Description
Book SynopsisAway from Chaos is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. Gilles Kepel offers a clear and persuasive narrative of the long-term causes of tension while seamlessly incorporating on-the-ground observations and personal experiences from the people who lived through them.
Trade ReviewGilles Kepel has long been France’s most sophisticated scholar of radical Islam, and
Away from Chaos is his personal and political summa—a remarkable synthesis of decades of passionate engagement with the Middle East. -- Robert F. Worth,
The New York Times MagazineGilles Kepel has lived the torment of the modern Middle East as a scholar and, ultimately, as a target of the jihadists. In
Away from Chaos, he narrates that tortured story and proposes a return for the steadying forces of a century ago—the European nations, a rising Russia, and the internal balancers of the Levant whose destiny is to bridge East and West. -- David Ignatius,
Washington PostIf you want to understand the contemporary Middle East, this is the place to begin. Gilles Kepel’s book is a deeply insightful, empathetic, almost elegiac text that both explains how the region ended up in its present predicament and how it may find its way out of it. -- Odd Arne Westad, author of
The Cold War: A World HistoryIn
Away from Chaos, Gilles Kepel, one of the world’s most prominent scholars of Middle Eastern politics, provides a grand narrative of this region’s history over the last four decades, explaining the rise and possible end of Islamism as a mobilizing force. Relying on his deep personal engagement with the Middle East and also with Islam in Europe, Kepel masterfully charts the region’s upheavals and their grave implications for the West. What emerges is an intimate and deeply learned portrait—the culmination of a lifetime of study and sympathetic observation. -- Bernard Haykel, Princeton University
Who else but Gilles Kepel could have written this seductively provocative book? Kepel has drawn on his decades of deliberation and argument in this tour d’horizon of the development of Islamist movements in the Middle East since the 1960s.
Away from Chaos offers a review, equally challenging and accessible, of the modern political history of the Middle East. -- Lisa Anderson, author of
Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First CenturyMore than other observers of events in the Middle East and North Africa today, Kepel offers a persuasive framework for understanding the turbulence and uncertainty facing the region—and how events in one country affect those elsewhere in the region and beyond. -- Dale F. Eickelman, coauthor of
Muslim PoliticsAn excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region...devoid of the crippling ideological blinders that sometimes disfigure books about a part of the world so rife with ideology. -- Michael J. Totten * The New York Times *
A powerful, sweeping overview of major Middle Eastern political change since the 1970s -- W. Andrew Terrill * Middle East Journal *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Testament for Syria
Part I. The Barrel and the Koran1. The Islamization of the Political Order
2. The Onset of International Jihad: Taking on the Near Enemy (1980–1987)
3. The Second Jihadist Phase: Against the Distant Enemy (1998–2005)
4. The Third Jihadist Generation: Networks and Territories (2005–2019)
Part II. From Arab Spring to Jihadist Caliphate5. The Arab Spring in Context
6. From the Fall of Despots to Societies in Turmoil
7. Sectarianism and Derailed Rebellions: The Shiite-Sunni Fault Line
Part III. After ISIS: Disintegration and Regrouping8. The Fracturing of the Sunni Bloc
9. The Global Stakes in the Fight for the Levant
Conclusion: Middle Eastern Fault Lines and Global Tectonics
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Index
