In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power

a tour de force. this title is one of Pipes' early works when he was preaching about the "comimg storm" but no one in DC would listen.

I am reading as much by Daniel Pipes as I can.He is a genius, a historian and a person out to save America from the dangers of Saudi Arabian terrorists.

Mr. Pipes, eminent scholear and great inflamicist of Islam most recently completed his book 'militant Islam reaches America' but this book is by far more scholaraly and gives a more complete picture of the Islamic world. This read has several shortcomings. Mr. Pipes attempts to survey many Islamic countries where Islam is the vast majority or the near majority. In these short paragraph length studies he does not touch on one subject that needs to be touched on, namely the fate of minorites in Muslim societies. He does not explain the ethnic cleansing carried out in many Muslim countries that helped create a homogeneity within nations like Turkey. Nevertheless he provides a wonderful appendix that includes a list of Muslim populations of countries throughout the world. What one will realize when reading this list is that the number of minority populations in a Muslim country is directly proportional to the time the country has been Muslim. I recommend this book wholeheartedly in light of our need to understand and critique the Islamic world. A good companion to 'The Rage and the Pride'.

Few writers, Thomas W. Lippman wrote in the Washington Post, have explained so lucidly the complex developments of Muslim history. It is difficult to address the questions of Islam, the Arabs and their relations with Israel and remain nonpartisan. But Business Week's Ronald Taggiasco called Pipes' scholarly explanation of events and faith in that little-known, volatile, and important part of the world well worth reading.Pipes' reasoned, literate explanation of what generated the Islamic resurgence goes a long way to explaining recent events. Written in 1983, this book provided the first comprehensive political study of Islam's extraordinary role in modern world. We are fortunate indeed that Transaction has rescued the political and global implications of the Islamic revival, revealed here, from the out-of-print category, complete with a new preface for 2002. The book is divided into three sections. The first covers the premodern legacy of Islam's sacred laws and its failure to implement the public ideal represented by those laws--as existed in the single state for Muslims (Dar al-Islam) from 622 to 753 A.D. According to Pipes, for most of Muslim history, traditional Muslims were willing to accept the gap between the ideal and the actual, to live with a less-than-complete implementation of Shari'a, although the Muslim approach to politics derived from the "invariant premises of the religion" established more than 1,500 years ago. The second section covers Islam's encounters with the West, beginning with the matched powers of Crusaders against the Ayyubids, and proceeding quickly to Napoleon's 1789 invasion of Egypt. (This prompted the Ottoman Sultan Selim III to declare Jihad against the French and join the infidel British and Russian empires to keep his own in tact). Muslims had ruled millions of Christians in Europe for 450 years before being displaced by Turkey. Then the western cultural onslaught began in the first half of the 18th century, and ran from Umma's eastern end (China and Indonesia) to its west (Crimea). By the end of 1919, only Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Arabia and Yemen retained political independence, the first three by balancing the claims of Britain against those of Russia and the latter two simply by being remote and completely barren. Meanwhile, the Muslim Empire had also lost battles of scientific, technical, mechanical, geographic and historical knowledge. Even daily Western life differed markedly from that of the Islamic east. Thus fundamentalists began lobbying for strict Shari'a everywhere in the Umma. In contrast, reformist Muslims argue that traditional Shari'a is hopelessly illiberal and conflicts with the true Qur'anic values. They reject Shari'a traditions emanating from Hadith, consensus of the 'ulama and reasoning by analogy as inauthentic and outdated, respectively. Similarly, they approve of parliamentary systems of government, but view hold their record in Islamic society in contempt. On some fronts, liberal vi