Political Islam is all the rage. But is the rage all of political Islam? Since bursting into Western consciousness with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the cluster of movements and figures of Islamism and political Islam have been variously an inspiration and a terror-and regularly both to many-a political football in sundry regional conflicts, a challenge to their governments, a vexation to Western policymakers, and last and least, a boon to academics. The Islamists' potential for wreaking massive havoc and suffering well beyond their accustomed frontiers was made clear to all, or should have been, by the events of September 11, 2001.

One may discern several streams in the rivers of ink flowing around political Islam: the argument that political Islam, and its terrorism in particular, represent a backlash against globalization, an argument put together most intelligently and presciently in Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld and burlesqued today by the pseudo-analyses of Noam Chomsky; the clash of civilizations thesis, famously, or infamously, associated with Samuel Huntington; those who see Islamist organizations as the stirrings of a nascent civil society akin to that which developed in Central and Eastern Europe under the Soviets; those, chief among them Bernard Lewis and his students, who see Islamists as dangerous and unreformable authoritarians; students of comparative religion, among them many contributors to the University of Chicago's outstanding multi-volume Fundamentalisms Project, understandably fascinated by the ironies and complexities of thoroughgoingly modern movements claiming the mantle of tradition; and of course, the now-hegemonic postmodern academic discourse founded by Edward Said's Orientalism, perhaps best understood as an academic Gnostic eschatology, which, like other Gnostic messianisms, easily becomes an apologetics of violence.

The life or death significance of these discussions has never been clearer to the United States and its allies since September 11. And so Gilles Kepel's powerful study of political Islam is all the more welcome. A professor of Middle East Studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, Kepel's synthesis of sociological understanding, historical explanation, and journalistic immediacy recalls that of Raymond Aron, along with the latter's lucid distinctions between pseudo-democratic progressive rhetoric, and the real thing. Though not without its flaws, his is likely the single most valuable and helpful volume on political Islam today, made all the more so by his ability to make adroit use of sociological analysis and yet elude the thrall of theory.

His story begins with the various nationalist and postcolonial regimes that emerged in the postwar years and their inability to fashion coherent national identities or viable economies. Scarcely legitimate in the eyes of their people, yet for the most part stubbornly impervious to change, these regimes have confounded conventional notions, which, Kepel writes: "have tended to equate . . . modernization with secularization. But nowhere in the Muslim world of the late 1960s did religion vanish from popular culture, social life or day-to-day politics. Islam was merely handled in different ways by different regimes, and was combined with nationalism in ways that varied according to the social class of those who had seized power at the moment of independence."

Since the end of the nineteenth century, various Muslim intellectuals and organizations, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood, had attempted to articulate an alternative to Western-style modernity, through a reassertion of a reinvigorated Islam as the guiding principle of a new social order. These ideas gained renewed attraction as the regimes stagnated. Thus, as Kepel says in a passage worth quoting at length:


Taking in hand this illuminating focus on the interactions of young urban poor, devout middle class, and Islamist intelligentsia in their ongoing struggles with failed nationalist regimes, Kepel walks through a close study of political Islam's fortunes throughout the Muslim world: in Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Turkey, as well as Islamist politics in Western Europe. Merely listing these countries highlights the problem with simply equating Muslim with Arab; the Muslim world has been well characterized by Bassam Tibi as "civilizational unity in cultural diversity."

(Though comprehensive, this survey is not exhaustive; those wishing to learn more about the Islamic politics of Central Asia will benefit from the works of Ahmed Rashid, while Yo'av Karny's extraordinary Highlanders brings the people of the Caucasus memorably and hauntingly alive. Elsewhere, the secular totalitarians of Syria and Iraq have massacred and tortured whatever genuine Islamist critics they may once have had and, being what they are, have scarcely any internal politics of whatever kind to speak of.)

In looking at the past decades, Kepel sees a trajectory of rise and fall; as nationalist regimes became increasingly discredited, by their own failures at state-building and their disastrous defeat by Israel in 1967, Islamists, educated and socialized in a network of Saudi-funded mosques and madrasas expounding reactionary Wahhabism, bid for social and political primacy. Yet time after time, Islamists proved unable to take or maintain a hold on power, not only because of the resourcefulness and ruthlessness of their opponents, but due to the inherent instability of the social base upon which Islamism has tried to raise its dreams.
Islamism achieved its first and most dramatic victory in the Iranian revolution of 1979, which found, in the person of Ayatollah Khomeini, a charismatic leader who was able "to overcome the social divisions of (Islamism's) base and attract the whole society." This turned out to be less a synthesis than a conjurer's trick: "Khomeini allowed each group to invest the movement with its own particular political dreams, which were not dispelled until the purges began in the aftermath of victory." The Iranian revolution eventually fostered a hitherto absent element of Islamic politics, as over the course of the Iran-Iraq War, and its appalling losses, "[r]eligious energy was externalized, and its goal was to change the world . . . .The appalling butchery of the eight-year war against Iraq gave the younger generation of poor Iranians an incentive to return to the former tradition of martyrdom . . ."

