JIHAD
The Trail of Political Islam
Gilles Kepel, translated by Anthony Roberts
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002
416 pp., $29.95

French scholar Gilles Kepel argues that Islamist terrorism signals the decline of fundamentalist extremism.


hortly after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush made a thoughtful, measured speech, urging the American people not to confuse Islam and Muslims with a few mass murderers and terrorists. He said that as one of the world's great religions, Islam had over one billion adherents who were as horrified by what had happened as the rest of humanity. The president's example was followed by that of other world leaders; they were effective in averting spontaneous popular reaction against Muslim minorities in the West.
        Alas, they did not stop self-appointed "experts" from churning out an avalanche of instant books on Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, and Islamic terrorism, offering their analyses of a religion they clearly know nothing about. The image these authors present of the Islamic world is absurdly skewed when it is not caricatural, designed to confirm prejudice against the Muslim "Other" instead of dispelling it. As a result Islamophobia has increased, to the detriment of devout, law-abiding Muslims in the West.
        Jihad, Gilles Kepel's magisterial and highly readable study of the rise and decline of Islamic fundamentalism--or "Islamism" as it is commonly called--is a timely corrective. A professor at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris, director of research at the Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, and visiting professor at Columbia and New York Universities, Kepel is an eminent historian and a world-renowned analyst of the Middle East. His knowledge of Arabic and the Muslim world is vast, his erudition rare. His dispassionate lucidity is a welcome respite from the partisanship and misunderstanding that mar so much writing on the subject.
        Kepel's engagement with the Muslim world goes back to his first book, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh. Based on his doctoral thesis and published in the early 1980s, it focused on the Islamist movements during the Anwar Sadat era. It was followed by A l'Ouest d'Allah (To the West of Allah), in which he described the expansion of Islamism in the West, notably among the young, second-generation ÄmigrÄs in French cities. This book was followed by his history of political Islam, Jihad, which assesses the record of Islamist movements throughout the Islamic world, from their "utopian" origin to their dominance in countries such as Iran and Afghanistan.
        Jihad was published in the original French two years ago. Since then September 11 has changed the world, and Kepel has revised his text and written a new introduction for the English version, taking into account the event and its seismic repercussions. The aim of the attackers, Kepel states, was twofold: to terrorize America and to mobilize the support of Muslims for their jihad, or holy war, against the United States. Instead, Muslim countries joined in the universal revulsion against the infamy of the massacre. Even in Iran, people poured into the streets and women held candlelight vigils in sympathy with America. Kepel states that his purpose in this book "is to shed light on the effect of September 11th, by placing these recent events within a historical perspective that covers the unfolding of the Islamist movement over the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century." His comprehensive book would be an excellent place to begin for anyone wishing to understand the Islamist phenomenon.
        Kepel's thesis is that "for all its apparent political successes in the 1970s and 1980s, by the end of the twentieth century the Islamist movement had signally failed to retain political power in the Muslim world, in spite of the hopes of supporters and the forebodings of enemies." The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he argues, is the expression of its terminal decline: "The waning of the movement's capacity for political mobilization explains why such spectacular and devastating new forms of terrors have now been visited on the American homeland." Thus, to Kepel, September 11 is the last gasp of a dying beast.

The rise of Islamism

he rise of Islamism in the last decades of the twentieth century was as spectacular as it was unforeseen. The decline of religion in Islamic societies had begun in the nineteenth century as a result of secular political movements for modernization. At a time when the decline seemed irrevocable, the sudden emergence of groups "swearing by the Koran alone, calling for Jihad, and drawing their activists from the world's great cities" was bewildering.
        Initially the leftist intellectuals considered Islamism merely a species of religious fascism, while for the liberals the Islamists were reactionary fanatics harking back to the Middle Ages. As the movement expanded, the ideologues of Left and Right changed their tunes: "Marxist thinkers of every stripe, casting about for mass support" began to credit Islamist activists with "socialist virtues," while the conservatives approved of their preaching of "moral order and obedience to God." Islamism appeared as "perhaps the outline of an Islamic civilization within the multicultural world of the coming century." Islamism replaced the nationalism of the previous generations who had fought colonialism and won.
        Kepel points out that Islamists were a cluster of varied social groups, with different agendas, and that if they coalesced they could seize power. The two core social groups were the "urban poor" and the "pious middle classes." The first consisted mainly of the young immigrants born after the wars of independence, with no memory

