Jihad

The late twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of an unexpected and extraordinary phenomenon: Islamist political movements. Beginning in the early 1970s, militants revolted against the regimes in power throughout the Muslim world and exacerbated political conflicts everywhere. Their jihad, or “Holy Struggle,” aimed to establish a global Islamic state based solely on a strict interpretation of the Koran. Religious ideology proved a cohesive force, gathering followers ranging from students and the young urban poor to middle-class professionals.After an initial triumph with the Islamic revolution in Iran, the movement waged jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan, proclaiming for the first time a doctrine of extreme violence. By the end of the 1990s, the failure to seize political power elsewhere led to a split: movement moderates developed new concepts of “Muslim democracy” while extremists resorted to large-scale terrorist attacks around the world.Jihad is the first extensive, in-depth attempt to follow the history and geography of this disturbing political-religious phenomenon. Fluent in Arabic, Gilles Kepel has traveled throughout the Muslim world gathering documents, interviews, and archival materials inaccessible to most scholars, in order to give us a comprehensive understanding of the scope of Islamist movements, their past, and their present. As we confront the threat of terrorism to our lives and liberties, Kepel helps us make sense of the ominous reality of jihad today.

Gilles Kepel’s landmark book…provides an in-depth history and compelling overview of the emergence of Islamist political movements in the late 20th century., An early and most perceptive student of [Islamism] was Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist who has traveled widely through the Muslim world and has written about fundamentalism in both the East and the West. He is also the best-known commentator on Islamic affairs on French television, and he has advised international leaders at the Davos conferences. In short, Kepel is not only a leading scholar but also a man of the world… [Jihad] is probably the best introduction to Islamism currently available., Islam’s radical politicalization had peaked long before September 11th…[Kepel] argues provocatively in a landmark book. So devastating and unexpected was the September 11th attack on America that many people concluded that Islamic extremism had become a threat of monstrous and mushrooming proportions. That idea is deftly countered in this brilliant and provocative book by a leading French specialist on modern Islam. Gilles Kepel argues that the attack can only be understood in the light of the rise and fall of political Islam, or Islamism as he calls it, over the past quarter-century., The French scholar Gilles Kepel, who documents the failure of political Islam in [this] excellent book…makes a comparison to communism. It was in the 1960s, after communism had lost any possible appeal to ordinary people—after the revelations about Stalin’s brutality, after the invasion of Hungary, as its economic model was decaying—that communist radicals turned to terror. They became members of the Red Brigades, the Stern Gang, the Naxalites, the Shining Path. Having given up on winning the hearts of people, they hoped that violence would intimidate people into fearing them. That is where radical political Islam is today., In Jihad Gilles Kepel offers a masterly display of scholarship that describes how a radical idea spread through large segments of the Islamic world in the 1970s and 1980s… Mr. Kepel leads us on a breathtaking excursion. He trails the Islamist movements that have traversed Europe in recent years, founding radical communities in France, Britain, Germany and Belgium.

Gilles Kepel is Professor and Chair of Middle East Studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.