Before 9/11, how many Americans knew the meaning of the word jihad? Even now, twenty-five years later, how many Americans grasp that acts like the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Orlando Pulse club massacre, and the Boston Marathon bombing are, in fact, not the work of people who’ve hijacked or misunderstand Islam but, rather, of people who understand the dictates of the Koran perfectly and are determined to carry them out. Some of us have spent much of the last quarter-century trying to communicate to serious readers that Islam isn’t just another religion but, on the contrary, an ideology of conquest.
Any number of invaluable books, like Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad and The History of Jihad and Jamie Glazov’s Jihadist Psychopath, have stressed the centrality of jihad to the Islamic faith, have demonstrated the roots of jihad in Islamic scripture, have traced it back to the very founding of Islam, have elucidated its psychology, and have made it clear that jihad can take a variety of forms, with acts of terrorism being only one of them. But never before, so far as I’m aware, has any writer on the subject constructed such an elaborate taxonomy of jihad as has Aynaz Anni Cyrus in her captivating new book The Architecture of Jihad: Inside the Ideology, Law, and Global Strategy Driving Islam’s Multi-Front Expansion.
Cyrus, let it be said at the outset, is an elegant, no-nonsense scribe: short, succinct sentences, brief bullet points, snappy formulations, no shilly-shallying around, and not a trace of academic fustiness. Her constant aim is to convey every piece of vital information as clearly, crisply, and urgently as possible. And one of the first things we need to know is that all forms of jihad “are part of an integrated playbook: normalize, enshrine, educate, entrench.” She begins with the most familiar form – “combat jihad.” Combat is central to Islam; wherever there’s a genuinely Islamic government, violence is one of its key tools. Violence was indispensable in the quick early expansion of Muhammad’s empire far beyond the Arabian peninsula; in the religion’s first centuries, “[c]onquest evolved into a system.” And combat jihad, in the age of 9/11, Atocha, Bataclan, and the Manchester Arena, is alive and well.
Of course, it takes cash to wreak mass mayhem – which brings us to “financial jihad.” As Cyrus notes, Islam’s “first financier” was Muhammad’s wife Khadija bint Khuwaylid, the rich widow whose fortune helped him get his empire off the ground. Soon, other sources of income developed – war spoils; jizyah, the taxes levied against infidels living under Muslim control; and kharaj, a tax on conquered farmland. And in recent centuries, the Islamic financial system has further evolved, refined, and expanded, with the religion raking in cash through phony charities and non-profits, often via brilliantly roundabout methods. (For example: “A U.S. nonprofit sends funds to a UK intermediary, who sub-grants to a Malaysian affiliate, who delivers it to a Gaza-based educational nonprofit, which shares staff with Hamas.”)
Then there’s a form of jihad that too many Westerners still get wrong – namely, “migration jihad.” If Muslims move West, it’s not just to collect welfare; it’s to do their part in serving the Islamic strategy of hijrah, which Cyrus defines as “a deliberate shifting of populations to create new centers of influence, reshape societies from within, and slowly tilt political power toward Islamic governance.” The very first example of hijrah was Muhammad’s own move from Mecca to Medina, and ever since then, the aggressive stage of Islamic expansion has been preceded by the “soft invasion” of hijrah.
It’s an old story, yet Western governments still don’t get it. And thanks to their ignorance, many European neighborhoods are now sharia-run enclaves where “police tread lightly, women are harassed for uncovered hair, and dissent against Islam is prosecuted faster than open calls for jihad.” In the U.S., under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden (and with the help of Christian “charities” and “Islamic advocacy organizations”), armies of Muslims were settled in selected cities – Minneapolis, Dearborn, etc. – to form the basis for new Muslim enclaves. “Muhammad’s original migration model,” Cyrus points out, “is still being followed: enter as a guest, grow into a bloc, demand accommodation, then rule by numbers.”
And on it goes. “Deception jihad” entails the use of “concealment, manipulation, and misdirection” to gain the upper hand over infidels. “Political jihad” consists of “the deliberate, organized use of electoral and governmental mechanisms to advance, protect, or normalize Islamic ideological objectives.” (One recent example is Hamtramck, Michigan, where “demographic consolidation produced a Muslim-majority electorate” and an all-Muslim city council.) And “missionary jihad,” a.k.a. proselytizing or da‘wah, has always played a key role in Islamic expansion, serving as “an opening act that softens resistance, secures alliances, and builds legitimacy long before force or policy takes over.” (Nowadays, a common example is interfaith programs, which serve jihad by parroting “grievance narratives,” selectively quoting Islamic scripture, drawing moral equivalencies between Islam and Christianity, and depicting Muslims always as victims, never as aggressors.)
