Shocked and Awed

Fred Halliday, who died in April 2010 aged 64, was a noted commentator on the Middle East and the relations between the Islamic world and the West. He was Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. This posthumous volume is quite unlike his other publications, although it shares their hostility to western policies old and new. Halliday never managed to find a good word for American foreign policy; quite the reverse, he saw the US role in the Middle East as unremittingly disastrous. In Shocked and Awed, Halliday contrasts the West’s discourse of the War on Terror with Al-Qaeda’s discourse of the Global Jihad. As such, it is bound to remain a useful work of reference as well as a lively read in its own right.

Let us deal with the problem with the volume at the outset. Halliday divides up the material thematically into twelve chapters, rather than making it an alphabetical dictionary of the misuse and debasement of language during the war on terror. This sometimes makes for interesting comparisons within and between sections; but the overall effect is less coherent because it requires continual use of the index to find the location of the term one wishes to consult. One feels that the book, as it is published, is incomplete. Halliday, perhaps subconsciously – his introduction provides a coherent justification of the book as it stands – planned a thematic book on the subject. What we have are his notes for this book, which would serve as a useful dictionary had they been arranged alphabetically.