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Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, by Fawaz A. Gerges
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Renowned Middle Eastern expert Fawaz A. Gerges takes us into the mind-set of the jihadi—or holy warrior—that lies behind so many headlines yet remains nearly impenetrable to us. Using his firsthand knowledge of the "Arab street," he brings to life the stories of Kamal al-Said Habib, a founder of the Jihadist Movement, as well as dozens of other Islamic fundamentalists, as they struggle with the battle being waged for the soul of Islam.
Journey of the Jihadist puts a human face to events of the last thirty years—from the civil war in Lebanon to the war in Iraq to the conflict in Lebanon today. This important work, now with a new afterword addressing the rise of Hezbollah, will join the ranks of those by Thomas L. Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, and Bernard Lewis.
- Sales Rank: #525414 in Books
- Published on: 2007-03-05
- Released on: 2007-03-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .86" w x 5.25" l, .71 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In September 2005, Gerges, an academic turned news commentator, published a rare and thoughtful piece of scholarship, The Far Enemy, that sought to map the different views within militant Islam's explosive underworld. Gerges argued nimbly, drawing upon numerous primary sources and firsthand interviews. After traveling across the Middle East and meeting with former jihadists, he learned that Islamic militants often disagreed on critical issues (including whether to attack the United States) and that their movement was far more variegated than Washington's official portrayal suggests. Published less than a year later, this new volume reads like a quicky follow-up. It covers similar ground, draws upon similar sources and is considerably more limited in its scholarly aspirations—although not, perhaps, in its commercial ones. Yet the follow-up may be the better book. Gerges has distilled his ideas to their core and done away with some of The Far Enemy's repetitions. The book's structure is also improved. It's now built around a series of profiles that give focus to each chapter and shed light on how key personalities within the jihadist vanguard see the world. Gerges even devotes time to his own upbringing in war-torn Lebanon, and although the veers into his personal story are not always relevant, they are fascinating in their own right, adding both intimacy and depth to this valuable book. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In America before 9/11, understanding violent Islamic radicalism was a prime concern mostly of Middle Eastern-studies academics. For that we can be grateful, at least when those academics write as unstuffily and accessibly as Gerges. A Greek Orthodox Lebanese Arab, Gerges has won the trust of some very prominent, formerly violent jihadists, whose personalities and words he uses to limn radical Islam with an intimacy other good explanatory works on violent Islam lack. His principal informants are Kamal al-Said Habib, cofounder of the largest jihadist organization, and, through interviews he didn't conduct, Osama bin Laden's former bodyguard, Abu-Jandal. Both have forsaken terrorism, though not violence. They exemplify a split in jihadism over whether to unite Muslim-majority nations under Islamic law or to radically expand Islam by destroying its enemies throughout the world (bin Laden's strategy). The split rather recalls that between Stalinists (advocating socialism in one country first) and Trotskyites (fomenting world revolution) in 1930s Communism, and Gerges insists that politics, not religion, is the root motivation of all organized jihad. The good news is that nonterrorist jihadists vastly outnumber terrorist jihadists; the bad, that Gerges' informants repudiate terrorism, not violence per se. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
PRAISE FOR JOURNEY OF THE JIHADIST
"Many of the shortcomings of the war on terrorism can be viewed as stemming from the failure to understand the motives and belief systems of jihadist Muslims . . . Fortunately, there are academics like Fawaz Gerges."―THE VILLAGE VOICE
"This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the world of militant Islam―a subject that has never seemed more relevant."―MARY ANNE WEAVER, author of PAKISTAN: IN THE SHADOW OF JIHAD AND AFGHANISTAN
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Important and Surprising Perspective on the Shades of Jihad
By Douglas S. Wood
In `Journey to the Jihadist', Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, provides extremely valuable insight into the mindset of Islamic jihadist. Or more correctly, make that plural `mindsets' because the central message of Gerges work is that even among jihadists opinions vary widely as to correct principles, strategies, and tactics.
Gerges starts out with some background to the modern jihad movement and its founder Sayyid Qutb who matriculated at Stanford and Colorado State College of Education for two years in the 1940s. Qutb was appalled by the empty materialism and especially the sexual license he perceived. He returned to play an instrumental role in radicalizing the Muslim Brotherhood. Try The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage) by Lawrence Wright for a more detailed consideration of Qutb's role in the radicalizing of Islam.
