In this enthusiastic, adulatory review of Justin Marozzi’s book Islamic Empires, Tunku Varadarajan, executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and thus someone who should know better if our academic environment were not so corrupt and compromised, retails present-day academic fictions about Islamic history that outrage the historical record, and that no one who was remotely honest and even glancingly familiar with that record could repeat with a straight face.
Tunku Varadarajan paints a picture of Justin Marozzi as a romantic adventurer, the type that the Tunku Varadarajans of the world apparently aspire to be: “As a teenager in Cairo, he honed his backgammon skills in ‘dirt-cheap coffeehouses, slamming down the counters deep into the early hours.’ In 1980s Tripoli, ‘a beautiful, melancholy place,’ he was taught never to talk to taxi drivers about politics. ‘Anyone here could be an antenna,’ his father had warned, using the Libyan expression for Muammar Gadhafi’s ever-present informers.”
Varadarajan’s adulation doesn’t end there. “The charm of this book,” he hastens to tell us, “lies in the fact that it is so obviously the adult sublimation of a boyhood passion for the lands and history of Islam. Mr. Marozzi is now 49, but his prose often has the wonderment of a young man who has devoured a shelf of books and is dying to tell everyone about the things he has read. Like an erudite magpie, he gathers material from every available source—primary texts, both religious and historical, as well as a profusion of secondary ones—and weaves it all together with dexterity.”
Well, then, Marozzi must know all about Islamic empires, right? Especially in light of the fact that Justin Marozzi is also, Varadarajan tells us, “a history graduate from the University of Cambridge,” as well as “an accomplished and ambitious writer: His previous books include biographies of Herodotus and Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as ‘one of history’s greatest self-made men.’”
A self-made man he may have been, but making that his sole identifier is rather like calling Hitler a failed artist and leaving it at that.
Tamerlane was much more than simply a self-made man, even one of history’s greatest among such men, yet Tunku Varadarajan and apparently Justin Marozzi don’t see fit to inform us of that fact. In The History of Jihad we learn, among much more about Tamerlane, that Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, a fifteenth-century Persian who wrote a biography of Tamerlane, observed that “the Qur’an says the highest dignity man can attain is that of making war in person against the enemies of his religion. Muhammad advises the same thing, according to the tradition of the Muslim doctors: wherefore the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of his conquests.”
One of history’s greatest self-made men indeed.
The nonsense does not, unfortunately, stop there. “‘One of the defining features of Abbasid Baghdad,’ he writes of the city in its ninth-century heyday, ‘was its cosmopolitanism. Arabs lived alongside Persians, Indians, Turks, Armenians and Kurds in a capital of Jews, Christians and Muslims.’ Tolerance was ‘less something to boast about than a generally accepted way of life.’”
From The History of Jihad: “In the late 770s, the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi traveled to Aleppo, where twelve thousand Christians greeted him with great honor. Al-Mahdi, however, was not disposed to respond in kind, and told them: ‘You have two options. Either die or convert to our religion.’ Most of the Christians chose to die rather than embrace Islam. In and around Baghdad, he noticed that the Assyrian Christians had built new churches since the Muslim conquest, in violation of dhimmi laws; he ordered them destroyed; five thousand Christians in Syria were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Many stayed true to their ancestral faith and chose death.”
There’s your tolerance.
So why does ahistorical twaddle and fantasy such as Islamic Empires get published and praised to the skies in the Wall Street Journal? Because it tells people what they want to hear. In this unthinking age, that’s apparently all that really matters.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 19 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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Wow! So they have infiltrated the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
YES, THEY DO KNOW BETTER!
Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, where he began teaching in 1984, having created the classical studies program at that institution. He has been a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991–92). Guess he won’t be invited back to Stanford to teach.
I guess this was just someone’s imagination at work ….
For the degenerate, decadent, immoral atheist West a dozen dead muslums is a mournful tragedy while millions of slaughtered Hindus (i.e. the genocide of some 2.5 million Hindus in Bangladesh in the 1970’s)
and tens of thousands of dead Christians in Nigeria is merely a statistic.
Victor Davis Hanson is the most awesome professor I’ve ever heard. I would have loved to have been one of his students!
http://jpfo.org/images05/armenia-01.jpg
http://jpfo.org/images05/armenia-02.jpg
http://jpfo.org/images05/armenia-03.jpg
Islam’s Armenian Genocide
Template for the Holocaust
whatever. i just use common sense to judge islam. i see a 3rd world, or even a dark age, civilization where ever islam reigns. i see people trying to escape, and not trying to immigrate; muslim countries never need to put up fences to keep illegal aliens out. i see countries where islam used to reign centuries ago doing everything they can to keep muslims out due to the stories of the horrors islam passed down for generations. same with communism. as reagan said, it doesn’t work
The globalists want you to have NO WHERE TO GO.
