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Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel, Anthony Roberts (Translator) Harvard University Press; (April 2002) 416 pages; 20.97, Hardcover

In 1984 the French scholar Gilles Kepel published a pathbreaking study of modern Islamist movements, issued the following year in a slightly updated edition in English translation as Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (Univ. of California Press). Kepel, who is professor of Middle East Studies at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris, has revisited the subject in his important book, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, published last year by Harvard University Press. Michael Cromartie spoke with Kepel in December.

Some commentators on your book suggested that you paint an overly optimistic picture of the future.

Many people do not really understand what I was saying. It's not an issue of being optimistic or pessimistic; it's more an issue of trying to be realistic about what is taking place in the Muslim world today.

So it's more descriptive.

Yes. And it may be perceived as optimistic because, after 9/11, many commentators—who became instant experts on the issue—have described the Muslim world as irredeemably violent, characterized above all by a deep-seated animosity against the West.

We should not mistake the tree for the forest. Making such distinctions is particularly difficult now, but I have been doing that job for 25 years. I was probably the first scholar in the West to write a book on contemporary Islamist movements, Muslim Extremism in Egypt, which I wrote in the mid-1980s. Political Islam is nothing new to me. I've always tried to look at it in cold blood.

Today there are signs of increasing openness to democratization. But this is really the only alternative if the whole Muslim world is not to slide back to the Stone Age. They are lagging behind everywhere. They have not created anything in terms of the advancement of science. Their scientists are increasingly poor. There is no upward social mobility. What they have is oil and nothing else. And oil is unevenly distributed. This is the big challenge they are facing.

You say that political Islam has been "two-pronged" from the outset. On the one hand are the Khomeinists, who were behind the 1979 revolution in Iran. On the other hand are the Wahhabis, whose influence is strongest in Saudi Arabia. How are these two kinds of political Islam different?

Well, Khomeinism needed to mobilize the impoverished masses, in order to achieve the aim of toppling the Shah's system. When Saddam Hussein attacked Iran, the year after the revolution, those impoverished masses were sent to their death in the Iraqi minefields. Much the same thing happened in the French Revolution with the sans-culottes. After the revolution, they were sent to Italy to pillage and loot so they would be estranged from the political center in France. But the Khomeinists had to mobilize the downtrodden masses to bring about revolution, and so from the outset their movement had a socially revolutionary parlance.

In contrast, the Wahhabis were never social revolutionaries. They were, and still are, social conservatives. Their understanding of religion favors the dominance of central Arabian Peninsula Bedouins, and has been used to legitimize their possession of the oil money from the Saudi royal family. To accomplish that, they needed two things. First, they needed to be in a very close alliance with the United States, a deal which was done when FDR met with Ibn Saud after the Yalta conference in February 1945. And, at the same time, they needed to buy peace with their local constituency. They used Islam as a means, if you will: by pretending to be exceedingly pious and uncompromising in religious matters, they deflected criticism for being stooges to the United States and for using the oil money disproportionately for themselves.

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