Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries

"Jihad," the Muslim holy war against Christians and others, has raged for 1,300 years with bloody conquests in Europe dating from campaigns to convert the infidels in the 7th century to today's random acts of terrorism in the name of Allah. Yet this huge unrecorded "hole" in European history has been censored and stifled by political and literary authorities who have feared reprisals from angry Muslims trying to hide a legacy of brutality vastly more bloody and six times longer in duration than the atrocities of the crusades.

This is the engrossing factual account of the immense and little-known Islamic military invasions of Europe, and the major players who led them, beginning around 650 CE. The Islamic Arabs (and later the Moors) occupied a number of the Mediterranean Islands, and invaded Spain and Portugal in 711 CE, and ruled over much of the Iberian peninsula for the next 800 years. France was attacked and invaded, as was Italy, and the European coasts all the way to Ireland and Iceland. The Muslims swept over the Balkans, besieged Vienna, and were intermittent masters of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary into the 19th century, destroying the Byzantines and conquering Constantinople (turning it into Istanbul). Ambitious and unrelenting, the Muslims also sought to conquer Austria and Russia.

In a bright and brisk narrative, Paul Fregosi's unique and provocative work is the first, and only, general history of the Jihad, the most neglected and disregarded phenomenon in European history.

Jihad in the West is the engrossing, factual account of the immense and little-known Islamic military invasions of Europe, and the major players who led them. In a bright and brisk narrative, Paul Fregosi's unique and provocative work is one of the few general histories of the Jihad.

Booknews

Rather frantic conservative polemic in the guise of a history of Muslim "holy wars" against the Christian West. Seeks to root all contemporary political violence by Muslims in the militant doctrines of Islam, and warns of a dire long-term threat from Islamic civilization. Includes b&w photographs of victims of Muslim terrorism and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem raising his arm in Hitlerian salute, in case you hadn't made the connection. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Paul Fregosi (Sydney, Australia), born in Marseilles and educated in Britain, is the author of the widely praised Dreams of Empire: Napoleon and the First World War 1792-1815.