Gilles Kepel the peripatetic French scholar of Islam whose latest book is the "War for Muslim Minds," likes to recall a question he was asked after 9/11. "'Gilles,'" asked Richard Descoing, the director of the elite school Sciences Po, the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, where Kepel has taught for the last decade, "'you don't regret studying Arabic 25 years ago, do you? Especially when you think of your colleagues who studied Russian?'"

It's a rhetorical conceit; Kepel has long been deeply secure he studied the right subject. Why wouldn't he be? He is one of the preeminent Western intellectuals specializing in Islam and the Arab world today. Propelled by the combination of bona fide academic gravitas, a willingness to take intellectual risks, and a manner that transcends dry scholarship, he has become a personality in the world of punditry, embellishing on his texts and speaking engagements with attention-grabbing, polished performance.

On a recent chilly day in Paris, Kepel spent several hours casually navigating - in flawless English - the course of his recent scholarship. At 49, he has a boyish face; he wears a crisply tailored blue Christian Dior suit to his morning meeting with a reporter, and maintains the disarmingly seductive manner adopted by a certain type of ultra-self-confident Parisian intellectual. He doesn't chafe at the role of expert.

He is also unafraid of controversy. Published just before the September 11 attacks, his last major academic book, "Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam," pronounced militant jihadism to be on the wane. In France, says Kepel, with something of a smirk, he was pilloried. "'Kepel prophesies doom of Islamism,'" he says, mocking the newspaper headlines. "As of 9/12/01, they all went after me and said, 'He's a false prophet.'" His publishers didn't believe anyone would buy a book subtitled the "Decline of Political Islam," as it was initially called. The book reached English speakers after 9/11, with the new subtitle. It was well received.

In many ways, "The War for Muslim Minds" is a natural coda to "Jihad," modified less in an effort to respond to his critics than in the hope of reaching out to a broader popular audience with an almost-journalistic presentation. There is a difference, Kepel writes between anti-Americanism engendered by Middle East policy - still rising - and jihad, still, he says, on the wane.

The title refers to the ideological battle for the Muslim world. Who will prevail: the West, and moderate Muslim leaders, or Islamic extremists? Kepel has staked his reputation on the former. The French title explains it best: "Fitna: War in the Heart of Islam." Whereas jihad, Kepel writes, is the "instrument that restores harmonious order to the world by submitting a reluctant humanity to the Quran's unchanging laws," fitna, which means internecine conflict, "signifies sedition, war in the heart of Islam, a centrifugal force that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration, and ruin." It is fitna, he says, "that one finds today in the Middle East."

Kepel is at his best when explaining how what he calls the dying strains of jihadism intersected, disastrously, with the methodology of the neoconservatives who dominated the first administration of George W. Bush.

"The neocons," says Kepel, tipping his chair backwards toward one overstuffed bookshelf in a tiny office piled floor to ceiling with tomes on Islam, "mistook Baghdad for East Berlin." It's a trope he follows in the book. The Bush administration's reliance on "Sovietologists" (cold warriors like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Soviet expert, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) he explains, deluded themselves into thinking the removal of Saddam himself would "solve everything," both in actuality and in the imagination of the Arab street. "There was the downing of the statue," he says, "made to resemble the downing of the statues of Lenin and Stalin, in order to show that Saddam was a despot. But the statue was pulled by a cable, tied to an Abrams tank, and it showed that the despot had been removed by the U.S. military, not by locals. It did not prove as powerful or convincing for Iraqi civil society as it should have, and the U.S. was not able to translate its military victory into a political success." This initial failure, he explains, undermined what the neo-cons thought would be a domino effect of democratization and peace in the Middle East. "To use Mrs. Rice's parlance," the neo-cons believed "the road to Jerusalem [would go] through Baghdad."

Kepel believes that the Islamic world's "American-o-phobia" is also connected to four years of inaction on the part of the United States vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "W 1" - he uses just the letter and the number, referring to George W. Bush's first administration - "was perceived as backing Sharon" unequivocally. "Now there is no option but to go back to Jerusalem first, and consider Jerusalem the road to Baghdad." That means reengaging in a Middle East peace process.

(Any talk of Israel, of course, brings up the question: Is Kepel, as it is rumored, a Jew? "In Islamic circles, I am sort of pinpointed as 'le juif Kepel,' 'Kepel the Jew,'" he says, noting that there are also "pro-Israeli, pro-Likud groups that have spread the rumor that I am a convert to Islam." He is neither.)

"From 1996 to 2000, while Oslo appeared to be on track," he writes in "The War for Muslim Minds," "the Palestinian question was not a priority for the international jihadist movement. Bin Laden henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri's territorial reference at that time was to the 'citadels of jihad': the Taliban's struggle for control in Afghanistan and the fight against the Russians in Chechnya. Bin Laden's focus was the Saudi dynasty. But... none of these spaces generated the kinds of slogans that could mobilize the masses to the cause of jihad." The failure of Oslo, and Sharon's Temple Mount walk, on the eve of the intifada, in September 2000, on the other hand, could and did.

With the insurgency in Baghdad, Kepel says, the "issue is again the war for Muslim minds. If you look back to al-Zawahiri's literature, they saw themselves as the vanguard of the umma," the Muslim masses. Yet "they were unable to mobilize the masses of the Muslim world in the 1990s." They failed everywhere. "Terrorism is crucial to what they call martyrdom operations. They think that it will sort of cut through their incapacity to succeed in grassroots work."

