A review of Danny Burmawi, Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis Gerasa Books, 2025
A number of authors have tried to help those not familiar with Islam, or who think that Islam is just another ‘Abrahamic religion’ understand what Islam is really about. To understand an ideology it is important to be able to view the ideology from both the inside and the outside.
To view an ideology from the inside means to have at least at some time been a believer in the ideology and to understand its ideas and also the feelings and emotions the ideology stirs amongst its adherents. To view an ideology from the inside also requires familiarity with the ideology’s texts and its traditions.
To view an ideology from the outside, however, means having the ability to analyze the ideology, not only by describing the main ideas but also by showing how the ideology functions in societies where it is adopted.
Danny Burmawi, who grew up Moslem in Jordan, converted to Christianity as a young man and moved to Lebanon where he worked for many years for Christian relief organizations and who also earned a graduate degree in theology, has just the set of skills necessary for analyzing Islam and how it currently impacts Israel and the West. Because of that background he has both an insider’s understanding of Islam, is familiar with its foundational texts in the original Arabic and the culture that Islam has created and is also able to step back and view Islam dispassionately.
His new book, Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis (Gerasa Books, 2025) clearly describes and analyzes Islam as a lived ideology, an ideology that is not a religion like others in the West but an aggressive and expansionist political ideology.
Burmawi begins with a history of early Islam. His main points in reciting that history are to show that Islam is not only about an attempt to connect to the divine, but that it is an amalgam of previously existing ideas, including ideas from Arabian culture, such as violence or Jihad, the worship of sacred items and places like the Qa’baa and many ideas from Judaism including textual study and dietary laws.
But, he posits, Islam’s real innovation was that although ‘Allah remained ultimate in theory …Muhammed became the necessary mediator, interpreter and access point through whom divine will was revealed and enforced.’ Muhammed’s life story and his sayings therefore eclipse the Qu’ran as the sources of religious authority and unlike the Hebrew prophets who are merely messengers, Muhammed’s life itself became the message. As Burmawi explains ‘In Judaism and Christianity the man serves the text. In Islam the text serves the man.’
Muhammed is uncritically considered the ultimate example of all values. That is why blasphemy laws are so common in the Moslem world, not to protect Allah’s honor, but to protect Muhammed’s. It is also why Moslems often react violently (as in the famous Charlie Hebdo case in France, or by trying to murder the author Salman Rushdie) to criticism of Muhammed. As the example of religious perfection Muhammed is considered beyond criticism. In the Moslem world Jews and Christians are not considered infidels because they deny G-d but because they deny Muhammed.
Because Muhammed’s life is supposed to be the model for all things, Islam cannot be apolitical. Muhammed was political. His community was a state not a church, a mosque or a synagogue. Once he moved to Medina he was in charge of governance, warfare (Jihad), taxation, punishment, and treaty-making. He did not merely preach Jihad, he led it. His ideology was and is aggressively expansionist and supremacist.
His life was and is the model of how to do these political things and that makes Islam fundamentally different than Judaism and Christianity. It makes Islam as much a political ideology as a religion. The Qu’ran repeatedly emphasizes the duty to establish Islam and Sharia law in the world as a unifying political system. ‘This is not symbolic.’ says Burmawi. Rather, ‘It is expansionist in design and strategic in execution.’
Resistance to Islam, the Moslem sources emphasize, should be met with coercion, forced conversion, political subjugation through the jizya tax (special tax on non-Moslems) or war.’ Moreover, in Islamic ideology the power of Islam is especially connected to state power and depends on and is protected by Moslem majority states.
Although the Islamic war against Israel is often mistaken for a dispute about land, territory or borders it is nothing of the sort, says Burmawi. It is an Islamic crusade, a theological struggle, to eliminate Judaism and Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. Islam considers the existence of Israel a theological affront that needs to be eliminated because Islam holds that once territory has been conquered by Islam it must always remain Islamic.
To advance the cause of eliminating Israel the Islamic world hijacked the name ‘Palestine’ which had belonged mostly to Jews during the British Mandate and created a new, artificial and reactionary ‘palestinian’ identity solely for the purpose of delegitimizing the Jewish state. ‘Palestinian’ identity was constructed as a weapon and not from any real heritage. ‘Palestinian’ identity became the focus of Islamic grievance and resentment against Irael and the West. Moslems may murder Moslems by the hundreds of thousands, but that is insignificant. When Jews kill Moslems, especially by defeating them in war, it is an offense against Muhammed and Allah.
