God of Battles

Peter Partner examines the ways in which the concept of holy war - the jihad of the East and the crusade of the West - came to acquire its symbolic power, and how this still affects the modern world. He shows how the ideal of the crusade permeated Western attitudes and beliefs, and discusses the modernity or otherwise of today's Islamic fundamentalist movements, which so alarm the Western world. He reveals how present-day Islamic reformers have actually borrowed the vocabulary of fundamentalism from Western sources, and discusses ways in which they have interpreted (and occasionally put into practice) the idea of holy war. Above all, this text investigates the reasons behind the fear which Islamic fundamentalism excites in the West, and warns against allowing views that ultimately derive from 11th-century propaganda to influence us today.