Wave of the past

摘要

So Devastating and unexpected was the September nth attack on America that many people concluded that Islamic extremism had become a threat of monstrous and mushrooming proportions. That idea is deftly countered in this brilliant and provocative book by a leading French specialist on modern Islam. Gilles Kepel argues that the attack can only be understood in the light of the rise and fall of political Islam, or Islamism as he calls it, over the past quarter-century. He suggests that, from its origins in the 1970s, the phenomenon had three key constituencies. First, the businessmen and professional people who had lost out in the post-colonial division of spoils; these Mr Kepel describes as the pious middle class. Second, a new and volatile group, the disenchanted urban young. And, third, the Islamist intellectuals who became the voice of the movement.