RaymondIbrahim.com
The Al Qaeda Reader
“[Raymond Ibrahim] has done us a great service—at some risk to his person—in revealing the full intention and motives of al-Qaeda… But it is now up to America to use that gift [The Al Qaeda Reader] for its own defense"—Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
The Al Qaeda Reader exposes al-Qaeda's ultimate motives by showings the striking differences between statements published in English for Westerners and those in Arabic for Muslims. Al-Qaeda's publications for the Muslim world are completely different in tone and content. In addition to laying bare al-Qaeda's ultimate motives, The Al Qaeda Reader includes the organization's propagandist speeches, which are directed primarily at Americans, Europeans, and Iraqis. This book makes clear that al-Qaeda is not an organization committed to a war that is finite, defensive, and based on specific complaints. Al-Qaeda stresses Islam's compulsory demand for "offensive jihad," that is, not because Islam is "under attack," as they claim in messages to the West, but simply to offer the world the three sacred choices: accept Islam, live in total submission to Islamic overlords as marginal citizens of an Islamic state, or die.
What Others Are Saying About The Al Qaeda Reader
"The Al Qaeda Reader, simply by letting our enemies speak in their own voices, explodes the popular delusion that Western crimes and policies are responsible for the 'distortion' of Islam that al Qaeda represents....This means that the fight will be long and hard, that leaving Iraq or creating a Palestinian state will not buy peace, and that the side that accurately understands its enemy and has confidence in its own beliefs will ultimately triumph. Thanks to Raymond Ibrahim’s The Al Qaeda Reader, we have the means for achieving that understanding" -- Bruce Thornton, California State University, Fresno
“Mr. Ibrahim compares The Al Qaeda Reader to Mein Kampf, and that is not a mere insult. In their brutality and candor, their fulminations against democracy and loose morals, their obsession with territory, their finicky racism and absolute disdain for the material needs of the public, these documents are a strange echo of Hitler’s writings from prison”— James Buchan, New York Observer.
“Ibrahim’s work serves us well by giving us a view into the mind of our enemy and, in this case, the more we know, the less we will like. This is an implacable foe, not given to compromise or reciprocity. But reading The Al Qaeda Reader may be the first step we need to take in order to fully understand what we must do to win this war”— Mark T. Clark, Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
"Every government official, every FBI agent, every DHS bureaucrat should have a copy" -- Hugh Fitzgerald, Jihad Watch
"In this important collection of key Al Qaeda texts, Mr. Ibrahim has provided us with a glimpse of incendiary doctrine and convictions that clearly expose the reality of the enemy we are facing. It’s high time to heed the messages in these disturbing documents and counter this politico-religious movement that is anything but peaceful." -- Janet Levy, FrontPageMagazine.com
"Raymond Ibrahim's release The Al Qaeda Reader is a necessary addition to the scholarship of jihad." -- Gary H. Johnson, Jr., The American Thinker
“Ibrahim has found a place in the neocon blogosphere, where he deploys his familiarity with al-Zawahiri's scribblings and bin Laden's utterances to show that the religion of Islam lends itself to violence. As the son of an immigrant family from Egypt and a Coptic Christian, he might be forgiven for taking this position. Fundamentalists of al-Zawahiri's ilk have tried to make a misery of Coptic life in Egypt. And to Ibrahim's credit, his annotations generally note where the jihadists' militant reasoning deviates from more conventional readings of traditional Muslim texts”—Steven Simon, Washington Post.
“Through four documents, written by both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, the two sections of theology and propaganda provide essential texts and documents that trace the origin, history and evolution of the ideas of al-Qaida founders al-Zawahiri and bin Laden. The documents are meant to help readers understand the difference between propaganda and theology”—Brandace Simmons, Roll Call.
“‘Stop hurting us and we’ll stop hurting you.’ That is the message Americans get from al Qaeda. In his fascinating new book, historian Raymond Ibrahim explains that the jihadists say one thing to CNN, and quite another to fellow Muslims…. Ibrahim annotates each document, with careful attention paid to the treatises. He does a superb job of explaining archaic concepts and unfamiliar allusions, and his footnotes and glossaries alone are an invaluable resource”—Tristan Abbey, Stanford Review
“Ibrahim's book received positive reviews from two unusual sources—the left and the right. He has been a fixture on Fox News... But the book has also been lauded by Reza Aslan and by [Lawrence] Wright, who references Ibrahim in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Sept. 11, The Looming Towers…. Ibrahim's solid research should serve as a corrective to those demagogues who would have the world believe that terrorism begins and ends with Israel.”—Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal
“Ibrahim found that in publicly accessible texts and videos (often with English translations and/or subtitles), al-Qaida's stated grievances fit quite neatly into the picture of the world painted by Chomsky and his ideological co-travelers. However, Ibrahim also found a wealth of untranslated works by al-Qaida members (including tracts by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri) designed as theological treatises for both fundamentalists and the rest of the Muslim world. In these works - better indicators of al-Qaida's motivations than videos so tailored for Western audiences as to have English subtitles scrolling on the bottom - one almost never sees references to the United States, Israel, or even the West as a whole. Instead, they are subsumed under the Arabic word kufr, or ‘infidelity,’ which Ibrahim translates as contextually meaning ‘the regrettable state of being non-Muslim that must always be fought through ‘tongue and teeth’”— Zack Beauchamp, Brown Daily Herald
Reviews of The Al Qaeda Reader
Touchstone Magazine: Mere Comments
Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 20, No. 3.
