Death rattle?

When push comes to shove, Kepel insists, a political movement only holds onto its supporters when it can give them what they want and need: jobs, education, access to power and other opportunities to better their lots. Muslims, it turns out, aren't that different from Westerners in this, and the extremity of the Islamist impulse is in direct proportion to how desperate people's situations have become and how fed up they are with whoever's in charge. The first real surge of Islamism came when an entire generation had grown up without any memory of the colonial era -- and without a shot at the wealth and perks that got redistributed when the European occupiers departed. "The first Islamist onslaught was against nationalism," Kepel writes, with Egypt being the quintessential case.

As Kepel runs through the history of nation after nation, he finds again and again the same mid-century recipe for an Islamist groundswell: a nationalist government whose fabulous promises of the bounties of independence have devolved into authoritarianism, poverty, no social mobility, corruption and insensitive pushes to modernize. In such straits, "the devout Muslim capitalist could make common cause with the slum-dweller." The third ingredient was young Islamist intellectuals, educated in universities where militant groups thrive and proselytized, who provided the ideas and propaganda to hold the patchwork alliance together. (These, like the Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and early leaders of the Egyptian militants, tended to have engineering and vocational degrees.)

Sometimes Islamists did gain power -- in Iran and Afghanistan, and on a smaller scale in Algeria. In other cases, nationalist regimes tried to placate the malcontents with moral crusades. (Quite a few also found the Islamists to be a useful wedge against Marxist and socialist movements.) "By making concession after concession in the moral and cultural domains," Kepel writes, "governments gradually created a reactionary climate of 're-Islamization.' They sacrificed lay intellectuals, writers, and other 'Westernized elites' to the tender mercies of bigoted clerics, in the hope that the latter, in return, would endorse their own stranglehold on the organs of state." (As a result, many Muslim nations lack the kind of educated, secular-minded thinkers needed to lead the push for democracy, political pluralism and other bulwarks of civil society.)

These orgies of finger-pointing enabled the devout middle classes to take over the elite positions once held by their Europeanized counterparts, while the urban poor got to act as enforcers. In one of his shrewder analyses, Kepel writes that the campaigns "allowed impoverished young men, humiliated and forced into abstinence or sexual misery by the crowded family conditions in which they lived, to become heroes of chastity who sternly condemned the pleasures of which they had been so wretchedly deprived."

Iraq's invasion of Iran shortly after Khomeini took power played into his theocratic hands: He used the bloody war with Saddam to systematically eliminate any possible challengers to his authority. The war enabled him to siphon off the potentially destructive energy of the same poor young men by reviving the Shiite cult of martyrdom: "The killing of so many young men brought about the symbolic death of their class as a collective political protagonist in Iran."

Now, however, the first generation that has known only the Islamic Republic has finally come of age, and the same class of young men who once took to the streets chanting "Death to America!" are now out there chanting "Death to the mullahs!" In most cases, though, the ascendancy of Islamism didn't last even that long. The "fragile alliance" of the urban poor and the pious shopkeepers was "ill-prepared for any kind of protracted confrontation with entrenched state authorities." The middle class tended to defect once the regime started offering them tidbits of power, while the underclass Islamists and some of the intellectuals often became so extreme in their views that they frightened and alienated their former allies. Kepel quotes a disillusioned Sudanese Islamist who thinks the movement was "better off when it was frankly repressed" because "when Islamists achieved power, they ignored all democratic procedures" needed to peacefully resolve conflicts.

For Kepel, the emergence of the kind of militant groups that committed acts of terrorism in Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan and other breeding grounds of fanatics, groups like Egypt's Al Jihad (where Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, cut his terrorist teeth) and the fearsomely brutal GIA in Algeria, were signs that Islamism had spent itself as a political force. After several years of grisly terrorism in Egypt, culminating in the massacre of a group of tourists at an ancient temple in Luxor in 1997, he says, the government had learned its lesson. It decisively cracked down on militant groups like the Gamaat Islamiya, and privatized and modernized the economy to woo the pious middle class who once supported the militants.

