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The burden of Kepel’s song is that the Islamists scored
striking political successes in the 1970s and 1980s, including
the rout of the Soviets in Afghanistan and the conspicuous gains
of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian movement in the Israeli-held
territory. And not in the Muslim world alone, for Europe, the
heart of Christendom itself faced a burgeoning Islamist
"threat" with a sizeable chunk of the population
insisting on separateness and its own distinct ethnic identity.
The above notwithstanding, by the end of the twentieth century,
Kepel argues, the Islamist movement had "signally
failed" to retain political power in the Muslim world, and
this despite the "hopes" of its supporters and the
"forebodings" of its enemies.
The spectacular
and devastating new forms of terrorism such as the 11 September
strikes—and the more recent mindless bombing of Bali (early
October) with its tragic loss in human life and limb and the
latest outrage (November-end) in Kenya—are not an
"insignia" of triumph but a "waning" of
movement’s capacity for political mobilisation. In Kepel’ s
considered judgment, 9/11 was an attempt "to reverse a
process in decline" with its compulsive if shameless
paroxysm of destructive violence.
The major
objective of the book under review is to shed light on the
principal goals that Osama bin Laden and his close ally Mohammad
Omar have set by themselves. The 9/11 assaults were designed to
arouse emotional sympathy and enthusiasm among the Muslims and
galvanise them with an example of victory by violence. The
agenda of the US anti-terrorist coalition the assaults provoked
was just the opposite: to isolate and wipe out Osama’s
Al-Qaeda and its Afghan protectors while minimising civilian
losses. The terrorist vanguard’s cherished objective was to
mobilise the masses and thereby permanently alter the present
world order; replacing it by an Islamic state. Was it any whit
different from the communist goal of arousing the revolutionary
consciousness of toiling humanity and mobilise it through a
cycle of provocation, repression and solidarity? The
million-dollar question Kepel poses is whether the terrorist
strategy of bin Laden’s Islamist militants will come to the
same sorry end to which Stalin’s Russia did. His own tentative
conclusion, that in the wake of 9/11 the militants have
"lost" the game, that the event itself was the
cumulative result of the Islamist movement’s long expansion—and
decline—in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
The Director of
Research at the CNRS in Paris and Professor at the Institute for
Political
Studies at the
Sorbonne, Gilles Kepel is rated one of the world’s foremost
experts on West Asia and has authored a number of books,
including Muslim Extremism in Egypt, The Revenge of
God and Allah in the West. The present study,
translated from its original in French, is the end-product of
five years of intensive research and extensive travel in most
Muslim lands, including Algeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco,
Pakistan, Senegal and Sudan. Apart from copious notes, there is
a short but useful glossary and nine sketch maps showing Central
and West Asia as well as East and North West Africa, the Eastern
Mediterranean, Bosnia as well as Malaysia and Indonesia, lands
dominated by Islam. Sadly, there is no bibliographic note.
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unexpectedly, the upshot of the 9/11 strikes against the twin towers
of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington
has been a spate of books on Islamic fundamentalism. And its most
heinous manifestations, the now nearly-defunct Taliban of the
one-eyed Mullah Mohammad Omar and the yet alive, and kicking,
Al-Qaeda network of the Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden. A few
have been noticed in these columns, Abdul Rashid’s Taliban
and Peter Bergen’s Holy War Inc; Gilles Kepel’s
impressive tome under review belongs to the same genre and merits
attention.