The Bin Ladenist, Egyptian-born physician al-Zawahiri turns up again and again in Kepel's work and conversations. Kepel has been following him since the late 1970s.



The year before beginning university, Kepel recounts, he was in a special course for "bright students," but his heart wasn't in it. "My mother died in a car accident that year," he says. My head was somewhere else, and I didn't work a lot, and when I was not listening, I was sort of relating to the map. I failed my exams, and decided I would go and visit the map."

Kepel's travels were marvelous - "like something out of The Odyssey" - and when he returned to Paris after meandering through the countries that ring the Mediterranean, he took up Arabic. It was the 1970s, the colonial period was over and Islam was a distant second to communism in academic priorities. But in 1979, the oil crisis hit, and suddenly Middle Eastern studies were useful again. Kepel moved to Cairo to write his dissertation on Islamic movements in Egypt. "It so happened," he says in his laconic style, "the ones I was interested in killed Sadat," the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981 by Islamic opponents to the peace treaty with Israel. "The day after [the assassination], some sort of charter plane of American aspiring scholars arrived in Cairo, but I was two years ahead. And out of that PhD, I wrote my first book, which in English is called 'Muslim Extremism in Egypt.'" It was well received - the Financial Times called it "valuable and original" - and Kepel began his movement toward name recognition.

When Kepel returned to Europe, he was among the first to turn an analytical eye on the burgeoning Muslim population of Europe in "Les Banlieues d'Islam" ("The Suburbs of Islam," a reference to the suburbs of French major cities where Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian immigrant workers were settled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and where, in the last 20 years, there has been a religious revival and skyrocketing unemployment). The book is often cited but was never translated.

Kepel kept writing. One book called simply, "Revenge," coincided with the first Gulf War. "It was about Islamic Christian and Jewish political movements," he recalls, and a "real best seller, translated into 25 languages," though the book gave him "serious problems with the academy. Because of jealousy," he says, "I was barred from any position that would enhance my career." At the time he was at the prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He left and taught for a year in New York, at Columbia and New York University - "I was amazed at the mediocrity of the students."

Kepel began writing "Jihad" in the United States. "I wanted to sort of write a history of the last 25 years of Islamist movements, which was more or less parallel to my own career," he explains. "The guerrilla actions of jihadists," he explains, "in Algeria, in Egypt, in Bosnia, everywhere, were failures because they didn't manage to seize power and they couldn't duplicate the Afghan model." After September 11, Kepel's critics were gleeful. "Some even suggested that, because the government at the time was looking at budgetary cuts, they should start with my own salary. It was great fun. But if you survive as a specialist in the Middle East for 25 years, you are thick-skinned as a rhino and you have a low blood temperature."

Later, he acknowledges that "the campaign" against him "was harsh." Much to his "delight," his old friend Zawahiri published, in December 2001, an "on-line manifesto" called "Knights under the Prophet's Banner." Zawahiri said, as Kepel paraphrases, "'we are in decline. We have failed, we failed miserably in the 1990s, jihadism failed everywhere.'" About those who had had the "temerity" to criticize him, Kepel says they now "looked like kids."

Zawahiri, explains Kepel in "The War for Muslim Minds," "began his text with a somber diagnosis of the movement's failures in the 1990s," and explains that a "radical change of strategy" had been conceived to "galvanize undecided Muslims" - in other words, the September 11 attacks. But there was a backlash against the idea that 9/11 was the ultimate jihadist action. Writes Kepel: "Most Muslims saw the massacre of innocents on September 11th as opening the door to disorder and devastation in the house of Islam. Not only did the U.S. military promptly destroy the regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, not only were American troops camped on Islam's soil from Baghdad to Kabul, but the holy war that was supposed to flare up and 'burn the hands' of the infidel West, as Zawahiri put it, brought about only ruin and destruction in the Middle East... The uprising of the faithful that was expected to seize power and reverse the decline of Islamist political movements in the 1990s did not materialize."



One of Kepel's hopes for the Muslim world lies in the ability of European Muslims to transcend the geopolitical battle for the soul of Islam - if they can embrace the democratic structures of their adoptive countries. "They are the potential purveyors of these values to the Muslim countries from which their families emigrated," Kepel writes. "In this reading of the future, European Muslims will become the international vectors of a democratic project that they themselves embody." If this "positive reading of the future" does not bear fruit, he warns, the alternative would mean a "rigid Islamic identity" that "leads them to reject cultural integration into the European environment and embrace cultural separatism." Kepel supports his point by noting that French Muslims refused to support the Iraqi jihadis who kidnapped two French journalists last summer. The kidnappers claimed that they were acting on behalf of the right of French women to wear the veil - a matter of dispute in France for years - but French Muslims demonstrated against the jihadis and called for the journalists' release.

"My name is now known in the Arab world," he says, before launching into a story about lecturing - in Arabic, "without notes" - in Saudi Arabia last May. "I'm on satellite television, taking part in debates in Arabic with Arabs who usually do not agree with me. And it's a challenge - how to keep open a critical dialogue, if you will. Because I think, if we want to avoid a shallow issue, which called itself the 'clash of civilizations' theory, we have to reach out."



Sarah Wildman is a senior correspondent for the American Prospect magazine. Her last piece for The Jerusalem Report was on the forgotten slave-labor camps of Paris.

The Jerusalem Report, July 11, 2005 issue