Yet there were leftover, intransigent jihadists, like Zawahiri, and these seemed inevitably to wind up in Pakistan or Afghanistan, where many of them (funded by the Americans and the Saudis) had fought against the Soviets in what they saw as a resounding triumph and divine endorsement of their cause. This hard core of militants -- some the educated products of various Arab homelands, others poor locals brainwashed in the madrassas that provided the only available form of schooling (in addition to free room and board) -- are what al-Qaida is made of, although it's likely that the "al-Qaida troops" currently being mopped up by American forces are all low-level Pakistani and Arab recruits. The group's brains, the engineers, like bin Laden and Zawahiri, are surely long gone.

When he turns to the likes of bin Laden and his cohorts, Kepel's energetic political pragmatism hits a bump. "The attack on the United States was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation and decline of the Islamist movement," he argues, "not a sign of its strength." Perhaps so; certainly the attack mostly served to bring on the destruction of the Taliban, meaning there's one less Islamist regime in the world. But as Kepel points out, the goal of the Sept. 11 attacks remains obscure, and no one has officially taken responsibility for them.

Clearly, Kepel, who sees all the political groups he describes here as serving specific constituencies with concrete needs, finds this baffling. "Resorting to spectacular terrorism was a high-risk gamble," he writes, figuring it as an attempt to "regain popular favor by way of television, in the absence of any effective work at the grassroots level." Despite any momentary, purely emotional rallying of the faithful, such terrorism is likely to "engender a far greater, far deeper angst among the devout middle class who feared that such explosions of violence might threaten their vital interests in the long run."

Ahmed Rashid's survey of militant Islamism in Central Asia, also called "Jihad," describes a scenario in that region (the "'Stans") that seems, with a few tweaks, to be an instant replay of those that fostered Islamism in the Arab nations 25 years ago: Authoritarian regimes bailing on the promise of post-Soviet prosperity and viciously squelching even the most innocuous display of faith outside of state-sanctioned venues. Kepel, who doesn't cover Central Asia at all in his "Jihad," would no doubt predict a bloody efflorescence and a subsequent fading of political Islam there as well.

Kepel sees signs of democratic yearnings in many parts of the world where he feels Islamism has exhausted itself, and he quotes a Malaysian militant who came to embrace Western civil ideals when the regime in his own country turned on him and Western human rights groups became his only defenders. Kepel may be right that eventually more democratic institutions will emerge in the Middle East. Perhaps they'll even appear in Central Asia (although Rashid would like to see Western powers help those nations skip over the period of violent Islamist insurgency suffered by their Arab counterparts by pressuring their governments for reforms now).

That will be well and good, but it leaves the matter of bin Laden and other anti-American terrorists scarily up in the air. Perhaps highly ideological militant movements like Islamism do all eventually fail to seize any real power, but in the process of flaring up and dying out, they also give off a kind of waste product: deposits of fanatical, even nihilistic men for whom access to political power has become irrelevant.

Initially it strikes Americans as paradoxical to describe Islamism as gravely weakened because it was Islamists who hurt us, and badly. But the lesson of Sept. 11 may be not that militant Islam is a legitimate force in the world that we've foolishly ignored, but rather that small, isolated and sometimes frankly crazy elements of the world's society can nevertheless cause us a lot of pain. That's the nature of terrorism -- the military doesn't call it "asymmetrical warfare" for nothing. The question of whether terrorism "works," like the question of how much militancy is inherent in Islam itself, has been batted around a lot since the towers fell in New York City eight months ago, but both are actually fairly irrelevant. Revenge is an end in itself for people who have given up ever seeing the Kingdom of God on earth. It doesn't take an entire world religion to either hijack a plane or shoot an abortion doctor; it just takes a maniac -- or two or 20 -- with nothing to lose.

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