In the wake of 11 September 2001, the study of political Islam became a vastly more complicated enterprise. No other event in recent history demonstrated with such literal force how interconnected the phenomenon of Islamic activism—in all it forms—had become. Those scholars who had studied the Arab world suddenly had to pay attention to Iran and Turkey, and to such remote places as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Scholars of South and Southeast Asia had to consider how Indonesian and Malaysian Islam intersected with Khomeinism and Saudi Wahhabism. Thus, like it or not, 11 September set the stage for a rebirth of Islamic studies. Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam marks this coming of age by providing a comprehensive account of the evolution of political Islam as a national, regional, and global phenomenon. No other work offers such a careful and well-written balance of analytical parsimony and empirical reach. For this reason alone, the book will be a classic for years to come.

Kepel does not wear his theory on his sleeve. Rather than draw the reader into a long conceptual prologue, he links two venerable forms of analysis to construct a flexible analytical framework whose unassuming if ubiquitous presence clarifies rather than weighs down his story. Deploying traditional Marxism, he argues that the effort of radical Islamists to impose their agenda on the state hinges on their capacity to forge an alliance between “young urban class” and the “devout middle class.” The former has been the standard-bearer of radical social and ideological (if not utopian) agendas, while the latter has often aligned itself with these revolutionary projects only to relinquish them in favor of an accommodationist pragmatism that protects its economic interests. This deeply structuralist perspective, which has a Barrington Moorish feeling to it, leads Kepel to an eloquent if familiar proposition: no enduring alliance, no power. But how do we explain the success or failure of alliances that in retrospect are almost always tenuous? Using a variant of Weberian sociology, Kepel argues that politically active intellectuals promote such alliances by disseminating ideologies that fire the imaginations of different social groups precisely because the moral impulses that animate these ideologies transcend economic and social interests. Highlighting the writings of Sayyid Qutb, Mawlana Mawdudi, and Ayatollah Khomeini, he shows how their ideas helped rationalize alliances between the urban poor and the pious middle class, thus producing what appeared during the early 1990s to be a rising tide of radical Islam in Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, and Western Europe. This tide was fed by rapid modernization (which expanded the size of the urban poor population, from Jakarta to Cairo) and by the globalization of Islamist ideology, set in motion by Saudi petrodollars and then greatly accelerated by the Saudi-funded, and American-armed, jihad in Afghanistan.

Yet if money and geo-strategic interests propelled radical Islam, its fortunes were limited by a paucity of leadership skills within the ranks of the radical Islamists themselves. Few of the intellectual activists who produced or reinterpreted the Islamic ideologies of the 1980s and '90s had the symbolic and political skills to forge durable class alliances. Indeed, no one could rival “Khomeini's extraordinary ability to unify the various components…of a movement whose single point of departure was hatred of the shah” (p. 112). Personal charisma, combined with the hierarchical nature of Shi

ism itself, produced an outcome in Iran that was nearly impossible to replicate in the Sunni world.

As Kepel's story unfolds, the role of leadership looms even larger than his eclectic analytical framework would initially suggest. Quite apart from symbolic skills or personal charisma, the alliance strategies of radical Islamists play a decisive role in determining the fate of their project. While rational-choice aficionados would surely prefer a deductive analysis of such strategies, Kepel's more inductive approach nevertheless echoes the “democracy without democrats” and its rationalist underpinnings. As his narrative suggests, the only effective long-term strategy that radical Islamists can use to dilute the edifice of autocracy, the shrewd strategies of well-entrenched autocrats, and the fears of the pious bourgeoisie is a policy of capitulation that accepts the political and social status quo. Blinded by the light of their victory in Afghanistan, they constantly misjudged both the strength of the state and the economic interests of their tacit allies with the bourgeoisie. As Kepel's chapters on Egypt and Algeria demonstrate, the radicals' resort to violence eventually pushed the latter into the hands of the former.

