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

by Gilles Kepel, Henry Randolph (Translator)

Overview

The Middle East is one of the world’s most volatile regions. In recent years, from the optimism and then crushing disappointment of the Arab uprisings through the rise and fall of the Islamic State, it has presented key international security challenges. With the resilient jihadi terror threat, large-scale migration due to warfare and climate change, and fierce competition for control over oil, it promises to continue to be a powder keg. What ignited this instability?

Away from Chaos is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. Gilles Kepel, called “France’s most famous scholar of Islam” by the New York Times, 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.

From the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war of 1973 to the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Away from Chaos weaves together the various threads that run through Middle East politics and ties them to their implications on the global stage. With keen insight stemming from decades of experience in the region, Kepel puts these chaotic decades in perspective and illuminates their underlying dynamics. He also considers the prospects of emerging from this long-lasting turmoil and for the people of the Middle East and the world to achieve a more stable future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231551946
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	691,308
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Gilles Kepel is chair of Mediterranean and Middle East studies at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and former special envoy of President Emmanuel Macron of France. He contributes to Al-Monitor and is the author of many acclaimed books, including Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (2017).

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Testament for Syria
Part I. The Barrel and the Koran
1. The Islamization of the Political Order
2. The Onset of International Jihad: Taking on the Near Enemy (1980–1987)
3. The Second Jihadist Phase: Against the Distant Enemy (1998–2005)
4. The Third Jihadist Generation: Networks and Territories (2005–2019)
Part II. From Arab Spring to Jihadist Caliphate
5. The Arab Spring in Context
6. From the Fall of Despots to Societies in Turmoil
7. Sectarianism and Derailed Rebellions: The Shiite-Sunni Fault Line
Part III. After ISIS: Disintegration and Regrouping
8. The Fracturing of the Sunni Bloc
9. The Global Stakes in the Fight for the Levant
Conclusion: Middle Eastern Fault Lines and Global Tectonics
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Index

Editorial Reviews

An excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region...devoid of the crippling ideological blinders that sometimes disfigure books about a part of the world so rife with ideology.

The New York Times - Michael J. Totten

A powerful, sweeping overview of major Middle Eastern political change since the 1970s

W. Andrew Terrill

More 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.

Dale F. Eickelman

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.

David Ignatius

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.

Lisa Anderson

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.

Odd Arne Westad

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.

Bernard Haykel

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.

Robert F. Worth

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.

O. A. Westad

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.

O.A. Westad