Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the questions of Islamist radicalism and the choice of political violence on the part of a number of Islamist groups have been prominent in both academic and policy-making circles. The answers provided to questions such as “Why do they hate us?” have been extremely varied. From the facile answer of the Bush administration to the more complex but ultimately flawed ones offering an essentialist interpretation of Islam as a religion particularly prone to violence, answers have been rarely satisfactory, particularly in the United States. The author of the book himself has to somehow point out that his attempt at understanding the origins of this contemporary wave of violent radical Islamism is not determined by sympathy toward Islamists.

In this analysis of the emergence of radical Islamism, Mazar provides a much needed, if not entirely novel, explanation for the rise of violent radical Islam. His argument is that societies unable to cope with the challenges of modernization, which has also inevitably accelerated across the world due to the impact of globalization, allow for the mainstreaming of ideas that are inherently anti-modern. The clarity of the argument and Mazar's ability to move away at times from Islam in order to make comparisons with other anti-modern movements, such as Nazism, which arose in different cultural and religious contexts provide a solid understanding of how such extreme ideas can become popular when specific political, social and economic conditions seem to conform to what extremist frameworks explain. Thus, the linkage between ideas and material conditions explains a certain type of political action, namely terrorism. This is a much welcome contribution to the general debate about the rise of militant Islamism because it sweeps away a number of very simplistic assumptions that affect policy-making. Mazarr's objective is in fact not simply to elucidate an academic research puzzle, but to offer very specific advice to policy-makers on how to confront this problem. The book thus emerges as a critique of the current war on terror waged in the Muslim world and offers in its final chapter, a number of prescriptions that should be implemented in accordance with this new understanding of who the enemy is.

While the book has a significant number of strengths, it is also problematic in a number of ways. First of all, the concept of modernity seems to overlap very closely with the Western experience of modernization and what it means to be a modern society. It is not necessarily clear, however, what the inherent values of a modern society actually are. In this respect, it might have been better to talk about the values of modern liberal-democratic thought rather than “modernity”; it seems that violent radical Islamists have a particular problem with the values of liberalism and, to a lesser extent, democracy in so far as it enshrines the values of liberalism (namely individualism). Some authors argue quite convincingly that there is no unified meaning to what modernity and modernization are and therefore each society has to follow its own route to what it understands modernity to be. In this respect, radical Islamism might not be an anti-modern project, but “simply” an anti-liberal one.

Such an interpretation of modernity would be useful for a second problem the book suffers from. The focus is on the men and on the ideologues of violence such as Sayyid Qutb, but what about Islamists who still want to radically transform their societies even though they might reject the use of violence to do it? Should they be considered anti-modern as well? In many ways, the creation of an Islamic state is the ultimate objective of Islamists, and their internal disputes are based on the tactical choices to be made to get there, and on the content with which to “fill” this Islamic state. If the rejection of violence for political goals is what makes more mainstream Islamists modern, what of the use of violence employed by Western democracies, which are supposed to have achieved the apex of modernity? The main point of discord seems to be liberalism and the impact it has on societies and this where tensions arise between Islamist actors and western powers.

These shortcomings are quite minor in the context of the analysis that Mazarr offers because his attempt to explain violent radical Islam counters many stereotypes and perceptions offering in the meantime a set of plausible courses of actions that would truly help in winning the war on terror. Unmodern Men in the Modern World is a very solid volume that should be of interest to academics and policymakers alike.