founder of an empire, and his followers were
sustained by a belief in the manifestation of
divine approval through success and victory.
Islam was associated with power from the
very beginning, from the first formative years
of the Prophet and his immediate successors.
[...] It was religion which distinguished those
who belonged to the group and marked
them off from those outside the group. A
Muslim Iraqi would feel far closer bonds with
a non-Iraqi Muslim than with a non-Muslim
Iraqi.^325There is more accuracy and insight to be found in this single
passage from the 1970s than would be found in a whole
year of contemporary commentary from our highly-
educated elite. This passage does not come from an obscure
scholarly journal, but from a magazine on politics and
culture, a magazine that was so iconic to Americans that it
was often mentioned in American movies and television
programmes. Thus we see, that as late as the 1970s and
early 1980s, our political leaders, academics and journalists
were fully aware that Islam is a religion of war and not a
religion of peace: it was inextricably intertwined with
political power and an empire that spread from Lisbon to
Afghanistan, with a legal system that sanctioned war against
unbelievers, that sanctioned enslavement or apartheid for
the Kuffar.
In one of his very readable books from the early 1980s,
Professor Lewis told us that jihad is the name given to the