The painful ten-year defection of the Islamic bourgeoisie from the Islamist opposition began in 1990 when, in the Iraqis' invasion of Kuwait, the Saudis discovered that their bid to fund and control an alliance of radical and mainstream Islamists had emboldened the radicals to betray their paymasters. But by then the genie was out of the bottle. With the worldwide dispersion from Afghanistan of unemployed jihadist-salafists (who gladly lent a hand to whoever would hire them), Islamist radicals everywhere concluded that the time had come to confront Arab rulers and their allies in Paris and Washington. But if it took successive administrations time to grasp the bitter legacy that American policy in Afghanistan had bequeathed (as Kepel's account of Washington's insidious relationship with Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman illustrates), the fact is that well before the tragedy of 11 September, the resort to violence by the radicals had all but sealed their fate as a political movement.

This point merits emphasis. Jihad came out one year after its original French version (Jihad Expansion et Déclin de l'Islamisme) was published and thus includes a discussion of the impact of 11 September on Islamic radicalism. While some reviewers have argued that the attacks in New York and Washington disprove Kepel's argument about the declining capacity of radical Islam to win political power, this assertion misses a central point of his book—namely, that the use of terrorism is the last straw that breaks the back of the urban-poor–pious-middle-class alliance. Even if you only read the French version (most of which I slugged through), you cannot but predict that the rise of Al-Qa

eda would strengthen the resolve of Middle Eastern governments, their tacit allies in the Islamic bourgeoisie, and their increasingly taciturn supporters in the West to prevent Sunni Islamist radicals from repeating the victory of their Shi

i counterparts in Iran.

That said, is the failure of radical Islamists to take power synonymous with the overall decline of Islam as a political force? Moreover, does this failure presage a new era in which, as Kepel puts it, “Islamists defending the rights of the individual stand shoulder to shoulder with secular democrats in confronting…authoritarian governments” (p. 368)? Kepel offers an equivocal answer to the first question and a resounding yes to the second. The limits of radical Islam, he argues, have spawned a “post–Islamist” movement, most dramatically in Iran and to a lesser or greater degree in Sudan, Egypt, Bosnia, and Turkey. But to the extent that this movement promotes a revision rather than an abandonment of Islamic thought and action, Kepel's book signals the continued vibrancy of a certain version of Islamist politics. Moreover, on the very last page of the French version of his book he alludes to the possible return of Islamic radicalism itself when he warns that, unless Muslim governments address the social and political needs of their urban poor, “the Muslim world will soon be confronted with new explosions.”

As to his second claim, how one evaluates it depends not only on a reading of the facts, but also on the conceptual prism through which these facts are read. Although Kepel's book brings together Marxist and Weberian analysis, ultimately it rests on a Hegelian vision of historical dialects that points forward to a democratic future. Put differently, Kepel believes that at the end of the day the devout bourgeoisie will be more bourgeois than devout. But Islamic ideology—even in its most bourgeois form—is as much, if not more, about identity as economics. And it is precisely this fact that has hindered collaboration between secular professionals and the leaders of the devout middle class in Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Palestine, and Jordan. Kepel is right: the decline of radical Islamism has opened the door to a process of state-controlled political liberalization that has facilitated the co-existence of both groups. Moreover, in the long run, their peaceful coexistence might promote the kinds of lasting political learning that he already sees on horizon. But for now, their coexistence owes more to institutional constraints than any fundamental process of ideological transformation. As Kepel's chapter on Turkey shows, one of these constraints is the existence of secular political parties. Although their influence has contributed to what he calls the “forced secularization” of Turkey's mainstream Islamists, given the paucity of credible secular opposition parties in the Arab world, and the presence of an Islamist bourgeoisie that is committed to a cultural agenda that the impious bourgeoisie and its allies in the ruling establishment reject, a transition from liberalized autocracy to competitive democracy may take a little longer than Kepel's superb book suggests.