Islam’s political mosaic & the world: “The War for Muslim Minds”

This review first appeared on WhirledView.

Warning. This is a rave review. The book is Gilles Kepel’s “The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West” and it was published in English translation earlier this fall.

Kepel is first and foremost a specialist in Islam and politics. And, by the way, he is French. A month or so ago he appeared on the U.S. talk show circuit promoting this book—his latest. It is just under 300 pages. It explains precisely why militant Islamists hate us, what their aims and goals are, how militant Islam is not a single, closely knit movement but rather far more fragmented—and in this sense much more dangerous now—than before the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq.

Throughout “War for the Muslim Minds,” Kepel places militant Islam in the context of Middle East politics, ideology, history, socio-demographics, and economics. He tells us, for instance, not only why 15 out of the 19 of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, but also shows that many of the 15 were from a single poverty-stricken tribe whose sons and daughters saw only bleakness ahead. In his first rate chapter entitled “Saudi Arabia: The Eye of the Storm,” Kepel describes how the fabulously oil-rich kingdom is governed—through increasingly untenable familial and religious relationships—and warns us of impending political disaster which could have tremendous worldwide repercussions.

Kepel also succinctly demonstrates how 9/11 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly relate—the first time I remember seeing this argument made so successfully, if at all. He suggests that the Bush Administration’s pro-Sharon stance and hence the U.S. refusal to restart the negotiations from where Clinton left off gave Osama Bin Laden a pretext for his anti-American terrorist activities that resonated throughout the disaffected Muslim world—from Hamburg to Mindanao—never there before. And Kepel explains why.

The chapter, “The Neoconservative Revolution,” provides an excellent description of the backgrounds and ideology of the small band of now right-wing—once left-wing—American intellectuals who have a hammerlock on the Bush Administration’s hence U.S. foreign policy. Kepel suggests that although the neocons had astutely identified many of the political problems bedeviling the Middle East, their recipe for resolution has created an unmitigated disaster that plays directly into Bin Laden and other militant Islamists’ war against America—and the rest of the West.

Kepel concludes with “The Battle for Europe,” a masterful look at Islam in Europe. The tenuous relationship between the two—Europe’s ever growing Muslim population, and the venerable continent itself—is just one more piece of the complicated mosaic of Islam, its politics and the world that may well be the most crucial political movement of our times. I won’t go into more details, but its well worth curling up around this thoughtful and provocative book to the finish.

Chair of Middle East studies and a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, Kepel’s first U.S. published book “Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam” appeared in 2002. “Jihad” is now in its second printing in paperback. My guess: “The War for Muslim Minds” will be even more successful. Policy makers and students alike take note.

Originally posted on WhirledView by Patricia Kushlis on Saturday, 18 December 2004