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The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West, Gilles Kepel, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 327 pp., $23.95 cloth.
Relations between Islam and the West have never been straightforward; just how complicated they are is brought out in Gilles Kepel's book. It is a complex, nuanced, and illuminating analysis and description of the ideological currents and historical events that have created the present-day "war for Muslim minds," or, in the original French title, the "war at the heart of Islam." The latter title conveys more of the book's thrust, as much of it is about the struggle within various strands of Islam to deal with the modern world and to grapple with the presence of the United States in Islam's birthplace. Some of its themes will already be familiar: the rise of neoconservatism and its impact on U.S. foreign policy; the end of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and its role in Islamic terrorist doctrine; the United States' dependence on Saudi oil; and al-Qaeda's use of terrorism to convert Muslims to its cause. But it is the weaving together of these strands, and the incorporation of less-well-known others, into a coherent, logical, and thorough analysis that distinguishes the book.
Kepel juxtaposes al-Qaeda's ideology with that of the neoconservatives. His focus is on the real-world consequences of the collision of these two worldviews, which, while evidently in opposition to each other, are in agreement that the current regimes in the Middle East must go, and that the use of force is a legitimate means to achieving that end. The ideologies of both al-Qaeda and the neoconservatives have in common a gross exaggeration of the meaning of certain recent events: Ayman al-Zawahiri, alQaeda's main theoretician and ideologue, diagnosed the U.S. invasion of Iraq as "a sort of remake of the devastation the warring Tatars had caused seven centuries earlier" (p. 137), while the neoconservatives saw it as a "war for democracy"-a part of their grand strategy for remaking the Middle East and the world at large. Neither actor was or is capable of seeing the other clearly, their views being clouded by particularly thick ideological distortions.
What is striking about Kepel's work is that he does not stop there; instead, he unpacks the development...