Siachen Glacier - War Above the Clouds-By-Martin A Sugarman

SWORD OF ALLAH-A.I Akram

Mohammad's Muslim general Khalid, June 30, 2006
By William Garrison Jr. (Bellevue, WA United States)

"Sword of Allah: Khalid bin al-Waleed" was originally released in January 1979 (504 pgs) in hardback.

Then it was revised and released as "Khalid bin al-Waleed: Sword of Allah" in February 2004 (458 pgs) in paperback by Maktabah Publishers in Birmingham, England. The author is: Lt. Gen. A. I. Akram, a Pakistani army officer who taught at the Pakistani Staff College in 1964, and who later traveled to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East to view the battlefields of the Muslim Prophet Mohammad and his best general: Khalid. Akram wrote this book in tribute to Khalid, whom be believed to be "the greatest military general in history", and who campaigned in the Middle East about 630-650 C.E. For his research he excluded both Muslim and Christian writers who lived and wrote after the Tenth Century; Akram believed they were merely rewriting the battle accounts of the earlier Muslim scholars, such as: Mohammad bin Ishaq. Akram's use of Arabic sources helped him to broaden the history of Mohammad's and Khalid's early battles. However, by excluding any "Western" scholars he avoided benefiting from their critical analysis in questioning the historical accuracy of some of the battlefield scenarios. Akram generally does not question the accuracy of the early Muslim biographers. However, as a professionally military-trained general, Akram occasionally rises above his fervent Islamic beliefs and questions some of the battlefield accounts. Akram doubts a few of the stories that anti-Muhammad enemy forces numbered over 100,000 - 200,000 during some battles, and Akram found it incongruous to believe that despite so many soldiers, only four or so deaths on either side resulted after several days of heavy "battle" between these large armies: who had shot the sky full of arrows at one another. Pertaining to the massacre of some 600 Jewish males who surrendered at the battle of Khaybar, Akram was so embarrassed by the obvious outright cold-blooded murder of these Jewish prisoners that he blithely skims over this shameful episode of the Prophet of Peace. Objectivity is not a strong attribute of Akram. Akram revised the final edition over five years, and it shows good attention to detail -- if the details can be believed. As he visited the early Muslim battlefields and studied them, Akram developed some 30 maps depicting the various battles. However, the maps are very generic and hypothetical (nothing like a modern detailed battle map), as nothing really remains of the battlefields themselves -- their having been buried in the shifting sands of time. This is a very good heavily-detailed book recounting Mohammad's and Khalid's battles -- from a not-too-critical Muslim perspective. A good companion book analyzing these battles with constructive criticism is: "War, Terror & Peace in the Qur'an and in Islam" by T.P. Schwartz-Barcott.

Sadly, no index, but a helpful Table of Contents listing the battles.

ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW:---


The Sword of Allah - Khalid bin Al-Waleed

This is an excellent book written by the late Lieutenant-General A.I. Akram of the Pakistan Army, in October 1969. The online version of the book resided at www.SwordofAllah.com but more recently this website seems to have been discontinued. Given that the text of this book has been lost to the internet world since then, it has been our project at GrandeStrategy to salvage what could be found of the text online. Thus far we have managed to salvage a good portion of the book. We repost it here. Please note that we are doing this without any financial gain and as a service to all those that seek solace in this book from today's dark times, when the Islamic world lies in shambles, and news from Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya and Kashmir are heartbreaking and shameful. In such times this book reminds us of how glorious we once were, and perhaps how someday we can be again.




The Sword of Allah: Khalid bin Al-Waleed, His Life and Campaigns

Introduction



Part I: In the Time of the Prophet (SAWS)

Chapter 1: The Boy
Chapter 2: The New Faith
Chapter 3: The Battle of Uhud
Chapter 4: The Battle of the Ditch
Chapter 5: The Conversion of Khalid
Chapter 6: Mutah and the Sword of Allah
Chapter 7: The Conquest of Makkah
Chapter 8: The Battle of Hunain
Chapter 9: The Siege of Taif
Chapter 10: Adventure of Daumat-ul-Jandal

Part II: The Campaign of the Apostasy

Chapter 11: The Gathering Storm
Chapter 12: Abu Bakr Strikes
Chapter 13: Tulaiha The Imposter
Chapter 14: False Lords and Ladies
Chapter 15: The End of Malik bin Nuwaira
Chapter 16: The Battle of Yamamah
Chapter 17: The Collapse of the Apostasy

Part III: The Invasion of Iraq

Chapter 18: The Clash with Persia
Chapter 19: The Battle of Chains
Chapter 20: The Battle of the River
Chapter 21: The Hell of Walaja
Chapter 22: The River of Blood
Chapter 23: The Conquest of Hira
Chapter 24: Anbar and Ain-ut-Tamr
Chapter 25: Daumat-ul-Jandal Again
Chapter 26: The Last Opposition
Chapter 27: The Perilous March
Chapter 28: Deeper into Syria
Chapter 29: The Battle of Ajnadein
Chapter 30: The Conquest of Damascus
Chapter 31: The Unkind Cut
Chapter 32: The Battle of Fahl
Chapter 33: The Conquest of Emessa
Chapter 34: The Eve of Yarmuk
Chapter 35: Al-Yarmuk
Chapter 36: The Completion of the Conquest
Chapter 37: Farewell to Arms

Appendix


Region MaP

JOURNEY INTO THE MINDS EYE

JOURNEY INTO THE MIND'S EYE, Fragments Of An Autobiography
"I must have been about four years old when Russia took hold of me with giant hands" writes Lesley Blanch. When a friend of her parents whom she simply calls The Traveller blew into her nursery, muffled in heavy furs and full of the fairytales of Russia, with gifts of Fabergé eggs and icons, he instilled in her a lifelong passion. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her in the grip of a tremendous obsession. The search to recapture her great love, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup and piroshkis on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s; to Siberia and beyond — journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye. Part travel book, part love story, Lesley Blanch's memoir is pure intoxication.

