A fury for God

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were carried out by men steeped in a certain Islamic ideology, which has come to be called Islamism. In A Fury for God, Malise Ruthven first reconstructs the events of September 11 and the war in Afghanistan. He traces the role of the idea of "jihad" and examines the permissibility of suicide in Islam, and reconstructs the world view of Islamist intellectuals like Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian thinker who has influenced an entire generation of radicals in the Arab world, notably Osama bin Laden. He also shows that it would be a mistake to treat these people as medieval fanatics�their attitude to modernity is dangerous and ambivalent. And in a changing analysis, the author exposes the crucial importance of the Saudi connection, the massive sponsorship of "fundamentalism" by an authoritarian tribal regime that has been tolerated by the international community for the sake of Western economic stability. Ruthven's identification of the ambiguities in Western policy is powerfully provocative.