Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West

Gilles Kepel

Published by Columbia University Press 2020

Away from Chaos

The Middle East and the Challenge to the West

Gilles Kepel

https://doi.org/10.7312/kepe19702

Overview
Contents

About this book

Away 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.

Author information

Gilles Kepel is chair of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres and director of the Middle Eastern Mediterranean Freethinking Platform at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. He is the author of many widely acclaimed books, including, most recently translated into English, Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (2017).

Reviews

Dale F. Eickelman, coauthor of Muslim Politics:
MMore 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.

Lisa Anderson, author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century:
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.

Bernard Haykel, Princeton University:
In 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.

Odd Arne Westad, author of The Cold War: A World History:
If 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.

David Ignatius, Washington Post:
Gilles 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.

Robert F. Worth, The New York Times Magazine:
Gilles 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.

Topics

Political Science

Political Science, other

Social Sciences

Contents

Frontmatter

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Contents

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Introduction. A Testament for Syria

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PART I. The Barrel and the Koran

ONE. The Islamization of the Political Order

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TWO. The Onset of International Jihad Taking on the Near Enemy (1980–1987)

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THREE. The Second Jihadist Phase: Against the Distant Enemy (1998–2005)

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FOUR. The Third Jihadist Generation Networks and Territories (2005–2019)

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PART II. From Arab Spring to Jihadist Caliphate

FIVE. The Arab Spring In Context

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SIX. From the Fall of Despots to Societies in Turmoil

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SEVEN. Sectarianism and Derailed Rebellions: The Shiite-Sunni Fault Line

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PART III. After ISIS: Disintegration and Regrouping

EIGHT. The Fracturing of the Sunni Bloc

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NINE. The Global Stakes in the Fight for the Levant

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Conclusion. Middle Eastern Fault Lines and Global Tectonics

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Acknowledgments

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Chronology

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Index

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Kepel, Gilles. Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7312/kepe19702

Kepel, G. (2020). Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/kepe19702

Kepel, G. 2020. Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/kepe19702

Kepel, Gilles. Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7312/kepe19702

Kepel G. Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press; 2020. https://doi.org/10.7312/kepe19702

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Language: English

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Copyright year: 2020

Audience: General/trade;

Illustrations

Other: 10 maps in color insert

eBook

Published: July 6, 2020

ISBN: 9780231551946