Islam is a global plague.
….to me….it’s Nazis with swords, knives, bombs, butchery….and any other description of horrors you can think of…..
We need not be so smug here in America…..we are about to be shown a movie in the theaters…of Democrats hunting Conservatives for sport and to kill…..WE ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO ALLOW THAT IN OUR CIVILIZATION!
I look for copycats soon thereafter. May God have mercy on our country.
Then i suggest you prepare yourself. Take courses or buy courses that teach you Krav Maga and other course methods to not just defend yourself but do serious ‘damage’ to an attacker. If you have children, inspect what you kids are being taught and don’t allow their school and school board to teach your children lies and garbage. Get family members to join you in these efforts, but never give in and never stop fighting for what is true and right.
No denying it. Over the past three decades, the Wall Street Urinal has turned into a Leftist-Regressive Rag.
It didn’t used to be that way…. How low the mighty have fallen.
From the Marine Hymn, “From the Halls of Montezuma, to the Shores of Tripoli“. We kicked their butts then, and we can do it now!
Let’s roll.
Yep. The first war America fought as a country under Jefferson, was the Barbary Coast….Muslims. Centuries later….it’s now inside our country….our Courts and Congress.
Where islam has touched the earth over the last 1400 years.
Death, destruction,chaos fear and misery have followed.
Some try to bend history to fit their agenda.
But history can not be changed.
The man is plainly no student of history.
Any serious author would have researched and then followed the experiences of all the peoples of the subjugated civilisations taken by the hordes of Islam, and with the Ottomans that history of conquest, violence and brutal enslavement was dreadful in ways it’s best not to imagine.
I have learned a lot about islam since 9/11.
None of it good.
Nothing the Democrats do is real.
Or good for anyone.
Hi patd, the problem with tyrant Democrats is the they seek to grab all the power and money for themselves, and subjugate the citizenry, to keep us under control. So they lie all time to keep us confused. Their actions are good for the Democrat power circle, but not for anyone else.
“tyrant Democrats is the they seek to grab all the power and money for themselves, and subjugate the citizenry, to keep us under control”
In all the history of man….that is called Communism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and slavery…..they can change the word…they cannot change the results….
Exactly, tyrant Democrats, tyrant socialists, tyrant fascists, tyrant Nazis, tyrant communists, tyrant Islamists, and tyrant globalists are all tyrants, with the same methods and goals. They all wrap themselves in some high-sounding phony story, like ‘helping the poor’, ‘purifying the race’, ‘pleasing Allah’, or ‘erasing all borders’, but they never do any of those things. They just grab all the power and money, and subjugate the citizenry [e.g., Venezuela, Detroit].
….except their donors….Demoncrats are Dhimmis for Islam….just like they were for Hitler. This is not my grandfather’s Democrat party….
….or he is a student of history…..and approves. These are the dangerous scary people.
He doesn’t care about being a student of history or about facts and the truth. He’s an unrepentant liar and propagandist who knows that thousands of idiotic Westerners, now deeply indoctrinated with political correctness and notions of “acceptance”,”tolerance”, relativism and no deeply ingrained beliefs and principles will go along with the crap. Political correctness will ensure that they don’t question. It causes such friction and unpleasantness they will think and say. Why do they do this? Because many are just stupid and never taught to question or think for themselves.
socialism is all about control of the people and the muslim so called religion is all about submitting to authority and aggressively attacking all that resist with the implacability of the borg. They see our liberty as an opportunity to be exploited.
birds of the same feather – tyrant to tyrant –
Mustafa Kemal Atarurk knew a lot more about Islam than any journalist of these days.
Then, he destroyed the Califate ,….and he destroyed Islamism in Turkey.
Must have been good reasons for that.
With the same stroke he converted Turkey into a secular and modern republic and gave its citizens democratic rights. Even to the women.
You’re advancing a lie and islamic propaganda. Ataturk not only ordered the slaughter of the Greeks of Smyrna (who were, surprisingly enough almost all Christian) and the incineration of their homes he was THERE. Furthermore, Turkey was never “secular”. Church bells could never be sounded in Turkey and it was forbidden for the shofar to be sounded publicly but the adhan bleated out its death beat 5 times a day every day of the week even under Ataturk your supposed hero.
No Caliphate. No church bells and no shofar.
He was a true secular then. Thanks.
I didn’t say he was a saint.