All of the above-mentioned forms of jihad have long histories. Not so “civilization jihad,” which involves the gradual transformation of an infidel society – morally, culturally, politically, and institutionally – “until the population no longer remembers where the original lines were drawn.” Let me explain: older non-Muslims, such as myself, who never saw a hijab in our youth, have since seen them proliferate, and therefore are intensely aware of how dramatically the West has changed; but young Western people around us have never known a world without hijabs, and are therefore far less capable of being worked up about them.
This kind of jihad, writes Cyrus, “thrives today for one reason: the modern West created the perfect environment for it”: once, “societies were fortified, identities were cohesive, and cultural boundaries were rigid”; now, “tolerance, diversity, inclusion, religious neutrality, and personal autonomy” make Islamic subversion easy. Confronted with Islamic cultural phenomena like hijabs, Western institutions “bend first out of politeness, then out of policy, and eventually out of fear of legal or social consequences.” So it is that while Islam used to conquer a society first and restructure it afterwards, today “restructuring comes first,” as exemplified by the introduction of halal-only menus in British hospitals and prisons, the removal of alcohol and pork from grocery stores in certain French and Belgian areas, and the creation of high-fashion hijabs by Nike and H&M (thereby “reframing a Sharia requirement as an empowerment symbol”).
“Civilization jihad” is particularly effective, observes Cyrus,
…because it does not demand surrender all at once. It asks for one accommodation, one exemption, one cultural adjustment at a time. By the time the pattern becomes visible, the norms of the host society have already shifted, and the original culture is treated as outdated, insensitive, or dangerous to social harmony.
This front wins without riots, ballots, or violence. It wins through expectations, changing how schools teach, how corporations operate, how neighborhoods behave, and how institutions respond to pressure. It dissolves resistance not by force but by framing resistance as the problem.
The aim is not coexistence. It is replacement, first of confidence, then of culture, then of authority. Civilizations do not collapse when they lose wars. They collapse when they lose the belief that their own values deserve to survive. Civilization Jihad is steady, systematic, and patient enough to outlive generations that underestimate it. Its defeat begins when a society stops apologizing for its identity and starts defending it.
So much truth – and so beautifully put.
Cyrus discusses other forms of current-day jihad, whose names speak largely for themselves. “Propaganda jihad,” which was perfected by the Muslim Brotherhood and which “has become the most aggressive and visible front in the 21st century,” controls perceptions of Islam by turning “lies into leverage, emotion into obedience, and confusion into compliance.” (One of its great accomplishments is the coinage of the word “Islamophobia.”) “Lawfare jihad” exploits Western law to weaken Western defenses. And “betrayal jihad” is unique in that it’s committed not by Muslims but by infidels. It’s “the jihad of useful allies, fearful officials, transactional leaders, guilt-driven activists, confused voters, and governments that reshape their own civilization to appease those who seek its decline. Civilization Jihad softened the ground. Propaganda Jihad shaped the narrative. Migration and Political Jihad built the leverage. Lawfare Jihad enforced the structure. Betrayal Jihad activates when those structures meet a population too intimidated to defend itself.” Cyrus sums up betrayal jihad succinctly: “when a civilization loses confidence, its people will protect the force they fear instead of the culture they inherit.”
Of course, the boundaries that separate the various forms of jihad aren’t clear-cut. They bleed into one another. No big deal. What’s useful about Cyrus’s categorization is that it obliges the reader to ponder the number of ways in which he or she has, in fact, been acted upon by the forces of jihad. A half-century ago, the CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show had a theme song entitled “Love Is All Around.” Love is all around: it’s the kind of sentiment that poets and lyricists are fond of, and that was certainly part of the Zeitgeist in 1970. Maybe, back then, it did feel, in some places and circumstances, as if love was all around. But today, in the Western world, it’s jihad that’s all around. Open your eyes. Take a look. Unless you’re living in a cave somewhere, it’s there. (And as it happens, it’s especially prevalent in Minneapolis, where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set and which at that time was notorious only for being too tidy and square and dull.)
So, yes, jihad is out there. And it’s out to get you. You may already know this. But if you read Cyrus’s book, you’ll develop a much keener sense of it, in all of its appalling forms, the better to recognize it when it materializes in your backyard. And there’s more that you’ll get out of this book: in every chapter about every different form of jihad, you’ll find lines from the Koran that document in detail the scriptural origins of the form in question. Not least, Cyrus supplies, in connection with each form of jihad, a long list of well-thought-out ideas about what can be done to combat it. Three cheers, then, for a thoroughly impressive study of a subject that none of us want to think about but that all of us are duty-bound to contemplate, to comprehend, and to confront.
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