The Shade of Swords is the first cohesive history of Jihad, written by one of India's leading journalists and writers. In this paperback edition, updated to show how and why Saddam Hussein repositioned himself as a Jihadi against America, M.J. Akbar explains the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Placing recent events in a historical context, he tackles the tricky question of what now for Jihad following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. With British and American troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and once again in Iraq, the potential for Jihadi recruitment is ever increasing. Explaining how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice, and illustrating how Muslims themselves have historically tried both to direct and control the phenomenon of Jihad, Akbar shows how Jihad pervades the mind and soul of Islam, revealing its strength and significance. To know the future, one needs to understand the past. M.J. Akbar's The Shade of Swords holds the key.

M.J.Akbar, an Indian journalist and author, traces the origins of Jihad in the struggle against oppression that was part of the earliest consciousness of Muslims. Travelling across centuries and continents, from the triumphant rise of Islam under the Prophet Muhammad to the depression of defeat in the first Crusade, through the renewal of Saladin to the rise and fall of the Ottoman and Mughal empires and the raw passions of Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, Akbar's gripping story explains how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice.

The Shade of Swords is the first cohesive history of Jihad, written by one of India's leading journalists and writers. In this paperback edition, updated to show how and why Saddam Hussein repositioned himself as a Jihadi against America, M.J. Akbar explains the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Placing recent events in a historical context, he tackles the tricky question of what now for Jihad following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. With British and American troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and once again in Iraq, the potential for Jihadi recruitment is ever increasing. Explaining how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice, and illustrating how Muslims themselves have historically tried both to direct and control the phenomenon of Jihad, Akbar shows how Jihad pervades the mind and soul of Islam, revealing its strength and significance. To know the future, one needs to understand the past. M.J. Akbar's The Shade of Swords holds the key.

The Shade of Swords unwraps two hundred years of India's history, focusing on the inter-communal, sectarian strife that has so blighted the country and the lives of its peoples. The Hindu-Muslim divide, like sectarianism in Northern Ireland, is seen by many both inside and outside India as an interminable and accepted fact of life. It has led to massacres, political assassinations, to the destruction of mosques (most provocatively the Barbi mosque in 1992) and alarming nuclear stand-offs between India and Pakistan.

It is a short encyclopedia of Islam to understand Quran and Hadiths through 786 textual questions. In this groundbreaking work Professor Patri tries to find out the epicenter of the eruption of Islamic terrorism. The author very scholarly documents the unknown side of Islam which both Muslims and non-Muslims should read to know the real face of Islam as a political creed and not a religious philosophy. The great thing about this book is that one can penetrate the whole of Islamic literature through a series of textual questions which can enlighten on the basic tenets of Islam.