This revitalized concept of martyrdom also made itself felt in the camps of fighters in Afghanistan, who developed a sense of themselves as the vanguard of an Islamic Internationale while defeating the Soviet Union. "The international brigade of jihad veterans, being outside the control of any state, was suddenly available to serve radical Islamist causes anywhere in the world. Since they were no longer bound by local political contingencies, they had no responsibilities to any social group either. . . . They became the free electrons of jihad, professional Islamists trained to fight and to train others to do likewise."

Through the 1990s, as the regimes showed striking resilience and the Islamists proved unable to effect sustainable social coalitions, they became increasingly radicalized and violent. "The radically different trajectories of the middle classes and the disinherited young became more and more painfully obvious-and as a result the former became vulnerable to attempts by established governments to win them over, while the latter drifted in the direction of violence and terrorism." Thus, Kepel argues, the ascendance of al-Qaeda represents, as the title of the prescient 1994 volume of Olivier Roy had it, the failure of political Islam. In the end, he writes, "[t]he recurrent violence of the decade was above all a reflection of the movement's structural weakness, not its growing strength."

Though the book was first published in France in 2000, Kepel writes in this post-September 11 American edition: "[T]he attack on the United States was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation and decline of the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength and irrepressible might . . . .This does not mean that we shall not see other outbursts of terrorism that claim the mantle of jihad. . . . But violence in itself, as we have seen . . . has proven to be a death trap for Islamists as a whole, precluding any capacity to hold and mobilize the range of constituencies they need to seize political power."

TURNING TO John Esposito's Unholy War after Kepel's powerful study, we find a much slimmer volume in every way. Esposito, professor at Georgetown and a leading figure in America's Middle Eastern Studies community, argued in several books through the 1990s that political Islam represented no threat to the West and was indeed a force for democratization in the Arab world. One might think that this leaves him with some explaining to do. Yet in this book he offers no regrets, but rather gamely offers in four brief chapters an introduction to political Islam for the layperson who comes de novo to the subject. Esposito's greatest talent, well on display here, has long been his ability to make deeply unfamiliar history and culture strikingly accessible; indeed, his analysis is so determinedly reasonable, so seemingly appealing in its wishing away of severe conflict, so seemingly well-informed, that it takes a moment to realize just how much is left out or glossed over in his narrative of political Islam.

He offers what we may call the New York Times version of political Islam, the reassuring story that a nervous liberal elite tells itself: that the anger of its enemies is the understandable response to a long history of victimization, for which it is itself to blame; that if only we properly understood these grievances we would see that our ostensible foes are speaking but another dialect of the political language we call our own; that the answer to these problems lies in the adjustment of our policies to make this all go away. The social work analogy is made explicit when he says that: "Just as among inner city youth in the United States, some of those young people lose all hope . . . for a small minority, suicide bombing seems a proud and powerful response." Why it is that most inner-city youth don't blow themselves up in shopping malls seems not to be a matter for analysis. Indeed, the only actors he describes are Islamists and the governments who repress them, omitting the urban poor and the merchants who so richly inform Kepel's analysis; and both scant the role of the secular Arab intelligentsia, movingly chronicled in Fouad Ajami's The Dream Palace of the Arabs, who have for the most part been so tragically incapable of creating meaningful cultural syntheses for their societies.

And what are the grievances at work? Of course, colonialism, and Esposito rightly observes that nearly all the postcolonial Muslim states carved out by Europe were-and are now-fragile from their births. But above all it is the existence of Israel that has prevented the Muslim world from successfully mastering the challenges of modernity. Rather than arguing this, he simply assumes throughout that the reader will understand why the creation of Israel is such an affront and understandable cause of rage and sorrow as to make healthy rapprochement with the West impossible. (Full disclosure: Esposito recently told the Times that a think tank where this reviewer once worked, cheerfully described by the paper as "having close relations with Israel," is "not primarily concerned with what is best for America." Unlike, say, his Palestinian funders at Georgetown.)

