Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam

472 Pages·2009·83.636 MB·English

by  Gilles Kepel

Sausalito
Public
Library
GILLES KEPEL
$29.95
As we confront the threat of terrorism to our
lives and liberties, Professor Gilles Kepel helps
us make sense of the ominous reality of jihad
today.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Islamist militants
revolted against the regimes in power through¬
out the Muslim world and exacerbated political
conflicts everywhere. Their jihad, or “holy war,”
aimed to establish a global Islamic state based
solely on a strict interpretation of the Koran.
Religious ideology proved a cohesive force, gath¬
ering followers from students and the young
urban poor to middle-class professionals.
After an initial triumph with the Islamic Revo¬
lution in Iran, the movement waged jihad
against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, pro¬
claiming a doctrine of extreme violence for the
first time. By the end of the 1990s, the failure
to seize political power elsewhere led to a split
in the movement: moderates developed new
concepts of “Muslim democracy’ while extrem¬
ists resorted to large-scale terrorist attacks
around the world.
Jihad is the first extensive, in-depth attempt
to follow the history and geography of this
disturbing political-religious phenomenon.
Fluent in Arabic, Kepel has traveled through¬
out the Muslim world, gathering documents,
interviews, and archival materials inaccessible
to most scholars, in order to give us a com¬
prehensive understanding of the scope of
Islamist political movements, their past and
their present.
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Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/jihad00gill_0
JIHAD

GILLES KEPEL
JIHAD
THE TRAIL
OF POLITICAL
ISLAM
Translated by Anthony F. Roberts
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2002
Sausalito Public Library
Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Jihad: Expansion et Declin de Vlslamisme
©Editions Gallimard, 2000
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress
0-674-00877-4
In memory of Michel cTHermies
master
friend