Making the Arab World

The books under review is yet another testimony to Fawaz Gerges’s continued academic curiosity about ‘political Islam,’ and more particularly what has now come to be known as ‘Islamist terrorism’. The central theme of his earlier works America and the Political Islam (1999), The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went Global (2005), Journey of the Jihadist (2006), The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda (2011) and A History of the ISIS (2016) all revolves around this same theme. The author intended this book to be an ‘examination of two towering figures of Arab politics – Nasser and the man he executed in 1966 – Syed Qutb’ (p. 11). He was naturally frustrated that, although there are scores of books on both personalities written primarily by admirers and camp-followers, all of them ‘present separate pictures and are not integrated across time and space’ (p. xi), ‘each side denied the humanity of the other and portrayed its rival as a traitor or even a kafir – an infidel’ (p. 7). This ‘double-biography’ is therefore his attempt ‘to overcome the simple either/or approach that came to dominate the analysis of Arab political and social order’ (p. 20), ‘thus filling a major gap in the literature’ (p. xiii).