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.