“Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States. Fundamentalists are responding to what they see as a centuries-long conspiracy by the West to destroy Islam.”

—Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, National Interest, Fall 1995

“The Muslim world has been designated all too frequently as constituting a new ‘other,’ a rising, ‘fundamentalist’ challenge to everything that is best in Western and Christian civilization.”

—Antony T. Sullivan, associate at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, World & I, September 1997

According to the history of Islam, around the year 610 A.D., in a cave in the Arabian city of Mecca, a young orphan named Muhammad heard a voice ordering him to recite revelations that would be dictated to him. Over a period of 22 years, Muhammad acted as a “transmitter...