William Polk's work, Crusade and Jihad, is a grand-scale overview of the conflict between the Islamic world and what Samuel Huntington used to call “the West.” Polk prefers the term “global north” as apparently this latter term is a bit easier to define than “the West.” Overall, the argument is that this is an inevitable conflict, brought about by the inherent aggressiveness of the Islamic world at first and then by its chaotic failure during the past centuries.

Although Polk's grasp of history is much better than that of Huntington, his focus is definitely on the past several centuries. He gives the reader an overview of the high Islamic civilization, but this focuses mainly upon the early caliphate and skips quickly to the Ottoman period.

For the rest of the Crusade and Jihad, the reader is treated to a thumbnail critical portrait of most Muslim countries and a surprising number of adjoining regions where Muslims are predominant, but not independent. A reader should prepare themselves because Polk's interests and commentary are very broad-ranging. He is perfectly capable of a digression into the relationship between The Tempest and imperialism (250–251), and at all times ladles in curious or little-known facts that make Crusade and Jihad a fascinating book.

For a book whose title refers to “a crusade,” the discussion of the topic in the introductory chapters is surprisingly muted (one page). Polk is clearly more interested in trade-driven expansionism than in purely religious imperialism. Although he does not say it, it seems that for him, the term crusade has more of a connotation of grand enterprise rather than harking back to religious violence.

For the rest of the book, he goes from Napoleon in Egypt, to the French in Algeria, to the Raj in India, to Russian imperialism in the Caucasus. Although he has sections on the Sudanese Mahdi and several other North African anti-colonial movements, it is rather striking that Polk's overview of the Islamic world does not include either west or east Africa.

Part 3, the central part of the book, is almost completely focused on the Middle East, and takes one through nationalism into the 1990s, including digressions on India and a separate chapter on Kashmir. For Polk, the prominence of Saddam Husain is a throwback to the revolutionary anti-colonial days of Nasser and Algeria. It is not surprising that he notes that toward the end of his life, Husain became more sympathetic to Sunni Islam, and thus serves to transition into the latter section of the book.

Part 4 deals with Islamic groups, and rightly starts with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Polk then skips backward to the Muslim Brotherhood, and he also devotes several chapters to Palestine and Palestinian Islamic groups. These, together with Hizbullah, are considered to be Islamic-nationalistic in their character, and thus at odds with the more globalist Islam of al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

It is apparent, however, that Polk sees Salafi-jihadism as a phenomenon associated with failed states. He singles out the Philippines, where the Muslim minority has been rather tardy in embracing Salafism, Somalia, and Boko Haram in Nigeria, before dealing with transnational movements.

Since Boko Haram is a movement I have studied closely, I shall critique Polk's presentation of it somewhat. It is apparent that Polk included it not because of any knowledge—he admits that “satisfactory reportage on northern Nigeria in this period is hard to find” (466)—but because he wanted to be as broad as possible. Polk's treatment of Boko Haram's founder, Muhammad Yusuf (d. 2009), is fairly good, but his knowledge of Boko Haram from 2009 until the present is superficial. For example, he quickly devolves into statistics and numbers (x number of people killed, y number of buildings destroyed) rather than citation of what Boko Haram actually says about itself. And he is inaccurate about the Ansaru group, which broke off from Boko Haram, who he characterizes as “perhaps even more violent” (471) than Boko Haram. In actuality, Ansaru was revolting against the indiscriminate attacks leveled by Boko Haram against Muslim Nigerians.

Crusade and Jihad is an attempt to explain why exactly the Muslim world is in the situation that it is. Polk is critical all-around, frequently pointing out western hypocrisy and brutality, but at the core he thinks that the problem for Muslims is religious rigidity (529). Although Crusade and Jihad is a descriptive work rather than a prescriptive one, it offers food for thought for Muslims who might read it. In general, Polk's tone about the future of the Muslim world is quite pessimistic. He is also very strongly anti-interventionist and does not hesitate to point out the major disasters of various American and British invasions and interventions during the recent past.

Although Polk's title does not really fit the book, it is worth reading. His scholarship is that of a second-hand but broadly read writer, and because of his critique he leaves the reader questioning assumptions rather than feeling comfortable with them.