Jihad in the West

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Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries is a book by author Paul Fregosi.

The book provides a detailed history of the past 14 centuries of Islam's wars against the non-Muslim world.

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According to the author, Jihad is defined in Islam as an effort to expand and extend Islam until the whole world is under Muslim rule. It is essentially a permanent state of hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world. It is a religious obligation for all Moslems. However, this is not the definition of Jihad used by many, if not most, Muslims. Jihad can mean a struggle or fight to overcome one's inner deficiencies and the negative side of the ego.

The perspective of the author is that the expansive Jihad has been in effect over the last 1,400 years, wherein Islam has attempted to conquer Europe, Asia and Africa, in order to Islamicize them, and continues to this day in its effort to achieve the goal.

The book contends that there is a link between terrorism known as Jihad today, with wars of Muslim expansion beginning at Islam's inception. It argues that while many Muslims claim The Crusades are the origin of the conflict between Islam and Christianity, Jihad had already been going on for 500 years before then; The Crusades were simply a response to the Islamic incursions into Europe.

The author points out that in contrast with the Christian precept "He who lives by the sword will die by the sword", Islam teaches that "the sword is the key to heaven and hell" and that while Christians who kill are ignoring the words of Christ, Muslims who kill are obeying the teachings of Islam.

According to early accounts of Islamic tradition, Muhammad, the founder, was subject to a great deal of ridicule and contempt from his peers in Medina, and that Muhammad's response was to murder anyone who did so. Such was the fate of Abu Jahl and Abu 'Afak who were killed, their heads given to Muhammad, and female poets like Asma bint Marwan, who was killed for making disrespectful verse.

According to this view, it is during this time period that Muhammad honed his skills at deception, manoeuvering, assassinations, wars, looting through raids; From what he learned he developed an ideology of terror as a tool to subjugate the common people to his control and the promise of spoils and loot from victims killed and enslaved to induce his followers to battle.