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Waking up from the nightmare

BEYOND TERROR AND MARTYRDOM:
The Future of the Middle East
By Gilles Kepel, translated by Pascale Ghazaleh
328 pp. Harvard U. Press $27.95

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

Ours has been an age of terror: planes blow up in the sky, videotapes of beheadings circulate on the Internet, young women detonate concealed bombs in crowded marketplaces. Sometimes the perpetrators die, or try to, looking for an expressway to heaven. Whether they seek a place alongside God or alongside 72 virgins or simply seek an escape from the miseries of this world, they are martyrs in the eyes of many. Western democracies struggle to cope with this assault while maintaining their values.

But terrorists have problems of their own, which becomes evident in this excellent book by Gilles Kepel, professor and chair of Middle East Studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. The masses of Muslims, “dragged unwillingly into a spiral of daily massacres,” did not identify with the bloodthirsty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who personally decapitated the kidnapped American construction contractor Eugene Armstrong. Despite Al Qaeda’s expectations, the strategy of martyrdom did not galvanize the Muslim world. Instead of precipitating a worldwide Muslim uprising against the West, the attacks of September 11 brought down American wrath on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, miring both sides in a protracted struggle. “In a few short years the opposing dreams of Bush and Bin Laden devolved into an endless shared nightmare” in which both were unable to control the progression of events, Kepel writes.

That nightmare plays constantly on Middle Eastern television with every tragedy, every transgression against the Muslim world, finding instant widespread exposure through Al Jazeera’s televised news network. Kepel states that “It is impossible to overstate the extraordinary impact of Al Jazeera in keeping the grand narrative of martyrdom alive for its tens of millions of viewers in the 1990s.”

Kepel sees “grand narratives” at play. Al Qaeda says that democracy is a sham meant to blind people to the will of God. Martyrdom will inspire mass uprisings of Muslims. American neoconservatives frame the struggle as good versus evil and democracy versus totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has weakened itself through its “unipolar policy,” in which we act alone and too often use force as the world’s sole center of power. Kepel’s key advice to the U.S. is to abandon ideology in favor of politics and to accept a role as one power in a multi-polar world.

So how does the world get beyond terrorism?

The author sees hope beyond terrorism and jihad through eventual economic integration of Arabs with their neighbors, ultimately including Europe. The European Union must expand its economic influence into the Middle East, Kepel argues, or “run the risk of embracing a neomedieval nightmare that blends misery with jihadist rage.” The idea is that relative prosperity will lessen the social pressures that help to encourage violence. This is certainly a long-term prediction, and I fear a lot of violence will come to pass before a peaceful integration with the EU.

Meanwhile, there is Israel:

But flowing like a river beneath all the on-air arguments about tactics and interpretation is the unifying problem of Israel’s existence, which all commentators perceive as the fundamental cause of discord in the region.

Yet if Israel is the core problem, how is economic integration the answer to Middle Eastern Muslims’ woes? Perhaps—and this is my speculation—the economy is the fundamental issue, and improved financial well-being of ordinary Middle Eastern citizens will eventually make the fact of Israel’s existence less nettlesome.

Beyond Terror and Martyrdom suggests a constructive and promising direction for policy makers and a clear analysis that will give readers a better understanding of the issues weighing so heavily upon the Middle East. I highly recommend it.

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Bob Sanchez is an associate editor and the webmaster of The Internet Review of Books. His novels, When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky, have received rave reviews.

Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.

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