The New Crusades

Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims

By: Khaled A. Beydoun, Kimberlé Crenshaw - foreword

Narrated by: Neil Shah

The first book to examine global Islamophobia from a legal and ground-up perspective, from renowned public intellectual Khaled A. Beydoun.

Islamophobia has spiraled into a global menace, and democratic and authoritarian regimes alike have deployed it as a strategy to persecute their Muslim populations. With this book, Khaled A. Beydoun details how the American War on Terror has facilitated and intensified the network of anti-Muslim campaigns unfolding across the world. The New Crusades is the first book of its kind, offering a critical and intimate examination of global Islamophobia and its manifestations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and regions beyond and in between.

Through trenchant analysis and direct testimony from Muslims on the ground, Beydoun interrogates how Islamophobia acts as a unifying global thread of state and social bigotry, instigating both liberal and right-wing hate-mongering. Whether imposed by way of hijab bans in France, state-sponsored hate speech and violence in India, or the network of concentration camps in China, Islamophobia unravels into distinct systems of demonization and oppression across the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape. Lucid and poignant, The New Crusades reveals that Islamophobia is not only a worldwide phenomenon—it stands as one of the world's last bastions of acceptable hate.

©2023 Khaled A. Beydoun (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Essential Guide to Globalized Islamophobia

There are many books on Islamophobia, but few if any are so global. And since Islamophobia has fueled genocides from Bosnia to Gaza, China to Burma, with India poised to carry out its own, few subjects are so vital to our times.

This is a comprehensive book, which might appeal both to the beginner and the academic looking to brush up on Islamophobia in its full scope. In this sense, it is a truly remarkable book that deserves a wide audience.

But its focus on the War on Terror as the catalyst for Islamophobia is partial. Little is said about the Zionism, which generated not just the Holocaust of our time in Gaza, but also many elements of the War on Terror itself through the grip that the Israel lobby possesses over American elected officials, not to mention the extreme Islamophobia fostered by Israelis everywhere they hold power.

And virtually nothing is said about the New Atheists, who are often at the head of the Islamophobic pack in liberal circles. He might have also said a word about the late imperialism in the oil rich Middle East, which requires Islamophobia to justify its meddling. He might also have explored Samuel Huntington non-racist theory that globalized Islamophobia results from Islamic cultures being rooted in the center of Eurasia and therefore provoking more civilizational clashes than religions and ethnicities touching on fewer other cultures.

But there is only so much space in a groundbreaking book of this sort, and the author covers his terrain with reason and humanity. If only more books could do the same.