Whither Political Islam?

The effect was to be momentous. As Kepel points out, after Afghanistan in the 1980s, the jihad went global. The move was not just an expansion in scale; it was also a critical shift in strategy and tactics. Consider, for example, the seminal work by the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man: Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, the most politically grounded and comprehensive manifesto on global jihad. Its text is not yet available in English, but Kepel has translated important sections of it. Zawahiri begins with a call to shift the jihad's target from the "nearby enemy" to the "faraway enemy." To succeed, he says, the jihad needs a new leadership that is sufficiently "scientific, confrontational, [and] rational" to rethink relations between "the elite" and "the masses" and to wield inspirational slogans. (He finds that there is no cause more mobilizing than Palestine, which is "a rallying point for all Arabs, whether or not they are believers.") To those who are ambivalent about the use of political terrorism, Zawahiri explains that it is legitimate to strike Western populations, not just their governments and institutions, because they "only know the language of self-interest, backed by brute military force." "In consequence," he adds, "if we want to hold a dialogue with them and cause them to become aware of our rights, we must speak to them in the language they understand." Zawahiri defends suicide attacks as "the most efficient means of inflicting losses on adversaries and the least costly, in human terms, for the mujahedeen."

The global jihad's radically different goals could warrant only radically different methods and spawn radically different organizations. So instead of seeking out recruits through patient face-to-face encounters as the Afghan jihadists did in the 1980s, the leadership of the global jihad reversed the approach: tapping the potential of the Internet and the global media, it arranged for recruits to come find it. Predictably, the strategy has produced an organization that defies conventional understandings. Al Qaeda, a "terrorist NGO," or nongovernmental organization, is not, Kepel explains, "a nation with real estate to be occupied, military hardware to be destroyed, and a regime to be overthrown." As a result, Washington has ended up reifying the group--to little effect. According to Kepel, with its "Internet websites, satellite television links, clandestine financial transfers, international air travel, and a proliferation of activists ranging from the suburbs of Jersey City to the rice paddies of Indonesia," al Qaeda is resolutely modern and innovative. Unlike culturalists who portray bin Laden and his associates as linear descendants of an esoteric Saudi Wahhabism--or as premoderns with access to contemporary technology--Kepel understands them as hybrid products of multiple intellectual traditions. That insight is the great virtue of his book.

MISSED METAPHORS

Yet even Kepel's work is not entirely free of culture talk. He tends to associate "reason" with "the West" and "metaphysics" with Islamic homelands. Of the September 11 suicide bombers, he says, "These militants, educated in the West, must have [had] the discipline, intelligence and training to carry out complex operations" and "[been] able to shift back and forth between the rational mindset they had cultivated during their studies of engineering, urban planning, medicine, or administration and an alternate mindset that infused suicide attacks with metaphysical meaning and value." In search of this alternate mindset, he scans "Mohammed Atta's testament," where he finds evidence of "fanatical faith" in the promise of "gardens of paradise" and of houris--the virgins with which the martyrs will sleep, Kepel explains--"wearing their finest clothes."

Here Kepel's logic fails. Roy wonders, quite rightly, how the promise of houris in heaven could motivate female suicide bombers. More to the point, Kepel need not have looked so deep into a martyr's heart to find a contemporary example of how interest and ideology can mix: neoconservatives in the West are as apt an illustration. Kepel does have an inkling that the neoconservatives are a twin of al Qaeda--both came out of the Cold War on the winning side--and he devotes an entire chapter to them. But his occasional reliance on culturalist assumptions blind him to important parallels between the two.

The neoconservatives, Kepel rightly notes, were convinced that the Oslo accords were a trap; some even thought that the entire "[Middle East] peace process posed a potentially fatal risk to the Jewish state." Their alternative to negotiation was to redraw the map of the entire region through occupation, assuming, in a simple-minded analogy with Eastern Europe, that if they blew up the government apparatus of rogue states, the newly liberated peoples would embrace their occupation with gratitude. But Kepel misses the implications of his own observation, largely because he presumes a linear development from U.S. conservatives to neoconservatives that prevents him from understanding what distinguishes the two groups. Is it not precisely the potent mix of cold-blooded interest and hot-blooded ideology that distinguishes neoconservatives who link George W. Bush to Reagan from the conservatives who drove foreign policy under George H.W. Bush?