How familiar are you with the Qu’ran? Do you think you ought to more about it?

William Federer thinks you do. In his book, What Every American Needs to Know About the Qu’ran – A History of Islam & the United States, he offers quick snippets of history that bring you up to date on the highlights of Islam since Mohammed appeared on the scene in 700 A.D.

What went into its text? What parts can be traced back to other cultural influences? What behavior did it inspire in its adherents? What two technologies allowed Islam to spread?

The reason Federer wants you to know this is that Islam has a history of violence. In our day of carefully inoffensive phrases and multicultural niceness, nobody is supposed to say so. But what do you do with a historical record that documents the places where the slaughter was so thorough, the ground oozed with blood and the rivers ran red? A record in which the same awful thing happens again and again?

You will read of lands you never heard of, and the reason you’ve never heard of them is that they were wiped out centuries ago.

Muslim conquest even had a hand in America’s discovery and settlement. Our founding fathers’ reputations have changed from heroic to greedy and imperialistic lately. But read Federer’s account of what they were up against, then re-think that woke narrative you keep hearing.

Europe itself almost never was:

Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight.
Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.
If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eight centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.
Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared.
— Theodore Roosevelt

Federer’s own words in this book are spare. In much of it, he stands back and lets the historians and statesmen of old tell it themselves. Pope Benedict, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Toqueville, John Quincy Adams, Winston Churchill, Maimonides, various Arab historians —What Every American Needs to Know is not one author’s supposings, but his painstaking collection of account after account of what was.

It is also a warning of what will be if we do not believe that our culture is worth saving. The Qu’ran still exists. It still has adherents, and they think and act the way they feel duty-bound to think and act, not the way we might wish.

Don’t be like the “self-declared . . . humanist” Federer quotes, who wrote:

I am not a warrior . . . I never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.

Photo credit: The British Library on VisualHunt