by Gilles Kepel (Harvard University Press, £18.95)
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom—a new book by the noted French scholar Gilles Kepel—is a long polemical essay about what the west might now do in the middle east. Its theme is that the two "grand narratives" of our day—the war on terror and its obverse, the jihad against the west—have both failed and that a third narrative now has to emerge: one with the potential to deliver peace and prosperity.
Kepel takes his readers through the Bush administration's failure to understand the implications of the developments in the middle east that led to 9/11. Starting from this weakness, the administration launched its war on terror—from which flowed the folly of the Iraq war and the rise of Iran as a regional power broker. The US then lurched into the disasters of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, providing easy propaganda tools to use in further radicalising would-be terrorists, while allowing Israel to carry out its own war in Lebanon. These developments left Hezbollah stronger than ever in Lebanon, and Hamas likewise in Gaza, gaining the support of Sunni and Shia across the Muslim world at the cost of the west.
In a mirror image of the US failure, al Qaeda, according to Kepel, has also proved unable to adjust strategically to its changing environment since 9/11. He recounts the various phases of global jihad, in which the attacks of 9/11 unleashed a hotly contested theological debate as to who was a legitimate target. Against a backdrop of division and rising Shia-Sunni sectarianism, provoked in part by the Iraq war, al Qaeda found itself competing for pre-eminence against Hezbollah and Hamas. It was further weakened by internal debates as to whether it should continue with "spectaculars," or should set the ideological tone but move to a "franchise" model, whereby autonomous cells would carry out smaller-scale attacks. In all these phases, al Qaeda and its allies failed to translate the call for global Islamic resistance into mass action.
Applying the narrative of terror and martyrdom to the Muslims of Europe, Kepel sets up multiculturalism as the dividing force in Britain and the Netherlands, and cultural integration as the unifying force in France. This is where his argument becomes nationally partisan and contradictory. He sweeps from neocon warnings that Muslim demographics will turn Europe into "Eurabia" to the assertion by the left that France's ban on headscarves cost it the Olympics, and he criss-crosses debates about multiculturalism with criticisms of prevailing policy in a confusing mish-mash. Britain's position is caricatured as support for "Londonistan"—allowing radicals to live in the country as long as they do not support extremism. Those who defended free speech in the case of the Danish cartoons are excoriated. And Blair's inclusion of Tariq Ramadan as a government adviser is met with disdain. Kepel simply asserts that France is better at integrating its Muslims than Britain, the Netherlands or Denmark.
In the final chapter, Kepel unveils his proposal for a third grand narrative to counter the neocons and jihadists. In echoes of Ramadan's thesis, it is the resilience of the Muslims of "old Europe" and its "dynamic of cultural integration which is creating a unique deterrent to the logic of terrorism." At the same time, an alternative to both jihad and the war on terror is emerging in the economic integration of the middle east and Europe. Both regions embrace the "rational option" of an economic alliance that has the Mediterranean at its centre. In a Schumannesque sweep, the legacy of politics is expiated through economics. Europe's heavy history in the region is swept aside by the marriage of the euro and petrodollar.
Those familiar with Kepel's previous, more scholarly work, The War for Muslim Minds, will be disappointed by this book: it offers a useful chronology of key events, but most of his judgements are questionable or absent. Kepel's attempt to fuse three big subjects—US foreign policy, political Islam and European multiculturalism—into a grand design for a new international relations of the middle east warrants a more serious treatment than this.
