[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

Sun Tzu in The Art of War wrote, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” This lesson has often been ignored by the West when confronting Islamic jihadism. Religion in general has not been taken seriously by our technocratic, materialist, secularist world view.

But many Muslims have not lost the teachings of Islam and its precepts, and neither have they accepted the authority of secularist materialism that dismisses spiritual reality as a residue of a more primitive world that science supposedly has rendered meaningless. Thus, we ignore or dismiss the spiritual motive of modern jihadism, and fail to see our own hubris.

This combination of arrogance and misreading Islam has been dangerous. For as Hilaire Belloc warned about Islam nearly a century ago, “It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.”

Our ancestors had learned the challenge of Islam by dint of 1500 years of bloody experience. Mark Twain, for example, described a jihadist atrocity in the Holy Land a few years before his visit in 1861: “[Five thousand] men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter [of Damascus] . . . [T]he stench was dreadful. All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the ‘infidel dogs.’ The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste!”

Earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, upon returning from America, where he famously analyzed and celebrated America’s nascent democracy, studied Islamic doctrine, which included an 1838 assessment of the Koran, in preparation for his visits to Algeria (in 1841 and 1846) while serving as a French parliamentarian. Tocqueville concluded:

Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers.… The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels…. [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran…. The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.

One can only imagine how astonished Twain and de Tocqueville would have been to hear our academics, journalists, and politicians – some of them Christians – denying that jihad is “holy war,” or claiming that Muslim terrorism has “nothing to do with Islam.”

By the turn of the twentieth century, the gap between the Europeans and Russia, and the Muslim world had widened, and the dominance of Islam over the West had waned, triggering a crisis over how this calamity had happened. As Bernard Lewis explained, “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual response to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”

That “moment” Belloc predicted began after World War I with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, the torch that lit the fuse of jihad that exploded in 1928 with the dismantling of the last Islamic empire and caliphate in Turkey. Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb and his colleague Hassan al Banna laid out the neo-jihadist plan to rescue Islam’s eclipse by Islam’s challenger. As Lee Smith put it, Al Qaeda’s godfather was Sayyid Qutb, who had been executed by Egypt’s strongman Gamel Nasser in 1966.

Qutb rejected the whole modern “new world liberal order” created by the Versailles Treat as the enemy of Islam. As Qutb wrote, “It is necessary to revive the Muslim community which is buried under the debris of man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teaching.”

And Qutb is clear that sacred violence will be required to reform Islam: “Those who have usurped the power of Allah on earth and made His worship their slaves will not be disposed by words alone.” His colleague and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al Banna, is more forthcoming: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate not to be dominated, to impose the laws of all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Finally, if these important Muslim leaders aren’t evidence that Islamic jihad is holy war, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic Iranian revolution, leaves no doubt that violent jihad, including terrorism, is the path to restoring Islam’s imperial power as sanctioned by Allah. Khomeini, whom the arrogant Jimmy Carter called “nutty” and a “crazy man,” was in fact a charismatic cleric and a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, and a highly trained and respected Islamic scholar educated in Qom, and named by his teachers a “grand sign of Allah,” an honor given to highly learned religious leaders.

In 1942, Khomeini wrote of Islam’s imperial ambitions, “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.”

Contrary to the Western canard “nothing to do with Islam,” Khomeini explicitly describes this process as a violent one: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: ‘Kill the unbelievers just as they would kill you . . .’ Islam says: ‘Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors.’”

After he took power, Khomeini reiterated his jihadist program: “The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and the other a sword; the sword for crushing the traitors and the Koran for guidance . . . Islam is a religion of blood for infidels but a religion of guidance for the people.” The purpose of Iran’s Islamic revolution is global jihad: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah resounds over the whole world, there will be jihad.”

Iran has been the most formidable jihadist nation, sponsoring and funding numerous proxy forces that for decades have attacked Israel and other American allies. More dangerous, it has moved within range of possessing nuclear weapons. Thankfully, Donald Trump twice has pulled the U.S. out of the appeasing “Iran nuclear deal” ––and recently severely damaged the mullahs’ nuclear labs and factories. His Administration also recently ordered killing ISIS jihadists in Nigeria who have murdered Christians for years. For 1500 years, jihadists have told us that they love death as we love life. So, give them what they love.