Hulking linebacker tackles history of Jihad

By Michael Ashcraft —

When it comes to the Muslim mindset behind terror attacks, Raymond Ibrahim delves into the Arabic sources and unearths 1,000 years of constant jihadi struggle to dominate the world by military expedition, by rape and by torture.

He’s a mild-mannered historian whose bookishness seems at odds with his body build (he liked football as a kid). When he landed his dream job in 2002 to be in charge of the Arabic section of the Library of Congress, he happily read al-Qaeda writings, impenetrable for most Western researchers because they’re in Arabic.

What he discovered contradicted the narrative spoon-fed to journalists that the only reason al-Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attacks was in retaliation to Western military action in the Middle East. His resulting book, The Al-Qaeda Reader in 2007, exposed that what they truly wanted was world domination.

Western colonialism wasn’t the cause of, it was the pause in Muslim conquest.

Finding Osama bin Ladin’s manifesto and publishing it “proves once and for all that, despite the propaganda of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, radical Islam’s war with the West is not finite and limited to political grievances — real or imagined — but is existential, transcending time and space and deeply rooted in faith,” said Ibrahim, born to Egyptian Coptic immigrants in America.

His subsequent books, particularly Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, demonstrate that the latest outburst of terror attacks is not a novelty over grievances from Western interventions. To the contrary, it is jumpstarting Islam’s conquest culture that sputtered after the Ottoman Empire fell, he says.

Understandably, his warnings about the Religion of Peace have earned him fame as an Islamophobe. But, he points out, the people accusing Islamophobia almost universally don’t have access to the Arabic, something he grew up with and honed for his master’s thesis at California State University Fresno on the stunning defeat of the vast Byzantine forces at the Battle of Yarmuk.

Ibrahim is Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Friedman Rosen Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, an American conservative think tank. He quietly pursues studies and writes about history while consulting for the U.S. and other governments around the world.

That seems to be his favorite place, to quietly work on think tanks. But his quiet world recently exploded when his recent declaration to the Danish government went viral on TikTok and spilled over onto X (formerly Twitter):

“In all of world history there has never been a civilization that opens its doors to another civilization that is openly hostile to it. You’re ancestors fought tooth and nail to prevent Islam from conquering Europe,” he said. “The califs, the sultanates, the emirates, the grand imams, the muftis all said the exact same thing century after century: conquering Europe was one of the grand plans. Now Europe is saying none of that matters. It was all a misunderstanding. Come on in.”

In addition to his queries into the past, Ibrahim documents the persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries, highlighting the ongoing “war on Christians” and the brutal treatment of religious minorities.

It was Ibrahim who broke the story in 2015 about Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi setting precedent by visiting a Coptic church at Christmas.

Ibrahim has written about “demographic jihad,” in which Muslim populations aim to outbreed and out-populate non-Muslims in Western countries like the UK.

Controversy swirls around him so intensely that maybe needs a body guard.

Then again, maybe he doesn’t need a body guard. He looks like a body guard.

“Before I became a brainiac in my early 20s, I actually was a competitive body builder,” he says on David Wood’s Apologetics Roadshow. “It goes back to when I was a football player. I was supposed to play defensive end or linebacker in college football, but I injured myself. Afterwards, I loved weightlifting.”

To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.

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About this writer: Michael Ashcraft pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.