Jihad

"Kepel is one of the best-known French experts on Islamic militancy. And the French, for a variety of reasons, have produced much of the best analysis of Islamic militancy over the years, pre- and post-9/11. It is partly due to their own history and partly due to their interest in social sciences. It is also partly due to government investment very early on. Kepel’s book is a brilliant overview, both broad-brushed and detailed, of the last two or three decades of Islamic militancy and its antecedents. It came out just before 9/11 and had to be updated, but its thesis stands the test of time. That thesis is that the radical violence in Islamic militancy is in large part a response to the failure of political Islamist activism. Partly the frustration, but what Kepel does is to show the various ideologies that have been dominant in the Middle East and much of the Islamic world. First of all he looks at anti-colonialist nationalist agitations, often containing some religious element, in the first half of the 20th century, followed by two or three decades of often socialist or nationalist secular ideologies, followed by a surge of Islamist ideologies in the 1980s. And he looks at how all of these successive projects have failed to solve the very deep problems in those societies. Yes, he focuses in part on the two elements that he sees within radical militant groups. There are the poor, if you like, the lower working class and – and this is where I think he is brilliant – the lower middle class that have aspirations. These latter are often the first generation that have been educated and often the first generation that are living in cities. And he shows how their views and their values are often drivers of activism of all sorts, but particularly, recently, of militancy. In part, it is a reaction to social change which sees new groups contesting the position of old elites."

"Gilles Kepel is another brilliant French academic who again demonstrates the excellent sociological work of the French in this area. The idea behind this book was to explain where and how the ideas of Jihad originated. Kepel deals with a shorter sweep of history than Roy but gives an excellent overview of the movements that created political Islam. He is particularly interesting from late 1970s onwards when the Iranian revolution brought its own version of Shiite political Islam into public consciousness and accelerated other political Islamic movements elsewhere. Increasingly, since the 1950s, middle-class Arabs, from Egypt and Syria to the Gulf and North Africa, had sought a return to a more conservative form of Islam in which religion would play a more important role in society. In the 1980s and 90s, a breakaway fringe of hardcore ideological political Islamists, stirred up by the Iranian revolution, became much more activist, opting for violence in certain cases. But, in reality, this ended up alienating vast numbers of social political Islamists with their desire for a return to traditional values. Kepel actually suggests that the 9/11 attack on the twin towers can be seen almost as the end of the true ‘political’ movement in Islam. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For me, Roy and Kepel are so useful precisely because they talk sociology and history rather than religion or values."