Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2002), 416 pp., $29.95.
Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama bin Laden: Global Terrorism and the Bin Laden Brotherhood, translated by George Holoch (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 293 pp., $18.95 (paper).
Christopher Ross has been in the news. After September 11, the State Department summoned the former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Algeria back into service as "special coordinator for public diplomacy and public affairs." On November 3, he appeared on Al-Jazeera satellite channel to present America's case-in Arabic. (As one former diplomat put it, "the scuttlebutt around the locker room was always that Chris was the man in terms of being able to wrap significant thoughts in good Arabic.") With his many years of foreign service in Beirut, Damascus, Algiers and Fez, Ross is credited with knowing the currents of Arab opinion, and how best to navigate them.
Consider, then, this prediction Ross made at a conference of public affairs officers from the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs bureau in September 1993:
I predict, regretfully, that the region is fated to witness a wave of Islamist revolutions, successful or failed, over the next decade. To me, this is a likelihood with which we must come to grips. The regimes in place lack motivation, a vision for change, and support. The democrats have vision and motivation, but lack support. The Islamists combine all three-motivation, vision, and support. . . . Left to their own devices, the region's discredited regimes are likely to try to muddle through and repress opposition, its budding democrats are likely to fall on their faces, and its extreme Islamists can be expected to become the next agents of change.