Gerges, who was raised as Greek Orthodox in Lebanon, traces the development of the jihad through three generations starting with Kamal el-Said Habib. Kamal played a role in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, but later forswore violence as means to Islamize society for political means. The second generation is represented by Osama bin Laden's personal bodyguard Abu-Jandal . Gerges identifies the third generation as uneducated youth being radicalized by the American occupation of Iraq.
Gerges attempts to demonstrate that many if not most jihadists rejected bin Laden's attack on the West, some for moral reasons, more because they viewed it an ill-advised assault on the world's superpower. Much of the antipathy toward bin Laden flows, of course from Shiites. Gerges suggests that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were faring very poorly after 9-11 and the US rout of the Taliban, but that the US invasion of Iraq has almost universally enraged Muslims.
While Gerges' book provides essential context and perspective it suffers from inadequate identification of his sources. His endnotes state that his main sources are interviews he conducted between 1990 and 2005. He also identifies printed interviews and books for each chapter. He chose not, however, to footnote his work so it is usually impossible to identify a source for particular statements. He states that he was unable to interview Abu-Jandal, but still freely quotes him. The book has a bit of a slapdash feel to it, especially in a late chapter discussing the British Muslims and the London bombings. Gerges also accepts exaggerated claims by Arab Afghans of their role in defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Despite these shortcomings, Gerges' book provides much-needed perspective on the varying shades of even radical Islam and how the American occupation of Iraq is pushing more and more Muslims toward jihad against `the far enemy' - the West in general and the US in particular. Highly recommended.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Nuanced look at militant Islam
By jchris2005
Fawaz Gerges gives an intimate and nuanced look what constitutes as a Jihadist in today's post 9/11 world in this very anecdotal book. Gerges interviews a diverse cast of self proclaimed Jihadists from across the Arab world and mixes in a few personal tales from his childhood days in war torn Lebanon. As a result this book is relatively easy to read, flows well and is not as dry as other books on this subject that I've read.
Gerges's principal thesis seems to be that the Jihadist movement is far from being monolithic, elements within the community will differ on a wide variety of subjects that will range from goals to methods. This book does an excellent job in showing the various insights of Muslims. What was most surprising to me was the views of some of the very anti-American Jihadists that were interviewed by Gerges and their opposition to Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda movement. While they detest American foreign policy in general and specifically our support for Israel, they also believe that Bin Laden's actions are largely un-Islamic and extremely counterproductive for the global Jihad movement. I especially found fascinating his interviews with members of Hezbollah just after 9/11. They go to great lengths to denounce the horrific attack and to distinguish their movement from Bin Laden's.
What becomes apparent after reading this book is that there was an unique opportunity post-9/11 to engage some of the more moderate Jihadists and to quarantine the extreme sect represented by those like Bin Laden and Zawahiri. The war on terror cannot be won alone by smart bombs and soldiers. We need to find common ground and détente with the vast Muslim world that does not view world in the same nihilistic way as Bin Laden and his followers. However this opportunity was severely set back for the foreseeable future due to our invasion of Iraq, however well intentioned by the Bush administration, followed sheer incompetence and failure of the post war reconstruction and occupation which radicalized the Ummah (worldwide Muslim community) almost as much as the creation of Israel.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating look at the internal divisions within political Islam
By Tim F. Martin
_Journey of the Jihadist_ by Fawaz A. Gerges is a fascinating look at the evolution of Islam in the last three decades. Having done extensive interviews with many Islamists and translated documents previously not available in the West, Gerges showed how that for the last thirty years "an internal struggle has been waged for the soul of Islam," a struggle that affects the very foundations of Muslim society and politics.
