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Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the Global North. By William R. Polk. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018. xviii + 597 pp. + index 36 pp. $26.22 cloth.
William Polk's work, Crusade and Jihad, is a grand-scale overview of the conflict between the Islamic world and what Samuel Huntington used to call “the West.” Polk prefers the term “global north” as apparently this latter term is a bit easier to define than “the West.” Overall, the argument is that this is an inevitable conflict, brought about by the inherent aggressiveness of the Islamic world at first and then by its chaotic failure during the past centuries.
Although Polk's grasp of history is much better than that of Huntington, his focus is definitely on the past several centuries. He gives the reader an overview of the high Islamic civilization, but this focuses mainly upon the early caliphate and skips quickly to the Ottoman period.
For the rest of the Crusade and Jihad, the reader is treated to a thumbnail critical portrait of most Muslim countries and a surprising number of adjoining regions where Muslims are predominant, but not independent. A reader should prepare themselves because Polk's interests and commentary are very broad-ranging. He is...