Raymond Ibrahim’s 2018 book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, was recently translated into French and published in France. In connection, Arnaud Imatz of the French website La Nef, interviewed him. An abbreviated, English version of that interview follows:
The American Raymond Ibrahim has just published a fascinating and erudite history of the centuries-old conflicts between Islam and Christianity:L'épée et le cimeterre(Jean-Cyrille Godefroy Editions). This book is the almost exhaustive account of the fourteen centuries of antagonisms and fights, major or minor, which took place….
A historian, linguist and philologist, and a specialist in oriental languages, Ibrahim has methodically exploited first-hand sources, both Muslim and "Western", and has consulted numerous manuscripts from the Library of Congress in Washington. His book is not only a detailed chronicle of the battles, it is also and above all a rigorous analysis of the intentions and strategies of the various warring leaders.
Ibrahim shows that the Muslim forces were essentially obeying a religious, messianic, expansionist, conquering logic, whereas the Christian armies wanted above all to recover territories that for centuries had been Roman, Greek and Christian.
He also shows that the
religious fervor of today's Islamists overlaps exactly with ancestral
Islamic dogmas, that Western reactions are 1400-year-old self-defense
mechanisms, and that current rivalries are the reflection of a very old
existential struggle. We interviewed him for La Nef. ..................To Read More....
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