peace”?
It is only with a significant and growing Muslim
population in the West that many Muslims have begun
concealing that Islam is a religion of war. Throughout the
twentieth century Muslims living in other parts of the
world were themselves proudly publishing details of
Mohammed’s wars, in titles which offered no mistaking
their content. From 1939 to 1962 and beyond, Muhammad
Hamidullah published (in French, Urdu, English, Arabic,
Farsi and Turkish) Battlefields of the Prophet Muhammad: A
Contribution to Muslim Military History.^355 There was even
a book by a Muslim army officer the title of which could not
possibly tie the Koran and war more closely. Brigadier S.K.
Malik’s, The Quranic Concept of War (1979), makes it clear
that Islam is the opposite of a religion of peace.^356 In the
first paragraph of the Foreword (by the President of the
Islamic State of Pakistan), General Zia ul-Haq commends
jihad to the Muslim civilian and the soldier alike. This
Foreword is immediately preceded by a map of
Mohammed’s battles, entitled “Military Operations: 625-632
AD”, showing that the violence of Islam is not something
Muslims grafted onto Islam, but is something which they see
as being the foundation of the religion. Mohammed died in
632 AD (according to the core texts of Islam, as a result of
being poisoned by a woman whose own family had been
massacred by Mohammed).^357 The first paragraph of the
Preface to The Quranic Concept of War says the book
attends to “special features of [sic] Holy Prophet’s military
campaigns”. Does that sound like a religion of peace? Can