, comprehensive and meticulously documented, yet readable and vivid in its retelling of triumph and conquest, defeat and loss, cowardice and collaboration. This book not only makes clear how it came to be that the United States is faced with the internal and external challenge that threaten the world’s lone superpower today, but illustrates the human cost of ideas. The History of Jihad demonstrates just how important it is that we approach what has been known as the war on terror not just as a military or national security matter, but as an ideological struggle against an enemy that challenges our most basic premises as a free society and a free people. What is The History of Jihad’s most astonishing lesson is that, for all the confusion and denial surrounding that ideological antagonist today, we face the same ideological adversary that has threatened non-Muslim societies around the world for fourteen centuries. One would think by now, we would know exactly whom and what we are dealing with, and how best to do so. Instead, the willful almost gleeful ignorance is more pervasive than ever, which only shows all the more why Americans today need to read and understand The History of Jihad. ORDER The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS HERE.