Called “Allah’s Arrow,” Hamir, the ruler of a small sheikhdom on the Red Sea,was educated at Caltech, where he was a brilliant student, but as a foreigner on campus, he felt slighted by the Americans he met. After completing his studies in the United States, he returned to Arabia, and with his self-esteem revitalized, Hamir was determined to avenge the perceived insults to his person, his faith, and his culture by nuking Washington—so that by the end of Ramadan, with vengeance assured and his honor restored, the Arab would vanquish the infidel West. Lacking an efficient delivery system...

The story begins during World War I with John Buchan’s novelGreenmantle and the plot to bring down the British Empire: “There is a dry wind blowing through the East,” we read, “and the parched grasses await the spark and the wind is blowing towards the Indian border….

I have reports from agents everywhere—pedlars in South Russia, Afghan horse-dealers, Turcoman merchants, pilgrims on the road to Mecca, sheikhs in North Africa, sailors on the Black Sea coasters, sheep-skinned Mongols, Hindu fakirs, Greek traders in the Gulf, as well as respectable Consuls who use cyphers. They tell the same story....

Buchan created the paradigm for spy novels that appeared during the interwarperiod. With their heroes smiting foes of the British Empire throughout the world, novels could be set anywhere—in essence presaging the thrillers that emerged during the 1960s with the popularity of James Bond.

When the theme of a Muslimholy war against the West did appear in fiction published after World War I, authors, more often than not, set their plots in North Africa, evoking the rebellion of Abd al-Qadir who led ajihadagainst the French conquest of Algeria in 1838. Largely unread today, these novels...

Between 1950 and 1969 more than one hundred ninety-five crime fiction novelsabout the Middle East were published—almost four times the number of spy novels that appeared from 1916 through 1939 when Buchan’sGreenmantleand Sax Rohmer’sThe Mask of Fu Manchufirst appeared. Of the titles published before World War II, twelve were murder mysteries and fourteen concerned crime; five used World War I plots; four dealt withjihad,and twenty-one with military coups or mandate politics. World War II and its immediate aftermath were the subject of seventeen novels that followed the military campaigns and the nefarious...

By the 1980s, almost 600 thrillers and spy novels using the Middle East as abackdrop for action, characterization, or plot material had appeared in the United States either as British imports or as American originals. Suddenly, it seemed that supermarkets, drugstores, bus stations, and airports were inundated with spy novels whose covers depicted petro-sheikhs and terrorists held at bay by macho “avengers,” “destroyers,” “killmasters,” “executioners,” “peacemakers,” and assorted James Bond clones.

That the books were included on best seller lists and formed the subject of academic discourse indicates the importance of the genre, perhaps not for literary critics, but...

In 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, the magazine Soldier of Fortune: The Journal of Professional Adventurers (SOF)appeared on the newsstands. Founded by a former captain in the United States Army Special Forces at a time when many of America’s Vietnam veterans, depressed at the defeat, were returning to an unsympathetic America,Soldier of Fortunemarked a shift in masculine thinking. Discharged soldiers were demoralized: they had fought the war and performed well, but the government had betrayed them. To more than a few veterans, Vietnam was lost by a faulty command structure and a government that did...

The Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 sparked a resurgence of novels aboutreligiousjihadagainst the West. By the mid-1980s, authors were once again writing about trouble emanating from Iran and spreading throughout the entire Islamic world. The fear that something “ugly and unprecedented was threatening civilization, democracy and the entire Western liberal tradition” kept CIA agent Peter Randall up at night, “much as the rising terror of Nazism had troubled his father’s dreams in the mid-thirties.” Randall, the protagonist in Daniel Easterman’s novelThe Last Assassin,was worried about “militant Islam.” ¹

By the last third of the twentieth...