Wilder Shores of Love

THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE
“There have been many women who have followed the beckoning Eastern star” says Lesley Blanch. She writes about four such women in The Wilder Shores Of Love — Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (a French convent girl captured by pirates and sent to the Sultan's harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss linguist who felt most comfortable in boy's clothes and lived among the Arabs in the Sahara).

They all escaped from the constraints of nineteenth century Europe and fled to the Middle East, where they found love, fulfillment, and “glowing horizons of emotion and daring”. Blanch’s first, bestselling book, it pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on women escaping the boredom of convention.

Pierre Loti

PIERRE LOTI, Portrait Of An Escapist
When Pierre Loti — adulated writer, naval officer, traveller, amateur acrobat and escapist — died in 1923, he was given a state funeral, the only French writer to have received such an honour other than Victor Hugo. Bohemian, exotic and fiercely romantic; adored and scorned by French society in equal measure, Loti spent his life escaping the constraints of bourgeois France — and in so doing redefined his age. He travelled the South Seas, Asia and the Middle East (his great obsession) and loved with intense passion and freedom wherever he went. Lesley Blanch's biography revived an interest in this "unjustly neglected" French writer and launched reprints of his novels and travel books in France. She says, "He was not just a mawkish and sentimental writer as some think. Remember, people like Henry James and Marcel Proust greatly admired him. He wrote beautifully and had very sensuous rhythms. He could also be ghastly grim — Aziyadé, a burning Turkish love story, opens with an execution."

LESLEY BLANCH "It's awfully easy to say of someone who wears high heels and a painted face that he was a pederast. I think Pierre Loti was everything. He loved men and he loved women and if there had been a third sex he would have loved that one too"

THE SABRES OF PARADISE, Conquest And Vengeance In The Caucasus

THE SABRES OF PARADISE, Conquest And Vengeance In The Caucasus ~ Lesley Blanch
The Caucasians wrote love-poems to their daggers, as to a mistress, and went to battle, as to a rendezvous. Fighting was life itself to these darkly beautiful people — the most beautiful people in the world it was said. They lived and died by the dagger. Battle-thrusts were the pulse of the race. Vengeance was their creed, violence their climate.



Vengeance and violence; such was the Caucasus throughout its dark history, reaching its apogee during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the invading Russian armies marched eastwards acquiring their Asiatic and near-Eastern provinces and met their first check among the Caucasian mountains. All the warring Moslem tribes banded together in one terrible force, and under one man, Shamyl, the Avar, their Prophet and Warrior. In 1834, he sprang on to the scene in a flash of steel, a clap of thunder, like some flamboyant Prince of Darkness, the dramatic nature of his legend and his black banners matched by his back-cloth of towering mountains, perpendicular rock cliffs topped by eagle’s nest aôuls, or fortified villages, hung over ravines slit so deep no light ever penetrated the abyss where torrents raged, and a never-ceasing wind howled down the passes. This was his birth place — the wild mountains of Dagestan, an almost unmapped rock waste, set between the Black Sea and Caspian.

A hundred years or more ago, leading European newspapers devoted columns to Shamyl’s exploits: questions were asked in the House of Commons as to Britain’s commitments in the Caucasus, his bravery was extolled from public platforms, and English ladies were sewing an elaborate piece of bunting designed to become his flag. Shamyl’s heroic stand was interpreted with gratification as a deliberate check to Tzarist designs on India. The Caucasus barred the overland route to Delhi: it was clear, this man was an ally, ‘a really splendid type who stood up to tyrants … and deeply religious, even if he did have several wives…’ Thus the ladies of the parish sewing circle, fortified by tea and pound cake, as they stitched away at an appliqué of scarlet stars on a white ground and dreamed of it fluttering from some dark Caucasian peak. There was no doubt Shamyl had captured England’s imagination.

©

Although at first glance, it seems unlikely there was any similarity between the people of mid-Victorian England and those of the Caucasus, yet it is to be traced in their approach to religion — to suffering, which, in each case, was offered up with relish. Caucasians, both the exalted mystics and the people, were sustained by a stoic discipline, and humility, feeling themselves part of some Divine pattern which nullified individual anguish. They offered up their suffering almost impersonally, with a sense of fatality, for Allah! And, however violent their sufferings, whatever sacrifices Shamyl, in the name of Mahommed, demanded or imposed, they retained a certain austerity, unlike the noisy, self-indulgent mid-Victorians expressions of Christianity.

The pious English of this moment were more egotistic, and actuated by conviction of their own worth, which made them sometimes refer to God with a proprietory air, rather as a faithful retainer, always there, to sustain them when needed. Their Christianity was an exclusive raft, saving, first, the classes, then the masses; but saving, first of all, those who suffered most.

The nation, from Queen Victoria down to the most insignificant schoolgirl, expressed their conviction in their letters and journals. Religion was part of daily life, as it was not in either the materialistic eighteenth nor the scientific twentieth century. Sunday school, Scriptural readings, family prayers, collective hymn singing, an exchange of tracts, were part of everyday life: while letters dwelling on an interpretation of the Scriptures often passed between schoolboys, or that strange and wholly sincere race of military mystics who were among the heroic phenomenon of the age.