Andrew Bostom

Andrew G. Bostom (MD, MS) is an American author.

Quotes

The legacy of Jihad : Islamic holy war and the fate of non-Muslims, 2005

• Sadly, almost fifty years after Fattal made his observations, the sacralized hatred of jihad is still being inculcated as part of the formal education of Muslim youth in Egypt, the most populous Arab country, and throughout the Arab Muslim and larger non-Arab Muslim world. We in the West must press our political and religious leaders to demand that such bellicose, hate-mongering "educational" practices be abolished in Islamic nations, under threat of severe, broad-ranging economic sanctions. (chapter 44)

The legacy of Islamic antisemitism : from sacred texts to solemn history, 2008

• The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred as a “borrowed phenomenon,” seen exclusively, or even primarily, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from Czarist Russia.

Sharia versus freedom : the legacy of Islamic totalitarianism, 2015

• This current Jewish tragedy within a much larger non-Muslim, primarily Hindu tragedy, reminded me of the Indian Sufi “inspiration” for The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Ahmad Sirhindi. Nearing completion of my first book compendium, The Legacy of Jihad, in early 2005, specifically the section about jihad on the Indian subcontinent, I came across a remarkable comment by the Indian Sufi theologian Sirhindi (d. 1624). Typical of the mainstream Muslim clerics of his era, Sirhindi was viscerally opposed to the reforms which characterized the latter ecumenical phase of Akbar's sixteenth-century reign (when Akbar became almost a Muslim-Hindu syncretist), particularly the abolition of the humiliating jizya (Koranic poll tax, as per Koran 9:29) upon the subjugated infidel Hindus.22 In the midst of an anti-Hindu tract Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar's pro-Hindu reforms, Sirhindi observes, “Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.”
  The biographical information I could glean about Sirhindi provided, among other things, no evidence he was ever in direct contact with Jews, so his very hateful remark suggested to me that the attitudes it reflected must have had a theological basis in Islam—contra the prevailing, widely accepted “wisdom” that Islam, unlike Christianity, was devoid of such theological Anti-Semitism. Having originally intended to introduce, edit, and compile a broader compendium on dhimmitude in follow-up to The Legacy of Jihad, this stunning observation inspired me instead to change course and focus on the interplay between Islamic anti-Semitism, and the intimately related phenomenon of jihad-imposed dhimmitude for Jews, specifically.

• I had not intended Islamic antisemitism to be the subject of my second book. After finishing my book on the Jihad, I wanted to do a book about all the subject peoples under Islam—what Bat Ye'or has accurately called the “civilization of dhimmitude.” So I began analyzing writings about the condition of Hindus and Buddhists subjugated by Jihad on the Indian subcontinent. I looked at the relatively progressive period, under the Mughul ruler Akbar the Great. He began as a pious Jihadist and waged very bloody campaigns against the Hindus, but something changed in the course of his rule.18 He became much more tolerant of Hindus, abolished the jizya (the Koranic poll-tax, as per Koran 9:29; jizya means, “the tax paid in lieu of being slain”), appointed Hindus to administrative positions, and seems to have become a Muslim-Hindu syncretist in his personal religious beliefs.20 This led to a brief flowering of Hindu society. His reforms were violently opposed by the Muslim ulema, and I was reading an anti-Hindu tract by an Indian Sufi Muslim theologian named Sirhindi who died in 1624. The tract contained a line that just jumped out at me. “Whenever a Jew is killed it is for the benefit of Islam.” I tried to get whatever biographical materials I could on Sirhindi and I could find no evidence that he had had any physical contact with Jews. This astonished me.
  • Interview to British journalist Alan Johnson in November 2008, quoted in Sharia versus Freedom

• Please view the poignant, elegantly produced video by Kashmiri filmmaker Ashok Pandit, And the World Remained Silent, which chronicles in gory detail the brutal ethnic cleansing of some 350,000 indigenous Hindus from Kashmir during early 1990, orchestrated by Pakistan and its prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.30 (... and witness the jihadist speech of the late, much-ballyhooed “modernist reformer” Ms. Bhutto. She was a jihadist, plain and simple; the head of what remains a jihadist state.)
  • Bostom, A. G. (2015). Sharia versus freedom: The legacy of Islamic totalitarianism. Ch 7