Ataturk and Andrew McCarthy's "The Grand Jihad"

Encounter Books has just released a remarkably compendious 4-minute video synopsis of Andrew McCarthy’s “The Grand Jihad“, re-issued in a paperbound edition, which features captivating–and humorous–animation.

Please also see a very insightful review of “The Grand Jihad” by Karen Lugo recently published at The American Thinker, and a review I had published when the original hardcover version of McCarthy’s indispensable book was produced.

The book and video narrative highlight Kemal Ataturk’s modernizing reforms in the emerging Turkish Republic. These yeoman efforts included abolition of Ottoman Turkey’s Sharia-based casuistic hodgepodge of a religio-political governing code, including the “Caliphate.” Predictably, the global Muslim umma’s reaction to Ataturk’s monumental heresy ever since then–epitomized by the popular, mainstream Muslim Brotherhood’s Weltanschauung–has been an intensifying campaign of violent and non-violent Islamic jihadism to revive both the Sharia and the Caliphate.

Below is an apropos observation by Ataturk from a (then) confidential memorandum dated March 17, 1933, written by US Ambassador to Turkey, Charles H. Sherrill about Ataturk’s attitudes toward religion, i.e., Islam:

He maintains that when the Turkish people come to know the real meaning of some of the Arabic prayers they have long been reciting, they will be disgusted with themselves. He cited one prayer taken from the Koran, in which Muhammad prays that his uncle and the uncle’s daughter may be consigned to the infernal regions for something they have done [Note: see Koran sura 111, verses 1-5] “Imagine a thinking Turk taking any interest or getting any religious inspiration out of reciting such a prayer as that,” said he. The more he developed this line of thought the more I was forced to the conclusion that he is pushing the use of the Koran in Turkish largely to discredit the Koran with the Turks.