Pandora's Boxes Mind of Jihad Volume II Author:Laurent Murawiec Pandora s Boxes is the much anticipated second volume of Laurent Murawiec s The Mind of Jihad, a groundbreaking study detailing the intellectual and cultural sources of the Muslim way of war. Jihad, as Murawiec explains, is a permanent feature of Islamic history, a legally sanctioned war against the infidel that triumphed throughout the ages and... more » expanded the dar al-Islam in Byzantium, the Christian Near East, Persia and India. Jihad was gradually turned back by the West, and seemingly lay dormant for centuries. However, with the onset of European modernity, jihadist ideology adopted new methods. With regard to the eruption of jihad, Murawiec emphasizes that: Jihad, the war to uphold the writ of Islam or aggrandize its domination over the world, did not start with the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after 1990, with the establishment of Israel in 1948, with the birth of India and the partition of Kashmir in 1947 or, for that matter, with any modern event. Jihad started when the prophet Muhammad was preparing his forcible conquest of Mecca from his exile in Medina. In contrast, modern jihad erupted with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. It was a result of all the main political pathologies of the twentieth century, led by the parade of totalitarian ideologies, but transformed by its absorption into the Islamic cultural matrix. While the first volume The Mind of Jihad examined the tribal and religious roots of jihad, the second part Pandora s Boxes focuses on four main issues: The roots of jihad in the nomadic way of war to the rise of a fully fledged Muslim conception of jihad, The never-interrupted practice of Muslim war against the rest of the world, The German and the Soviet contributions to jihad in the modern era, And finally, the development, from the Quran to today, of a notion of jihad as terror. Murawiec s wide scholarship, penetrating analysis and deft narrative make Pandora s Boxes essential reading for policymakers, academic experts, journalists and anyone with a stake in fully understanding the ideological composition and lethal nature of jihad.« less