espoused by the elite is deliberately oblivious to
explanations of Islamic doctrine and history, consider the
use of the word “harb” (from Dar al-Harb). If one searches
The Timesʼ archive for the word “harb” from the start of The
Rushdie Affair (1990) until twenty years later, when Dr.
Sookhdeo published the third of three books on jihad, the
number of occurrences of the word “harb” can be counted
on the fingers of one hand! With only three articles in
twenty years by The Timesʼ professional journalists, in each
case the concept “Dar al-Harb” is presented as if it was the
rambling of some Islamic lunatic,^342 someone holding onto
a concept that only applied in the middle ages, rather than a
concept which permeated all Islamic thought for over 1000
years, a concept which was being discussed by Western
academic experts on Islam into the 1990s.
What this shows is that the educated elite have made
a sustained effort to keep the public deceived about the
nature of Islam. Whilst the West was undergoing a rapid
social and ideological shift, with the exception of some
specialist academic literature, there was a total dearth of
information about even the most basic structure of the
Islamic view of the world (i.e. dividing the world into war
or submission to Islam). There is a virtual wall between
the view of Islam explained by Western scholars
throughout the twentieth-century (even when this view
was in popular, paperback books), and the view provided
by journalists, clergy and politicians (the people who
stand between the expert view and the general public).
The West has become increasingly Islamized in the decades
following The Rushdie Affair; authors and artists have been