Muslims get branded as “extremists”. But our leaders are
far worse than these extremists, because unlike the
extremists, our leaders are systematically lying to their
own people. Up until the time The Grand Lie was promoted
in the wake of 9/11 there were mainstream experts who had
the ear of government. These experts made it clear that war
is so fundamental to Islam that Muslims divide the world
into “the world of Islam” and “the world of War”.
Professor Samuel Huntington was an acclaimed
political scientist and an advisor to an American President
from the Democratic Party. In a book which was the talk of
the quality newspapers when published in 1996, Huntington
explained: “Muslims have traditionally divided the world
into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the abode of peace and
the abode of war”.^322 Nowadays, in horror that these
advisories from the 1990s are coming true, Huntington is
portrayed as some fringe thinker, but he could hardly have
been more mainstream. In the very same year that
Huntington explained this clash of civilisations, at the
start of a popular chronicle of the history of Islam, a
Professor in France (who had published many books on
the history of Islam) offered this definition: “Dar al-
Islam: lands under Muslim rule as opposed to Dar al-
Harb (the lands of war). It is every Muslimʼs duty to help
extend the Dar al-Islam by violent or peaceful means
(jihad)”.^323 These are just two examples at the end of more
than a century of publications in English, French and
German which explained Islam in the very same terms
which the Muslim “extremists” used. Thus, on both sides of
the Atlantic, just a few years before The Grand Lie began,