HIS ANIMUS toward Israel lead him to a number of what one can only hope are errors of haste: By way of explaining Osama bin Laden's appeal, he writes that "the Palestinians . . . have been living under Israeli military occupation in violation of UN Security Council resolutions for over 40 years," effectively conveying that pre-1967 Israel's existence is itself a violation; he discusses Israel's "crushing victory" and "seiz(ing)" of land in 1967 without mentioning that it was fighting a war of self-defense; astoundingly, he writes that "[t]he increased use of force under the Ariel Sharon government sparked the second intifada, which began in September 2000."-choosing not to remember that the then-prime minister was Ehud Barak, who was offering unprecedented diplomatic concessions at Camp David; he says that Hezbollah fought only until Israel's departure from Southern Lebanon, and is now a mainstream organization devoted to education and social services, an assertion belied by a scan of any morning's newspaper; and he refers to Shaykh Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, as a "pragmatist" for his willingness to participate in the Palestinian Authority, notwithstanding his forthrightly consistent refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist. Only "[a] small minority," Esposito writes, "continues to espouse violence and terrorism to liberate the whole of Palestine." And on and on. (And how much of this got past the editors at Oxford is its own kind of mystery.)

Now, no sensible person could deny that the creation and persistence of Israel has been a deeply traumatic event for the Arab world, nor that Israel has over the decades committed its generous share of errors and injustices, or even that the destruction of Israel might go a long way toward exorcising some of the angers coursing through the Arab and part of the Muslim world. But simply to accept that as a given, as does Esposito, and to see the existence of Israel as uniquely immoral and demoralizing, fails to explain why it is that Muslims and Arabs, of all the peoples in postcolonial settings, have found themselves unable to live with the idea of Israel or come to a peaceful resolution of their differences, or why their disagreements with U.S. policy should be so much more bitter than those of others around the world.

Although animus toward Israel drives much of Esposito's analysis, he also discusses another pervasively cited issue: "the dangers of Western economic hegemony and its side effects." And, he says, "[t]he Muslim world's dominance by the West and marginalization as a world power, which has challenged Islam's relevance to modern life, and its lack of control over the forces of development, have been daunting barriers to progress." Here, too, yes, the emerging global culture of our time and its driving individualism, not only in economics, but also in politics, culture, and religion is deeply unsettling. It is also very attractive, which is why people in Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union struggle not only to find a place for themselves in this new global milieu but to work through its emerging networks and institutions toward a more supple shape of globalization. Again, why the Muslim and Arab worlds should be uniquely, and violently, resistant to globalization, if indeed they are, is left unexplained by Esposito.

Esposito calls for greater cross-cultural dialogue and encouragement of genuinely creative and thoughtful Muslim reformers of today, and who can argue with that? But in the end, his insistence that Muslims are endlessly put upon victims who must endlessly be understood by Western elites, and his unwillingness forthrightly to acknowledge the ills besetting Muslim societies are deeply patronizing. "Democracy," he writes, "is an integral part of modern Islamic political thought and practice, accepted in many Muslim countries as a litmus test by which the openness of government and the relevance of Islamic groups or other political parties are certified." What, in the light of all we have seen in the past years, can this possibly mean, especially when nearly all of today's most creative Muslim thinkers find that they can thrive only in non-Arab states? (Indeed the Muslim reformers he himself discusses-Anwar Ibrahim, Mohammad Khatami and Abdurrahman Wahid-are respectively Malaysian, Iranian, and Indonesian.) The only concrete policy prescription to emerge from Esposito's analysis is, of course, for the United States to distance itself from Israel.

Painful and complicated though it may be, one can love a language, religion and culture, deeply empathize with its history, grieve for its wounds and losses, and still be willing to fight the evils perpetrated in its name. The civilization created by Islam is indeed a great wonder of the world; yet in a sense, that is nearly beside the point as we confront terror today. Kepel is correct that the political Islam of the past decades has proved itself incapable of providing a workable future. "Islam, he writes, "like any other religion, is a way of life, one that is given its shape and form by Muslim men and women. . . .Today, as Muslim societies emerge from the Islamist era, it is through openness to the world and to democracy that they will construct their future. There is no longer any real alternative." Kepel's projection of democracy in the Arab world may be wishful; yet the task facing Western governments is-as for years it has properly been, if regularly forgotten-firm resistance to extremism, the promotion of sustainable, responsive, and pacific governance in ongoing dialogue with cultures and civilizations around the world; and a renewal of our own commitment to liberal democracy. The horrors that flash on the news as I write this review underscore just how urgent a task that is.

Yehudah Mirsky served in the U.S. State Department's human rights bureau during the Clinton administration and is now a Stroock Fellow in Religion at Harvard.

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