of colonialism, who unlike their parents were literate and had social expectations that were not met. The second were the majority of the middle classes, for whom Islam had a deeper resonance than the Western ideologies of the undemocratic, often corrupt, and incompetent political elites that governed them. Both groups had huge feelings of social frustration and impotence, and "the latter used the former to seize power," as happened in Iran in 1979.
        According to Kepel, the three most influential ideologues of Islamism were Sayyid Qutb, a leader of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt (who was imprisoned by Nasser and executed in 1966); the Pakistani thinker Maulana Maududi; and the Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. Only Khomeini succeeded in seizing power, partly due to social and historical circumstances, and partly because he was an astute politician. He broadened his constituency to include the secular middle classes, whom the shah had alienated, as well as the bazaar merchants. He presented a moderate, inclusive image and avoided specific programs.
        In general the Islamist discourse was ambiguous: strong on religious, moral, and political ideas but vague on social plans. The main argument was that all the problems of Muslim societies stemmed from the fact that they were not truly Islamic. Khomeini called the state of the world jaheliyyah (the age of ignorance/darkness, before the advent of Islam). Western ideologies--nationalism, Marxism, socialism--had resulted in poverty and tyranny; salvation would come through a return to the golden age of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad's seventh-century Medina polity. He opposed the mostazafin (the weak, the oppressed) to the motakabberins (the arrogant rulers) and urged the former to rise up against the latter.
        Khomeini's message resounded throughout the Islamic world. It found support among the Western-educated Marxists, "projecting the messianic expectations of Communists and Third World peoples onto revolutionary Shiism." Two crucial events further contributed to the spread of the movement: the death of Gamal Nasser in 1970, bringing an end to the Arab nationalism he embodied, and Khomeini's success in toppling the shah and establishing an Islamic republic in 1979.

The spread of Islamism

he Islamist discourse found an echo among sections of the intelligentsia in other Arab countries, who saw it as a counterweight to communism and at first tolerated it. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was among them, not knowing that the Islamists would end up assassinating him. Some Western intellectuals (among them French philosopher Michel Foucault and the poet Jean Genet) also backed Khomeini, believing that he would be a Gandhi figure who would retire to his aerie in Qom and be a spiritual guide. They were in for a rude awakening. Upon gaining power Ayatollah Khomeini established a theocracy, suppressed all opposition, brought back the hijab (covering) for women, and did not fulfill promises of liberation and equity. He changed the country's democratic constitution--which the shah had flouted, thereby causing his own downfall--to give the clerics absolute power. To be fair, the eight-year war with Iraq, instigated by the evil Saddam Hussein, did not help.
        If Islamism succeeded in seizing power by revolution in Iran, elsewhere its adherents hoped to succeed by democratic means. In Pakistan, Maulana Maududi's project was democratic. In Algeria, the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Front of Salvation) was certain to win the 1992 elections, which were canceled to prevent such an outcome. As

a result the group fragmented into factions; the appalling atrocities and massacres of innocent populations by the splinter group Group Islamique ArmÄ alienated the pious middle classes, driving them to negotiate with the government for democracy and reform. In Egypt, the radical group that broke away from the Muslim Brotherhood has been responsible for campaigns of violence and random murders. The 1997 massacre of tourists in Luxor was its last major terrorist act.
        In 1974, the price of oil skyrocketed, and Saudi Arabia used some of its unprecedented wealth to acquire political clout, spreading Wahhabism--its own brand of Islamic fundamentalism--through mosques and Islamic schools. (It is worth remembering that the majority of the September 11 highjackers were Saudis, as are Osama bin Laden and many connected to al Qaeda. Also noteworthy is the Saudi influence among the Taliban.) Wahhabism is a small, formalist sect, born in Egypt in the nineteenth century, opposed to Sufism and Shiism and all other spiritual doctrines of Islam. When Saudi Arabia was created after World War I, ibn Saud, the governor of Hijaz, became the absolute ruler of the new country. Saud was a Wahhabi and declared Wahhabism the official religion. He established the strictest interpretation of Sharia law, calling for the oppression of women and punishments such as hand cutting and beheading. In the Gulf states, Kepel tells us, Islamism thrives among the dislocated young, whose livelihood depends on a single, diminishing source: petroleum. Should these Islamists succeed in toppling the present pro-Western regimes, a period of instability and strife might spread through the whole region.

True roots of Islamism

t is important to note, as Kepel's remarkable survey makes clear, that Islamic fundamentalism is not homegrown, that it was born from the encounter of Muslim intellectuals with Western doctrines. One of Khomeini's chief ideologists, Ali Shariati, was influenced by Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, a bible of Third Worldism, and adapted Fanon's socialist ideas to his own Islamist doctrine. From Marx and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Sartre, Western thinkers have been the inspiration of Islamist ideologues of various hues. Thus the radical "Islamic" groups behind terrorist campaigns are more akin to the Red Brigade and the Baader-Meinhof gang than to anything connected with real Islam.
        Kepel concludes that the horrors committed by the Taliban and the political failure of radical Islam in Iran and elsewhere mean that "the Islamist movement will have much difficulty in reversing its trail of decline." In view of his intelligence and lucidity, it is to be hoped that such optimism is justified.
        Perhaps the last word should be left to Revelation: "Whoever kills a human being, shall be looked upon as though he had killed all mankind"--the Qur'an, chapter 5, verse 32.

Shusha Guppy is the author, most recently, of Three Journeys in the Levant (Starhaven, 2001). Born and raised in Iran, she studied in Paris and now lives in London. Guppy is the London editor of the Paris Review and contributes to publications on both sides of the Atlantic.