It says much about the way people in the West think that even the title of Efraim Karsh’s book gives one pause for thought. Islamic imperialism? Surely some mistake. Does he not mean western imperialism in Islamic countries? No, he does not. Karsh’s thesis is that Islam has an imperial past just as bloody and ancient as the West’s. He argues that empire-building has been part and parcel of the Muslim Arab experience as much as it has of the Christian European one. Far from being the victims of western aggression, Muslim countries have often been the authors of their own misfortunes, happily attacking their neighbours when it suited them and never really practising the solidarity among themselves they so readily preached to outsiders. He argues that the Ottoman Empire hastened its own destruction by siding with the Germans during the Great War. He also looks at the contemporary politics of Egypt, Iran, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries and shows the way that rancid rhetoric often trumps common sense.
