Here is my book on the fight against terrorism
Last spring I was contacted by Mr. Dan Mann of Eames Literary Services here in Nashville. The company's founder, John Eames, was also principal founder of NavPress, a major religious publisher. Dan had read my blog and asked whether I had ever thought about writing a book.

So we talked. The upshot is that I have now finished the introduction, the first two chapters and the summaries of the remaining chapters. Those pieces and a proposal document are what Dan needs to market the book to publishers.

My working title is "Truth and Its Consequences," a title sure to change because it has already been heavily used. I have posted the work so far on my server to give you a chance to look it over. If by chance a publisher happens to see this, please contact Dan Mann at 615-478-5944 or dan@eamesliterary.com.

So here you are:

Introduction, from which this excerpt:

This war is in fact a religious war all around, even though we of the West generally shun the idea. Unquestionably, though, our Islamist enemies know it, as do hundreds of millions of other Muslims who have not taken up arms against us. Even Muslim voices who counsel peace to their brethren understand what the real religion of Western people is, often more than we.

In the last several hundred years the West evolved a distinctive answer of what is truth and what is its authority. In contrast, Islam's progress in that inquiry mostly stopped just as the West was shifting out of first gear. Until the last half-century, the divergence between the West's and Islam's theology and philosophy of truth was not a basis for contention. After World War II the divergence took on a character that unfortunately was much more adversarial than cooperative, and finally more violent than peaceful.

This history, later coupled with cheap technology, worldwide communications and increasing globalization of economies and politics, butted headlong into Islamic societies that were ruthlessly patriarchal, theocratic, tribal and anti-democratic, all antithetical to what the West had become. After a four-hundred year hiatus, armed conflict between the West and a powerful strain of Islam broke out again.

This book is an historical, philosophical and religious exploration of how America and the West came into potentially catastrophic conflict with a prominent strain of Islam. For that topic, everyone, regardless of religion, creed or nationality is intensely interested in questions about truth and its authority. Like Pilate, both we and our present enemies realize that some answers are very threatening and that not all answers can be reconciled with one another. Unless we improve our understanding of the deep roots of the conflict and what is really at stake, we can't effectively discern what to do next.

Chapter 1: Lighting the Fuse - this chapter discusses the fuses of the explosions of Sept. 11, 2001. One was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that led to the first general declaration of military jihad in memory. The Afghan War was the birthplace of modern jihadism. Another fuse was the success of the Islamist revolution in Iran that brought down the Shah and turned Iran into a strict Islamist state. The third was the stationing of American forces in Saudi Arabia when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1989. I also explain the religious roots of military jihad in Muslim history.

Chapter 3: A Short History of Arab Terrorism

Three stages of Arab terrorism

Terrorism has been used by peoples and nationalities around the world throughout history, but the terrorism carried out by Muslims has for several decades has either been done by Arab Muslims (all nineteen hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001) or has been inspired by Arab sponsors or teachers (Abu Sayyef terrorists in the Philippines). Hence, the problem of Muslim terrorism is almost exclusively a problem of Arab terrorism.

Arab terrorism has gone through three stages. The first was a revival of strict Islamic devotion. Islamism, as the movement came to be called, was originally a reform movement calling secularized Arab governments and societies to return to the basics of pure Islam as the reformers defined it. Islamism began in Egypt in the early 1920s. It was and still is fundamentally religious in nature. It was not originally violent but became violent fairly soon; Islamists believed that they were obligated to strike those who defied Islam as Islamists perceived it.

The second stage of Arab terrorism was born by the displacement of Palestinian Arabs from their homes by the United Nations' establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. When it became obvious that Israel would not be defeated in conventional battle, as the wars of 1948 and 1956 proved, armed Palestinian groups arose to fight the Israelis.

These groups were essentially secular-political in outlook rather than Islamic; nationalism was a strong ideal in the Middle East at the time. For example, the famed Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO, was founded in 1964 as an umbrella Palestinian nationalist organization, not a religious one, to coordinate the tactics and strategy of several existing violent and political groups. While the PLO used terrorism to fight Israel, it did not overlay Islamism atop its agenda.

By the end Soviet war in Afghanistan many thousands of Arab men had embraced Islamism and jihadism. Arab terrorism reached a new stage in the early 1990s. Henceforth, Islamist terrorism would be directed not only at insufficiently Islamic governments or Israel, but also directly at the West, especially the United States.

Outline of Chapters 4-9

I am still writing the actual proposal, but it will be finished soon.

BTW, I had already written a book, back in 1988-89. It was a 105,000-word Cold War thriller novel. I was referred to the William Morris Agency by one of their published writers. WMA rejected the manuscript, but the agent did send a two-page letter and a chapter-by-chapter critique, which I took as a compliment of sorts.

by Donald Sensing, 12/29/2004 04:45:05 PM. Permalink |