No caliphate eh? Tell that to the Christians who lost their homes and properties on Cyprus in the 1970’s or the victims of the Istanbul pogrom. You’re warped.
But …. call to moslem “prayer”, on loud speakers, FIVE times per day. How, Maranatha, is that “secular”?
He’s one of the useful idiots of islam. He deserves the muslum boot heel on his neck — like all muslum apologists/sympathizers do.
I have read many of Maranatha’s comments. With some, I disagree. With most, I am in agreement. On this one, I believe that Maranatha has simply believed what Western history books reported … That vile the turkey attaturk, from turkeyland, established a totally secular nation. Even as far back as the late sixties-early seventies, education facilities, from Junior High and beyond, talked about a secular turkeyland … with little to no mention of stomping on Buddhists, Christians, and Jews … but letting the moslem mosques run at full capacity.
Maranatha just fell into their lies.
I suppose you’re right he could be a victim of islamic propaganda. I used to think Communism was great when I graduated from UCLA (spit).
I never was too much of one for those “commie pinko fags”, but that’s an entirely other subject. Many that despise mohammedanism and moslems, in general, were taught/told how the turkey attaturk, from turkeyland, was secular … and all types of other rotten lies. Seriously, those lies have been taught since the bloody fifties, or before. An old Encyclopedia Britannica piece … How old must that set be? Basically glorified that foul piece of drek, calling that thing “The Savior of Istanbul”.
UCLA allowed a Turkish “history professor” to teach islamic propaganda about Turkey. The SoS denied the Armenian Genocide (for which his home was blown up by Armenian activists). No one in the UCLA history department or the university administration had any problems w/the fact this muslum SoS was denying historical fact and the slaughter of millions of Christians by f’ing Turkish muslums. I happened to take the Turkish muslum SoS’s class on Turkish history that covered the time period of the Armenian Genocide — no mention was made of the genocide of 2.5 million Armenian and Assyrian Christians whatsoever.
Seriously, did you actually expect a moslem turkey, from turkeyland, to EVER tell the truth?
That’s what the ignorant moronic feral animal libturds do…they lie for their criminal buddies!!!! The libturds and muslims will destroy the world!
“Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as ‘one of history’s greatest self-made men.’”
Yes the genocidal hero that slaughtered and/or enslaved tens of thousands of Hindus was a “great” man but only to corrupt, craven a$$holes like Marozzi in the rotten, degenerate, atheist West. Was he was paid for this propaganda piece? In advance?
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
-George Orwell
A vote for a democrat is a vote for islam to put America under islamic sharia slavery.
Their focus is the destruction of our constitution
Justin Marozzi, like his heroes, a self-made man and a monument to the horrors of unskilled labour.
Marozzi’s book “Islamic Empires”…
From this book and from the Wall Street Journal is pouring the blood and outcries of the millions murdered, desecrated, raped, enslaved, terrorized – mixed with the satanic lies and petrodollars from the Islamic lobby.
We can’t blame the invasion of Islam into our country only on the Kenyan Obama…..go back and look at the history of the Bush Cabal with the MEs….remember the picture of GW Bush holding hands with the Saudi King/Prince?
Remember GW’s college roommate was a Saudi Prince?
“Islam means Peace.” GW Bush. Liar…..while standing on the destruction of Manhattan….and all the people murdered in the buildings and in the planes by MEs. And, how they protected the Saudis in America after the bombings…allowed them to take off in planes back to the Mid East when all other planes were grounded?
The Bush Cabal has been in bed with the Saudis through oil for many generations. And one of their great Uncles was the banker for Hitler.
President Jefferson once said: “America cannot be destroyed from without…..only from within.” Folks, the enemy has been “within” for a very long time.
One of their great Uncles was behind the plot to stop Tesla from developing free energy for the world….along with Chase….of the Chase Manhattan bank fortune.
And let’s not forget GWH Bush’s chilling statement, “New World Order” for America. He wasn’t kidding.
You are right.
However – after 1.400 years of islamic atrocities muslim’s crimes arrive at the culmination point.
And most of the their henchmenn and forerunners are spread all over US – Obama is one of the most despicable key figures.
This is not scholarship,.It is a sham, fake scholarship bought and paid for by the vast oil wealth of the Saudis and other Muslim potentates. News corp who owns the WSJ is owned by Saudi interests and cater to their whims. Its all about the Bengies, nothing about scholarship.
People still read that Communist rag?! Wow…what morons.
Why? Its what they do – wonder if theres ANY mention of 1400 years of bloodshed and terror – How many innocents have died at its hands – simply for believing something different –
I get the Wall Street Journal every day, and I missed this. Shame on the WSJ.