Book Review: The First Jihad

Recently the movie Khartoum, starring everyone's favorite NRA figurehead Charlton Heston, was on TV. I was suddenly filled with the desire to know more about this event in history and looked it up on the public library's website. The first, and I believe most recent, entry was this book by Daniel Allen Butler so I put it on hold. Mrs. Kraken laughed a little when I told her I wanted something to read that would be a little more light-hearted and said that only someone as weird as me would think that this was light reading. But nevertheless, I finished it in less than three days and found it overall an accessible narrative of a real life adventure. The First Jihad is a light, fast read; and as far as I could tell is a valid account of the tale with accurate descriptions of actors and events. That said, this book was crying out for an editor or at least a better one.

The dust jacket described the author's education at fancy sounding universities, his eight years in the Army with six of those in the intelligence division, and his hobbies. The book seemed to have a hard time finding a classification, was it history, military or political science, commentary on militant Islam past and present? First and foremost this book was not scholarly, meaning it is basically useless for academics, there were no footnotes or endnotes but the bibliography did contain a variety of sources including primary ones so that is a positive. Butler seemed to want to use the story of the Mahdi and Islamic uprising in the Sudan to inform the present day war on terror, but couldn't commit fully to the task. Nor did he bring any new interpretations of existing scholarship on the Mahdi or Gordon.

Second, editorship. Good grief I don't think I have ever read a book that contained so many typos and grammatical errors. Of course, compared to a blog post or one of those fly by night websites that take and publish mostly freelance political commentary articles The First Jihad was practically spotless, but actually printing a book on paper with a hardcover and dust jacket that can't be edited once it leaves the press should be held to a higher standard. It was jarring and distracting to read "there" when it should be "their" or a simple word is misspelled. And it breaks up your focus and rhythm of reading when a sentence is badly constructed and you have to back up to try and make sense of it. Maybe it is just a little thing, but the publisher should have spent a little money to hire more or better editors to make sure there aren't glaring mistakes.

Third, Butler made some real historical errors in his prose. I cannot speak to the events in and around Khartoum in 1884 as that was the subject I was trying to learn more about. But in surveying the history of Islam and branching into the Crusades Butler wrote that Sultan Mehmet renamed Constantinople Istanbul after capturing that last remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453 when the city did not change names until after the First World War nearly five centuries later. There were other examples but that one stuck out to me. And the mistakes were not confined to Medieval history, in a section referring to the war on terror and George W. Bush's infamous phrase about "smoking the terrorists out of their holes" Butler then used the British idea of "winkling the other fellow out of his hole" as though the two ideas were equivalent. They are not, "winkling" is trying to get an enemy to surrender while "smoking" is to either kill the enemy in their hole or flush him out into the open where he can be killed.

Even with these problems though the book was enjoyable. I'm probably just jealous that I did not try to write a book like it. Or angry that while we both served in the Army, Butler seems to have not internalized the attention to detail that I did. Little things to be sure, but those are some sloppy errors that stood out to me. So, with those in mind hopefully you can enjoy the book a little more should you ever go through the same steps I did of seeing Khartoum on TV and wanting to get a more detailed picture of the actual history. Happy Reading!