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The calamity of September 11 has unleashed a flurry of books – both old and new – that seek to explain the intricacies of the volatile region to a hungry public. Gilles Kepel, author of “Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam”, will discuss his own historical viewpoint tonight at 7:30 at Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. 

A Professor of Middle East Studies at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris, and the author of six books, Kepel’s talk will be preceded by an introduction from UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Lawrence Michalak, also the Vice-Chair for Middle Eastern Studies.  

Originally published in French in 2000 but updated after the September 11th attacks, Kepel spent five years researching the material for “Jihad.” The book is an historical examination into the cultivation of Islamic fundamentalism in the modern era, tracing its rise in the 1960s to its apparent fall in the 1990s. Writing in the introduction that “September 11 was an attempt to reverse a process in decline,” Kepel argues that the kind of radical Islamism espoused by Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini ultimately failed to triumph broadly in the Islamic world due to a breakdown of the interests among its various groups when political power was not gained. 

“The issue in the book is that the movement was strong over the last 30 years, when it was able to mobilize simultaneously different social groups,” Kepel said in a telephone interview before a lecture at UCLA. “On the one hand, the young urban poor, the disenfranchised who had moved from the countryside to the cities, on the other side the pious bourgeoisie people. And as a yeast to provide the ideology which would bring them together (were) the Islamist intellectuals, whether they be the clerics or radical ideologues.”  

The purpose of the book is to try to understand why for instance – Iran being the case in point - the Islamist movements managed to seize power and engineer a revolution, whereas in other cases such as Algeria, in spite of the fact that they had succeeded in their early phase to mobilize a number of people… they at the end of the day did not manage to seize power and were beaten by the military.” 

Kepel asserts that September 11th was not so much a brash assault by a rising group as it was a last ditch attempt by radical Islamists to galvanize a movement that had lost its resonance with its key constituencies. Kepel insists that those attacks failed because they failed to unite the Muslim world in a struggle against the West the way the radicals had hoped. 

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“So my contention is that when they divide - when the radicals go their way and the bourgeoisie moderates go the other - than the movement is not in a position where it is capable of seizing power. Hence, that leads the radicals into a track which is more and more violent over time,” Kepel explains. 

“The ebbing and flowing of the movement over the last three decades had lead to a splitting of that movement nowadays that it is less able to engineer political organization. That leads to the fact that they are still there but they are split and the radicals of the movement say they have leeway to be more and more radical.”