Star of Islam is an upcoming novel by T. Jackson King to be released in May. It has a somewhat strange premise i.e., the Shias take over large parts of the world within a decade. The prologue of the book given below gives the setting of the novel. It sounds a little too fantastical.

From a graduate course seminar given by Saad Idnn Ibrahim, Sunni Lecturer and Fulbright Scholar at the University of California Los Angeles, United States, Western Alliance, A.H. l455, or A.D. 2028.
“—students today will wonder at the speed with which Shi’a Islam spread across the world. The hordes of white-robed Iranian Martyrs took Jerusalem in 2012, Istanbul in 2013, Mecca in 2014, Europe in 2020, Central Asia in 2021 and by 2022, Shi’a Islam ruled over subject populations from Tanzania north to Samarkand, from Britain east to Indonesia, all voices singing Allahu Akbar—God is Great!

“The mullahs and ayatollahs of Qom say it is the Spirit of Muhammad, newly reborn in the Second Husain. The nations of the surviving Western Alliance point to the fifth column of foreign “guest workers” in Europe, who rose up and deposed democratic, socialist and fascist governments alike. The Hindus say little and profess a belated neutrality, hoping the Council of Mullahs will not emulate the Moghuls. The Chinese say the barbarians have finally shown their true colors. The black Africans are too preoccupied with starving to blame anyone. The rest of the world rejoiced that only a few radioactive craters pockmarked the Holy Land, Arabia, Iran, Europe and the former states of the Soviet Union.

“What is definite is that just as the Martyrs held sway over the largest empire since Alexander’s, the discovery of the Translight stardrive by the Baha’i heretic Megum Ben Ahmed in 2014 gave the mullahs something to do with the captured rockets of Baikonur cosmodrome. They used the Russian Energia heavy-lift rockets to throw massive cargos into space, relying on subject peoples for technicians, contracting with the Western Alliance for specialists only when they had to. But their desperation to spread the Prophet’s Call to other planets can be seen in their hiring of female Western experts—so long as they wore the chador.

“In 2022, eleven QomDrive starships left Earth orbit for the nearer habitable stars, seeking to spread the Prophet’s Call to new lands. One of these was The Sword of Islam, a ship run by a Harvard-educated Shi’ite and crewed mostly by Western-trained Iranians, Afghanis and Iraqis. It carried a Shock Brigade of Martyrs from the dregs of Yemen, Sudan and Libya, a colonizing group of farm peasants, and a small complement of contracted Western and Asian technicians. The eight hundred humans aboard The Sword of Islam are now known to have been the spark for what has become known as The Draconis Incident . . . .”

Thanks to Hall for the pointer. Here is how to refer to the book. King, T. Jackson. Star of Islam. Fantastic Books, May 2013. (cf Locus, March 2013, in forthcoming books)