Away from Chaos Kepel, Gilles; Randolph, Henry
05/2020
eBook
The Middle East is one of the world's most volatile regions. In recent years, from the optimism and then crushing disappointment of the Arab uprisings through the rise and fall of the Islamic State, ...it has presented key international security challenges. With the resilient jihadi terror threat, large-scale migration due to warfare and climate change, and fierce competition for control over oil, it promises to continue to be a powder keg. What ignited this instability? Away from Chaos is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. Gilles Kepel, called "France's most famous scholar of Islam" by the New York Times, offers a clear and persuasive narrative of the long-term causes of tension while seamlessly incorporating on-the-ground observations and personal experiences from the people who lived through them. From the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war of 1973 to the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Away from Chaos weaves together the various threads that run through Middle East politics and ties them to their implications on the global stage. With keen insight stemming from decades of experience in the region, Kepel puts these chaotic decades in perspective and illuminates their underlying dynamics. He also considers the prospects of emerging from this long-lasting turmoil and for the people of the Middle East and the world to achieve a more stable future.
Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West. This book sounds the alarm to the ...West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt-neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam.
Since 2001, two dominant worldviews have clashed in the global arena: a neoconservative nightmare of an insidious Islamic terrorist threat to civilized life, and a jihadist myth of martyrdom through ...the slaughter of infidels. Across the airwaves and on the ground, an ill-defined and uncontrollable war has raged between these two opposing scenarios. Deadly images and threats—from the televised beheading of Western hostages to graphic pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, from the destruction wrought by suicide bombers in London and Madrid to civilian deaths at the hands of American occupation forces in Iraq—have polarized populations on both sides of this divide.Yet, as the noted Middle East scholar and commentator Gilles Kepel demonstrates, President Bush's War on Terror masks a complex political agenda in the Middle East—enforcing democracy, accessing Iraqi oil, securing Israel, and seeking regime change in Iran. Osama bin Laden's call for martyrs to rise up against the apostate and hasten the dawn of a universal Islamic state papers over a fractured, fragmented Islamic world that is waging war against itself. Beyond Terror and Martyrdom sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt—neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam. Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West, one for which Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, may be the proving ground.
Conclusion Kepel, Gilles
Away from Chaos,
05/2020
Book Chapter
FOR THE PAST FORTY YEARS, the Mediterranean and the Middle East have undergone immense upheavals. Throughout the twenty-first century, this region has been a central element in the convulsions ...accompanying the birth of a new world order. Unceasing, inflamed belligerence intersects with major international tensions and conflicts whose sequence and articulation the preceding pages have attempted to retrace.
In the aftermath of the October War of 1973, the emphasis shifted from the Israeli-Arab confrontation, which had been its organizing structure, to a dynamic of exploding oil prices feeding the parallel rise of political Islamism. It fragmented during the pivotal year
Introduction Kepel, Gilles
Away from Chaos,
05/2020
Book Chapter
FOUR DECADES BEFORE writing this book, I spent the year 1977–1978 in Syria on an Arab language scholarship at the French Institute in Damascus. For budding Arabists, it was the “Open sesame” that ...would admit us to the cave hiding the grammatical and phonetic secrets of the region that we loved. Careers in those days rarely started without a sojourn in Shām, as we called it among ourselves. This was the Semitic term both for the Levant and its traditional capital in the local dialect. In the orientation of Muslim geography, in which one faces Mecca from the west,
Completed in 2005, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic
Logic of Suicide Terrorism is based on extensive research conducted
by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. This book belongs to what ...one
might call the quantitative school of terrorism studies, as it relies
mainly on data gathered on suicide attacks and their perpetrators over the
last two decades. Its author takes issue with the conclusions of those who
stress the importance of the doctrine of Islam in the shaping of the
suicide terror phenomenon. Such a debate is part and parcel of a wider
dispute within U.S. academia, boosted by 9/11 and its Iraqi aftermath,
though it was already rooted in the “Orientalism” battle back
in the 1980s. However, it also touches on an ongoing conflict between
scholarship and partisanship: Should academics take sides and advocate
specific policies, at the risk of submitting their scholarly credentials
to the political goals they champion, or should they shun away from
politics, at the risk of remaining clad in their ivory tower while social
debates rage, uninfluenced by their expertise? The issue of terrorism is
crucial to that matter.Gilles Kepel is
professor and chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, Sciences Po,
Paris.
A line in the sand Kepel, Gilles
RSA journal,
12/2008, Letnik:
154, Številka:
5536
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Suggests that Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential election has suddenly changed the two narratives that dominated the first years of the 21st century: George W. Bush's "global war on ...terror" and Osama bin Laden's jihad through martyrdom. The catastrophic failure of both these strategies leaves open the question of what policies the Obama team will implement in the Middle East. Following the Iranian presidential election in the summer of 2009, new teams in Tehran may have to answer to offers made by Europe and the new US administration. Another solution for the present crisis will certainly come from major changes in the sociology of Muslims that are taking place and setting new standards among Muslim populations in Europe. A new generation of people of Muslim descent in tune with the daily challenges of a modern democratic society is emerging. (Quotes from original text)
