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Al Qaeda in Its Own Words
by (Editor: Professor Gilles Kepel) (Editor: Jean-Pierre Milelli) (Translator: Pascale Ghazaleh) (Introduction: Omar Saghi) (Introduction: Thomas Hegghammer) (Introduction: Stephane Lacroix)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2008-04-30)
ISBN: 067402804X
EAN: 9780674028043
Dewey Decimal #: 363.325
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 384 pages
Edition: annotated edition
SKU: 30-4DPI-FLOO
Condition: New
Comments: Brand new hardcover with dust jacket. Gift quality. Expedited shipping is available.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Despite the frequent appearances of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri on television screens worldwide, Al Qaeda remains an elusive entity. As the world has grown increasingly familiar with the spectacle of Islamist terrorism, Al Qaeda’s essential worldview has remained bewilderingly opaque. To reveal its inner workings, Gilles Kepel and his collaborators, all scholars of Arabic and Islam, have collected and brilliantly annotated key texts of the major figures from whom the movement has drawn its beliefs and direction. The resulting volume offers an unprecedented glimpse into the assumptions of the salafist jihadists who have reshaped political life at the beginning of the third millennium. Excerpts from the work of Azzabdallah Azzam, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—drawn from speeches, internet postings, and published writings—tell the story of Al Qaeda’s evolution, from its origins in the Afghan war through the war in Iraq. These texts reveal the rational, discursive mode used to persuade and to justify violent armed struggle in a universe defined by militant Islam. Substantial interpretive introductions to each leader’s work and extensive critical commentary provide unparalleled access to the intellectual and doctrinal context of Al Qaeda in which these radical ideas have taken shape. By viewing Al Qaeda from within, this indispensable volume reveals the terrorist network’s insidious role in the global web culture of today and the full dimensions of its frightening threat to world stability and security. (20080211)
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Customer Reviews
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Excellent Resource
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-12-26
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
An excellent resource of translated writings and statements by top Sunni jihadi leaders and ideologues with commentary and annotation by top scholars of the Middle East and modern Muslim political movements. A valuable resource for students and academics, as well as the educated general reader.
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Confusion Abounds
Rating  (1)
Date: 2009-11-24
4 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
As Raymond Ibrahim stated in the Fall 2009 edition of the Middle East Quarterly, Al Qaeda in Its Own Words provides the translated writings of four jihadis--Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and Abu Musab Zarqawi. Edited by five people with Kepel, a French sociologist of Islam, as lead editor, it contains a wealth of data that, unfortunately, is presented in a rather confused manner.
The actual words of Al-Qaeda are rarely analyzed or placed in context. Obvious contradictions--such as Al-Qaeda's constant protestations to Americans that its war on them is a response to and derives from U.S. foreign policy while telling Muslims that the jihad must persevere until the globe is governed according to Islamic law--are ignored.
Where objective analysis is wanting, apologetics and hackneyed psychoanalyses predominate: Thus, the "neocons" are akin to Al-Qaeda since "the dual undertakings of 9/11 and the American attack on Iraq ... mirrored each other"; bin Laden--that "nervous, flaccid, eternal adolescent"--opted for a life of jihad due to his "devouring" need for "recognition"; whereas Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri chose jihad due to the "trauma" and "humiliation" they underwent in Egyptian prisons.
The editors also fail to explain the logic of their selections. Aside from the natural inclusion of bin Laden and Zawahiri--the two men at the heart of Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11--how, exactly, do the two dead fellows (Azzam, Zarqawi) fit in?
Though his writings are an important contribution to the vast corpus of jihadi literature, Azzam, dead since 1989, "can be held responsible only indirectly for the transformation of some Afghan Arab factions into terrorist organizations [i.e., Al-Qaeda]." As for Zarqawi--who had his own agenda and whose claim to fame lay in sheer barbarism and the practice of decapitation--one is at a loss to understand what value his anti-Shi'i diatribes have for understanding Al-Qaeda as an organization and not merely an amorphous body of Salafi jihadism.
To justify the decapitator's inclusion, the editors magnify his legacy, telling us that Zarqawi "ignited and fuelled a civil war with religious overtones between Shi'ites and Sunnis." In fact, the 1,400-year-old Sunni/Shi'i conflict required the elimination of an iron-fisted Saddam Hussein rather than the appearance of a Zarqawi to flare up again.
Much of this confusion could have been excused if the material contained in the book offered readers, as the jacket-cover promises, an "unprecedented glimpse" into the worldview of Al-Qaeda. The fact is that nearly every document contained in Al Qaeda was published earlier in other volumes or on the Internet.
In order to make an original contribution, the editors could have tried offering new insights or analyses on their unoriginal material. Instead, they seem to have taken the easy road by putting together a hodgepodge of previously published material, while offering only banal "analyses" and no synthesis.
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Very Informative
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-06-11
7 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
Very interesting book it is a series of translations of various type of communications from the top Al Qaeda leaders along with personal biographies on each of them. I found reading these communications helpful in giving me an idea of the rationalization of these murderous fanatics
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