Published: 1 March 2009
Air & Space Power Journal - Spring 2009

The Last Crusade: Americanism and the Islamic Reformation by Michael A. Palmer. Potomac Books (http://www.potomacbooksinc.com), 22841 Quicksilver Drive, Dulles, Virginia 20166, 2006, 284 pages, $21.56 (hardcover), $14.36 (softcover) (available January 2008).

Potomac Books lists The Last Crusade as history / public affairs—and correctly so because it begins as straightforward history but then moves into a political rationale for the war in Iraq. The book first addresses the history of the development of Islam from the seventh century to the present, tracing the rise and decline of Islamic civilization from the founding, through the Ottoman Empire, to the current backwardness of the Middle East. As necessary, the work compares Muslim state-centered developments with the freer approaches of Europe. In addition, it compares an Islamic civilization to one developed under Christianity. More often than not, it finds that Islam falls short of Christianity as a producer of vibrant and progressive civilization. It is almost foreordained.

According to author Michael Palmer, the Muslim world has shot itself in the face three times. It rejected the printing press, failed to separate church from state, and segregated the progressive elements—the Christians and Jews who engaged in trade and dealt with money. Repeatedly, when faced with a choice of progress or tradition, Islamists chose tradition. Their once vibrant civilization stagnated.

While the Islamic world was sticking its head into the sand, the primitive European world chose different answers to the same questions. Rather than tradition, it chose progress. Soon the West was moving into capitalist growth and expansion that would eventually take it throughout the world—including into the Middle East.

Turning from history, which seems mostly a warm-up for a political statement, Palmer moves into contemporary affairs. He reads Osama bin Laden as the leader of one legitimate strain of Islam. Admittedly, his is a virulent one, but still it is not the hijacking of Islam that Pres. George Bush mentioned occasionally. Palmer rejects those who would argue that bin Laden is fighting against the Western presence in the Middle East. Rather, he says that bin Laden is fighting the whole of Western history, particularly the development of a secular state. He wants—in fact demands and will die to achieve—a Muslim world and will stop at nothing. To reiterate, his approach is one of the three mainstream variations of Islam.

Palmer cautions that the United States has a history of going beyond its nature and doing the unthinkable. Should the Islamists attack with a nuclear weapon (and Palmer thinks they probably will, eventually), then the United States will undoubtedly unleash its full nuclear fury.

Samuel Huntington, who sees a “clash of civilizations” in today’s world, exerts a noticeable influence on this work. Specifically, Palmer observes a division in today’s world between the American Christian and Middle Eastern Muslim views of the world and their civilizations, seeing no way for the two to merge. He rejects even the neoconservatives who would Americanize or bring about a reformation in the Middle East, contending that Osama bin Laden is leading the only reformation that Islam will have. To Palmer, then, the Christian West and the Islamic Middle East are incompatible, locked in a death struggle with only one victor possible.

The Last Crusade is not really a work of scholarship, at least not of the academic sort. It has a bibliography, and the author is a degreed historian, but it is history in the Newt Gingrich style—history with a purpose. Palmer does not seem to be cherry picking, but he does not identify his sources consistently, does not footnote, and makes it hard to verify that he is reading his sources accurately and completely. I would not reject the work, but I would approach it with caution and find something by Juan Cole to balance it.

Dr. John H. Barnhill
Houston, Texas

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.