The Moslem Forever War against Israel also feeds into the Moslem sense of grievance against the West and resentment against non-Muslims. With the help of their Soviet allies some of the Moslem-majority countries rebranded their theological war against the Jews as anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Their Soviet handlers knew that calls to Jihad would not play well in the West. Declaring a Forever War against the Jews also allowed the corrupt, impoverished and ineffective Moslem-majority states to blame Jews for all their woes.
Along the way the Moslem world made antagonism to Israel the defining issue of their existence and the ‘Palestinian’ cause the unifying symbol of Islamic grievance. Islam had appropriated the symbols and mythology of the people and places it conquered, for instance by building a mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. When the Israelis defeated Jordan (and Egypt, Syria and Iraq) in 1967 and retook the Temple Mount it created a theological crisis for the Islamic world. How, after all, could an inferior and small people like the Jews defeat Islamic armies and reverse Islamic appropriation?
The Temple Mount, Al-Aqsa, became the rallying cry for every murderous Jihadi movement against Israel forever after-with Moslem clerics and politicians perpetually lying by saying that ‘Al Aqsa was threatened by the Jews’ even though the government of Israel let a Moslem organization control the Temple Mount. The mere presence of a Jew on the Temple Mount and the idea of a Jew praying there, sent Islamic clerics into spasms.
At the heart of the Arab-Israel conflict, says Burmawi is this: ‘The war against Israel is not a border dispute. It is not about settlements, checkpoints or territory. It is a theological crusade rooted in an Islamic ideology that demands the eradication of Jewish sovereignty to restore a global caliphate. In this worldview Israel’s existence is not just inconvenient-it is an affront to Allah’s will.’
Since Islam is a supremacist system that does not admit of any relativism or the belief that anyone else may be right or equally right, Islamic ideology holds that it is important to crush and eliminate any opponents. Even in the supposed bastions of ‘moderate’ Islam like al-Azhar Islamic University, war against Israel and killing Jews, including murdering Jewish women and children, is affirmed to be a sacred duty by all Moslems.
That is why Moslem massacres of Jews, including the massacre of innocents on October 7, 2023 are celebrated with joy and gladness throughout the Moslem world. The Islamic Forever War against Israel is a continuation of Islamic history and not an aberration. Peace with Israel in this view, is not only impossible-it is heretical. Moslem political leaders may deny this, but when they do, they are lying.
This Islamic ideology does not only concern Israel, but it is also antithetical to the West. Islamic ideology rejects democracy, rejects free speech, rejects freedom of religion (a Moslem who converts to a different religion is subject to the death penalty), rejects nationalism other than by Islamic states that may one day form the caliphate and rejects equality of all people, especially equality for non-Muslims and women.
Islam is not an ‘Abrahamic faith’ like Christianity and Judaism, Burmawi argues, because Islam fundamentally misunderstands core concepts of Christianity and Judaism. Islam ‘invokes the Gxd of the Bible as if he were the same deity but completely misrepresents His character, His covenant and His purposes. Islam borrows the names of figures from Jewish and Christian tradition but empties them of their true identities. It infuses them with a foreign vision that has no organic connection to Israel’s story.’
Islam gets Judaism and Christianity wrong because of its basic confusion about the Gxd of the Bible. Islam confuses that Gxd of Mercy and Justice with its own hegemonic, supremacist and expansionist ideology. There is no difference between an ordinary Moslem and an Islamist in Burmawi’s view since the doctrine is infected with expansionist, Sharia-supremacist and Islamic-exclusivist ideas and other doctrines alien to a free and open society.
Burmawi also recognizes that any analysis or criticism of Islam as an ideology will be met with cries of ‘Islamophobe’ or ‘racist.’ This trick of attacking all critics, one that Moslems and their allies have learned from the Far Left, has been quite effective in stifling fair and full conversation of what Islam really is, a political ideology as much as a religion. Joined by Marxists, practitioners of ‘critical theory’ and other noxious ideologies, Islam is on the march in the Middle East where it is eliminating ancient Christian communities like the Christians of Bethlehem and the Coptic Christians of Egypt and continuing its Forever War on Israel. In Europe Islam conquers by immigration what it could not conquer militarily.
Burmawi’s Islam, Israel and the West is written in a clear and readable style, does an excellent job of explaining Islam from the inside and from the outside and is worth the while of anyone who cares to understand the ideologies that challenge our world and that challenge the future of Christianity, Judaism and Western Civilization.
Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.