Journey of the Jihadist Inside Muslim Militancy [Paperback]

Renowned Middle Eastern expert Fawaz A. Gerges takes us into the mind-set of the jihadior holy warriorthat lies behind so many headlines yet remains nearly impenetrable to us. Using his firsthand knowledge of the Arab street, he brings to life the stories of Kamal al-Said Habib, a founder of the Jihadist Movement, as well as dozens of other Islamic fundamentalists, as they struggle with the battle being waged for the soul of Islam.

Journey of the Jihadist puts a human face to events of the last thirty yearsfrom the civil war in Lebanon to the war in Iraq to the conflict in Lebanon today. This important work, now with a new afterword addressing the rise of Hezbollah, will join the ranks of those by Thomas L. Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, and Bernard Lewis.


 
 

Fawaz Gerges is one of this country's leading scholars of and media commentators on the Middle Eastern. Starting in the late 1990s, Gerges went to Cairo on a McArthur Fellowship, to interview (Arabic is his first language) those involved in the Jihadist Movement, which had begun in the 1970s as a fight against the secularization of Arab countries, hence was national rather than international in scope. But events--the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian Revolution, war in Iraqbegan to extend its influence. The new Jihadists were not looking now merely to affect local but worldwide change. In Cairo, Fawaz began a long series of conversations with Kamal al-Said Habib was one of the founders of the modern Jihadist movement and one of its key spokesman. Habib had been jailed after Anwar Sadats assassinationorganized by the Jihadist Movementand then become allied with Osama bin Ladens fringe group, which he subsequently renounced, before the 9-11 attacks. Habibs life-story emerges as a counterpart to those events and forms the basis of this book. JOURNEY OF A JIHADIST gives readers a look at religious extremism from the insidefrom the point of view of somelÃ"