Searching for the Islamic State: Race, Rage and Religion

About the Book

Islamism’s journey from the idealism of the early Islamists to the regrettable violence of some of the movement’s later protagonists cannot be understood unless the movement is situated in its broader context. The narrative toggles between Islamist introspection and actions and how regional dynamics and the great geo-political controversies of the 20^th and 21^st centuries impacted the Islamist trajectory.

Confusion over "what to do" about Islam bedeviled American foreign policy makers throughout the 20^th and into the 21^st century. Early presumptions that "Islam implies autocracy" or that the world’s "Mohammedans" were forgettable relics of a medieval religion ill adapted to the modern world progressively gave way to greater pragmatism, notably following President Roosevelt’s entente with the oil-rich Wahhabi monarch of Saudi Arabia on the Great Bitter Lake in 1945. Three years later, President Truman’s pivotal role in helping midwife the state of Israel exposed the US, in Islamist eyes, as a modern Crusader state and unapologetic enemy of the Islamist ideal. Cold War era attitudes towards Islam in the US ran the gamut from fears Muslims were easy marks for the world’s communist regimes to the stubborn hypothesis that the God fearing followers of the Prophet must, in the end, be the natural friends and allies of the "Christian" West. The later theory led to the hasty conclusion that Islamist extremists could be partners in the good fight against global communism, a stratagem that came undone in the later part of the 20^th century when to America’s horror Islamism replaced the communism in some US policy makers eyes as the main enemy of the West.

Often portrayed as strange and other worldly, the Islamist viewpoint is revealed to be as integral to the modern world as the American experiment itself, a theme brought home when the Islamists’ fears and impulses are shown to mirror the distress and anguish of the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.