children:
At one point, I insisted on drawing a clear
distinction between Islamism and Islam,
thinking it would shield ordinary Muslims
from generalized suspicion. Over time,
though, it became clear to me that doing so
only played into Islamistsʼ hands, much as the
concepts of Islamophobia and moderate
Islamism do. Calling Islam a religion of peace
while criticizing Islamists as if in a vacuum
suggests that political Islamʼs ideas are sound
and only require the proper
implementation...^245That Islam is a politics and religion of war is explained in
one simple fact, requiring no knowledge of the texts of
Islam. Unlike the Buddhist or Christian calendar, the
Islamic calendar does not start with the birth of the
founder of the doctrine, does not even start with the date
of Mohammedsʼs first “revelation”. The Islamic calendar
starts from when Mohammed became a political and
military leader in Medina: as the Westʼs scholars of Islam
were saying more than sixty years ago, the Islamic
calendar “marked the date when the Prophet began to
assume sovereign power”.^246 From the very first day of the
Islamic calendar, Islam was political and warfare was
essential to Islam.^247 The calendar also marks that each
successive year of that calendar is just one more year in the