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Rating: 
Summary: American Imperialsts vs Islamist Rebels?
Review: Americans in post 9-11 or those wedded to postivist models of social analysis will not get this book. They will complain that it does not provide data, there is no surveys, there is not ethnography, no statistical models. This book will not tell you how to spot an Islamist, it will not tell you how many people there are in HAMAS. So why rate this volume so highly? The merit of this book is that it tells what the contempoary conflict between Islamists and American imperialists is about. The author argues that Age inaugarate by Columbus apporiation of the Western hemisphere (which coincided with ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Jews from Spain)is in crisis. The unraveling of the myth of western/white superiority is making increasingly difficult for the western global state to manage the world through perusasion that it has all the good ideas, thus to perserve it superiority it has to flex it military muscle to an increasing extent. The author suggests that Islamism has taken hold of the Muslim imagination, because it does not kow-tow to the western model, as such the attempt to destroy Islamism can only be understood as attempt to perserve the currant global order. No doubt the author would see the war aganinst terrorism as war between imperialists and rebels.
Rating:
Summary: American Imperialsts vs Islamist Rebels?
Review: This book produces nothing too surprising if you're familiar all the recent post-structuralist critiques of historiography, social science, and the study of the Middle East and Islam. Nothing will be too surprising to you if you are familar with the thought. However, if you are not familar with these trends, this brief book serves as a good introduction since this is about as lucid and comprehensible as works of such a predisposition tend to get. The author shows an excellent exposure to recent post-structuralist thought and english literature on the Middle East and Islamism; however, his engagement with Islamism leaves much to be desire as he apparently knows neither modern Arabic nor Persian as his bibliography and use of texts demonstrates. A much better and much more critical work,however, has been written by Aziz al-Azmeh entitled ISLAM AND MODERNITIES.
Rating: 
Summary: A Decent Attempt to Apply the Insights of Post-Sructuralism
Review: This book produces nothing too surprising if you're familiar all the recent post-structuralist critiques of historiography, social science, and the study of the Middle East and Islam. Nothing will be too surprising to you if you are familar with the thought. However, if you are not familar with these trends, this brief book serves as a good introduction since this is about as lucid and comprehensible as works of such a predisposition tend to get. The author shows an excellent exposure to recent post-structuralist thought and english literature on the Middle East and Islamism; however, his engagement with Islamism leaves much to be desire as he apparently knows neither modern Arabic nor Persian as his bibliography and use of texts demonstrates. A much better and much more critical work,however, has been written by Aziz al-Azmeh entitled ISLAM AND MODERNITIES.
Rating: 
Summary: BLAMING THE VICTIM
Review: Using the fashionable lanugage of Western academia, the author tries to explain Islamic violence by blaming " Eurocentrism". This is a familiar argument:because the Europeans, and by extenstion the United States which is seen by the fundamentalistS as part of " the West", colonised some Muslim countries in the 19th centuries, Islamic fundamentalists have the right to kill Europeans and Americans in this century.The probloem with this post-modernist, post-structuralist reading of history is that it abolishes ethics and elevates victimhood, real or imagined, into the sole yardstick for human behavior. Those interested in a better understanding of Islamism which has declared war on the West, inclduinhg through suicide attacks and bacteria-laden letters, had better look elsewhere. I suggest books by Anthony J. Dennis, Amir Taheri, Fereydoun Hoveyda and Morgan Norval.
I gave the book two stars because it provides an insight into how apologists for fundamentalism use every trick in the academic book to explain what is not justifiable. A READER IN ENGLAND
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