“Can be regarded as a standard, perhaps even definitive, layman’s guide to the current state of Islamism.” — Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 March 2005…among the most insightful Western observers of Muslim societies in the modern world. — Times Literary Supplement 3 December 2004

Gilles Kepel is Professor at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris and author of Jihad: The Trial of Political Islam (Harvard).