Roy is dismissive of all forms of ideology, not only the theological variety but political as well ("democratization," he informs us at one point, "is a process, not a philosophy," a claim I find almost stunningly obtuse). Gilles Kepel, author of The War for Muslim Minds, is properly respectful and is therefore able to show the long and laborious process by which the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's ideological mentor, eventually concluded that striking at targets in New York or Madrid would be more profitable than striking at those closer to home. A longstanding figure in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Zawahiri spent years pondering why such actions as the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 or the fundamentalist revolt in Algeria in the 1990s came to naught. The regimes were shaken but kept their feet, while in the end it was the fundamentalists who ran aground. His conclusion was that while such feats caused a big splash locally, they did little to unite the Islamic umma, or community, as a whole. The only way this could be done was to strike outside the umma at Russia, the United States or the other Western powers. The upshot, Kepel writes, was "a world view comparable--but in reverse--to Samuel Huntington's famous clash of civilizations." Where Huntington sought to shore up the forces on one side of the divide, Zawahiri was working just as hard to unify those on the other.

Does this show a lack of strategic thinking? Obviously, Zawahiri played his cards wrong in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime, which he was counting on for protection, collapsed under the American onslaught more quickly than many people expected. But the struggle over Chechnya is going along swimmingly from Al Qaeda's point of view while, with Russia drawing close to the Israelis and postinvasion Iraq turning into a happy hunting ground for jihadists of every shape and description, the "civilizational" dividing line is clearly hardening. Did Zawahiri underestimate the fury of the US response to 9/11, as Olivier Roy suggests? Or has he succeeded in drawing Bush into a war in Iraq that the Administration cannot possibly win? I think it's the latter, and I suspect Kepel does, too.

The War for Muslim Minds is something of a corrective to Kepel's previous book, Jihad, published in 2002, which argued that Islamic fundamentalism had peaked and that it would "have much difficulty reversing its trail of decline as it confronts twenty-first-century civilization." The title of his new book is unfortunate since it is not only Muslim minds that are at stake in the current conflict, but it is otherwise a masterpiece of political explication. Kepel is especially good on the symmetries between the Islamic fundamentalists and their Western equivalents, the neoconservatives. Where the fundamentalists had it easy--all they had to do was figure out a way to unite the umma against the West--Washington has been faced with the far more difficult task of pumping up support for Israel without ruffling the feathers of the Saudis to the point where they cut off the flow of oil. The solution hit upon in the 1980s and '90s was to divert the Muslim world's attention by encouraging an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan while staging a spurious "peace process" in Israel/Palestine to buy time. The strategy worked brilliantly for a while. But when Al Qaeda stepped into the vacuum created by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the United States was slow to respond. "Al Qaeda" literally means "the base," which suggests an actual military installation that the United States could pound with the usual array of smart bombs and cruise missiles. But Al Qaeda was really more "a database," Kepel writes, one "that connected jihadists all over the world via the Internet." It was a postmodern organization married to a premodern worldview. Yet the neocons, firmly in control under Bush II, preferred to do battle with a conventional military force, which is one reason they declared war on Saddam Hussein.

Fanaticism on one side has been met and matched by equally blind fanaticism on the other. Still, whatever the sins of the neocons, the reader by this point is likely thanking his or her lucky stars to be living in a region shaped by a faith in which, in the immortal words of John Ashcroft, "God sends His son to die for you" instead of "requir[ing] you to send your son to die for Him." Where the Koran instructs the faithful not only to "smite" the enemy "above their necks," but to cut off their fingers for good measure (Surah 8:12), the New Testament recommends turning the other cheek. Doesn't this tell us all we need to know about the difference between a warlike Middle East and a peaceful, enlightened West?

Not quite. Pacific as the Gospels may be, the religion they gave rise to has been remarkably violent. According to the historian William McNeill, Western Europe during the so-called Age of Faith was the most warlike civilization on earth, with the exception of Japan. The Arabs were stunned by the brutality of the Crusaders when they invaded Palestine in the eleventh century. The "parfait gentil knights" were bad enough, but the fanatical hordes known as the Tafurs were even worse. Barefoot and ragged, armed only with clubs, sticks, hoes and other crude implements, they charged into battle gnashing their teeth, feasting afterward on the roasted flesh of whatever poor Muslim they managed to get their hands on. Yet the knights were so impressed with these holy cannibals that they gave them the honor of being the first ones over the wall during the climactic assault on Jerusalem in 1099.

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