Chapter 1
Author’s Introduction “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” —Sun Tzu 6 “…like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions, and pursues totalitarian aims…we do not have this same understanding of the ideology that is driving our enemies: we lack a map needed for planning the way ahead.” —President George W. Bush Address to West Point, May 2006 7 “If anything, this [the need to understand jihad]…demonstrates the necessity of approaching the topic of war in Islam from a variety of directions: religious texts, history, jurisprudence, and so on...” —Abdulaziz A. Sachedina The Development of Jihad in Islamic Revelation and History 8 The three quotes above tell a story: First, to be successful we must know our enemies. Second, we have a murderous enemy whose ideology we do not properly understand. Third, the
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Sun Tsu, The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles (Chelmsford, MA: Courier Dover Publications, 2002), pg 36.
Elisabeth Bumiller, “At West Point, Bush Draws Parallels With Truman,” The New York Times (May 28, 2006),
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/washington/28bush.html.
8 Abdulaziz A. Sachedina, “The Development of Jihad in Islamic Revelation and History,” In Cross, Crescent and
Sword: The Justification of War in Western and Islamic Thought. Edited by James Turner Johnson and John
Kelsay. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
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