Reading Bonney's book on the history of Jihad for the past few weeks has made me come to the conclusion that his objective to cover the whole history of the idea and practice of Jihad was too ambitious given the means that are available to him. Some of these limitations include but are not limited to his inability to go to primary sources because of language restrictions and his limited understanding of the subject (Islamic studies) because it is not his area of specialty. Given these limitations, what he ends doing in his book is streamlining the political history of Islam through secondary sources for the most part and provides an overly generalized and non-coherent reading on Jihad that ends up reinforcing the polemical and simplistic narrative of Jihad that already exists in the West without adding nuance to the discussion.
Often, he has summarized discussion of Muslim political history, case in point is his discussion of Colonial Africa Jihad movements (Somali and Ethiopian Muslim takeover of Christian Ethiopia, Shaikh Uthman's movement, Shaikh Umar's Movement, Shaikh Abdul Ghadir's struggle, etc), without providing historical contexts for the conflicts or maps of places mentioned which leaves one rather bewildered and then follow this up with a discussion on doctrines of Jihad that were proposed by certain Muslim thinkers assuming that the juxtaposed assortment of information somehow makes a coherent narrative about Jihad. Instead, the uninitiated reader feels a sense of confusion of how this political history and history of ideas about Jihad all fits together.
On a whole, the work seems unoriginal and not well thought out. His cut and paste approach to creating a continuous narrative on Jihad (this can be easily assessed by looking at his footnotes and seeing how he used singular secondary sources to create this history) only seems to add more blur to the topic. Reading this book is certainly a Jihad.
As a muslim convert who served in the US army fighting in the war on terrorism in iraq and who has been trying to devote his life to understanding traditional islamic scholarship, I must say this is truely one of the most remakable unbaised books i read on the topic. It is very balanced and objective. It writes about how muslims usualy viewed the word jihad and how the terrorist ideology that sprawns from ignorant religous reformers view it. It is as I agree with the MYsterious reviewer, will take critisicm for its objective aproach of writing from the view points of the MAJORITY of the muslims not the minority who is trying to appear as the majority. And it is not used as a proprganda tool for Daniel Pipes overly biased prozionist approaches or the reviewer below who trys to make a overly pro zionist approach to the book by making the book just a game of politics. It shows the approach from a sincere outsider on the history of the normative muslims view of the word jihad not the from the fanatics approach. It is a must read for muslims and non muslims. Because not only non muslim dont know what is going on in the intellectual arena of muslims scholars but as a muslim observer i think muslims are just as confused as the non muslims are cause of all the propraganda of hertics of supporters of MAldudi and Qutb. Only some portions i dont agree with like his friendly protrayal of muhammad abdul wahab but i do like the fact he shows that not all wahabis view him as a genocidal killer so therfore they dont see such killin as a favorable thing. Another must read is Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition' edited by J. Lumbard.
