Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism (Hoover Institution Press Publication (Hardcover))

Description

'A Muslim has no nationality except his religious beliefs,' said Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, a key figure in the world of political Islam who was executed by the secular regime in his homeland in 1966. For decades, the ideologues of pan-Islam have refused to accept the boundaries and the responsibilities of the order of states. In Trial of a Thousand Years, Charles Hill analyzes the long war of Islamism against the international state system. Hill places the Islamists in their proper historical place, showing that they are but the latest challenge to the requirements that states had placed on themselves since the international system was born in 1648. The author describes the many wars on world order over the modern centuries--the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, the cold war--and gives a unique historical perspective to the Islamic challenge of the twenty-first century in Iran, Afghanistan, and beyond. He concludes that America must not give up its values; neither should we retreat by declaring that we will practice them only at home or by telling ourselves that our values are no more worthy than any others selected at random from among the world's many cultures. The first step, he says, is to recognize the problem and then try to develop ways to deal with the exploitation of asymmetries by the enemies of world order. Front Cover Title Page Copyright Acknowledgements Contents Foreword by Fouad Ajami Prologue On a Ship to Oman On the Train to the Army-Navy Game CHAPTER ONE: Two World Orders Christendom and Caliphate Duality or Unity? “The Turk” and “Oriental Despotism” Three World-Historical Events CHAPTER TWO: The Modern Ordering Takes Shape 1648 The Enlightenment Views the Prophet The Sick Man of Europe CHAPTER THREE: The Wars on World Order The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars The Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1866 The American Civil War and the Utah War The Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871 The Great War World War II: Imperial Japan and the Third Reich The Cold War The Indian Mutiny and the International System CHAPTER FOUR: An Islamic Challenge Takes Shape 1979: Iran 1979: Saudi Arabia 1979: Pakistan 1979: Afghanistan 1979: Egypt 1979: Saddam’s Iraq—Bonfire of the Pathologies The Lost Decade of the 1990s The Islamist War on World Order, Well Underway Saddam Overthrown Saddam’s Strategy CHAPTER FIVE: The Shock of Recognition Centers of Gravity Legal Military The State Women Democracy Nuclear Weapons Values CHAPTER SIX: In the Matter of Grand Strategy Religion in World Order Revisited Epilogue: On the Road to Oxiana Bibliography About the Author About the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order Index