Note: The following is a book review of The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs by Martin Mosebach. A shorter version was first published by the Middle East Quarterly (Fall 2019, Vol. 26, No. 4). To learn as much as possible of the 21 Coptic Christians martyred for refusing to recant their faith at the hands of the Islamic State (“ISIS”) on the shores of … [Read more...]
Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean
Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean by Joshua M. WhiteStanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. 376 pp.Reviewed by Raymond IbrahimAuthor of Sword and Scimitar Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2019 In the late sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire and its European opponents increasingly withdrew from the Mediterranean, their primary theater of war, leaving … [Read more...]
Juan Cole’s Imaginary Muhammad
Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires by Juan ColeNew York: Nation Books, 2018. 336 pp.Reviewed by Raymond IbrahimAuthor of Sword and Scimitar Middle East QuarterlySummer 2019 (view PDF) Note: Cole's ludicrous pro-Islamic revisionist history, which I review below, is representative of the only sort of history that CAIR and its Islamist allies … [Read more...]
Reversing the Roles of Crusade and Jihad
Editor’s note: The following book review by Raymond Ibrahim of William R. Polk’s book, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the Global North (Yale University press, Jan. 2018) first appeared in the Christian Research Journal. -------- From beginning to end, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the … [Read more...]
Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World
Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World By Christian C. Sahner Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 360 pp. $39.95.Reviewed by Raymond Ibrahim Middle East QuarterlySpring 2019 Sahner, associate professor of Islamic history at Oxford University, informs the reader that Christian Martyrs under … [Read more...]