The author believes that many in the West don't really comprehend the true relationship between religion and politics in the Middle East. Religion plays a huge role in Middle Eastern politics but often either as a tool or because it is the only outlet available for those unhappy with their governments (politicized religion has replaced secular nationalism as the dominant force in Muslim society). In many authoritarian regimes the only means of organizing and mobilizing activists who wish to change the political regime that governs their country is that centered on the mosque, as regional dictators have largely been successful in silencing their secular and non-religious opponents but would not dare to close down the mosques. Additionally, many of those who violently oppose a regime will couch their rhetoric and actions in religious terms in order to try and gain mass support, even though there might be many Muslims who come to regard the actions of ultramilitants as un-Islamic and even "nihilistic," having more in common with "more recent European, radical, ultraleftist, or Third Worldist movements" than with Islam. These ultraviolent groups wrote Gerges use religion only to serve their political goals, despite the fact that they don't act particularly religious at all.
Islamists everywhere would like to replace what they see as an atheistic political and social order at home with an Islamic state, though they differ greatly on how this is to be achieved. Mainstream Islamists, which are the overwhelming majority, have accepted the rules of the political game, embraced democratic principles, and generally oppose violence. Two other groups though have not discarded violence, the militant Islamists and the jihadists. Both have a willingness to use all means, including terrorism, to overthrow existing regimes and replace them with theocratic ones, though generally jihadists have a less sophisticated perception of the religious nature of the struggle.
Up until the end of the 1990s, many more Islamists were militant than were now, but as Gerges recounted with fascinating life stories and accounts of noted Islamists in Egypt and elsewhere, most came to reject violence. Some groups, such as Al-Jama'a al-Islamiya in Egypt (the largest Islamic group in the Arab world) and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria came to understand their goals of creating an Islamic society failed when violence was used and instead have come to support democracy and have largely embraced "the culture of political realism and the art of the possible," even working with former political opponents to achieve their goals. Civil wars launched by Islamic groups against governments - notably in Egypt and Algeria - failed, as not only the government ruthlessly defeated them but the Islamists found that they lost the support of the average Muslim, who was repelled by their violence, particularly against women, children, tourists, and civilians in general. The majority of Islamists have focused on what the author termed evolution, not revolution, in trying to make an Islamic society (converting people on an individual basis rather than trying to convert everyone at once by controlling the government) and are what he terms the accommodationist camp.
However, not all Islamists came to embrace the new political realities of the Middle East and therein is the internal struggle, as the Islamists split into a majority group that has largely disavowed violence and an ultramilitant group, exemplified by Al Qaeda. This group he terms the confrontationist camp and quite the opposite of most Islamists has in fact become more violent.
Gerges' notes on Al Qaeda are fascinating. Most members of Al Qaeda were originally highly militarized, hardened veterans of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - the Afghan Arabs - and they were he wrote "infused...with hubris," believing that if they could defeat one superpower they could defeat another. Several of the prominent Islamists he interviewed, particularly before the recent war in Iraq, were quite scornful of Al Qaeda, as among other things they regarded Al Qaeda as burdened by a cult of personality around bin Laden, creating an atmosphere which stifled internal debate, and a "catastrophic leadership" that was seriously detached from reality, one that had gravely underestimated the enemy (the U.S.), and that was both intellectually bankrupt and un-Islamic.
Al Qaeda seemed doomed following September 11 as the widespread Arab and Muslim revolt that bin Laden hoped for did not occur and the organization was on the run after the destruction of their hosts, the Taliban. Only a miracle would resurrect jihadism it seemed. Then, apparently, that miracle occurred; the invasion of Iraq, an event which served to militarize far more Muslims than the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan or perhaps even the earlier Soviet invasion, giving Al Qaeda a new lease on life and enormous credibility.
Or has that miracle occurred? While the war in Iraq has attracted militants from throughout the Muslim world and saved Al Qaeda from destruction, it has also alienated many Muslims as well; many have grown increasingly repulsed by the random kidnapping and beheading of civilians, of deliberately targeting Muslims civilians in general, and the targeting of neutral journalists and of aid workers. Even Al Qaeda was said to initially have been apprehensive of embracing Abu Musab Zarqawi, feeling he went too far in his indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim civilians and that his encouragement of a Shia-Sunni conflict was a dangerous distraction in the war against America.
There are indications that some Islamists that had formerly given up violence now see that conflict is inevitable with the West, but they nevertheless do not desire an open-ended conflict and firmly reject the "cult of death" that Al Qaeda seems to promote.
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