François Burgat ranks alongside-and often in opposition to-Gilles Kepel in France today as a Middle-East expert, and his advice is being sought far beyond the French-speaking world. He has a unique take on the relationship between the West and Al-Qaeda in particular, and in this lucid work sets forth nothing less than a new paradigm.

Every day, the political discourse from the pens and mouths of Western leaders and the press helps radical Islamist movements like Al-Qaeda build their case. The most damaging aspect of this, as Burgat sees it, is in the way that Western leaders and the media casually equate terrorism and Islam. While to Western ears a similarly vehement discourse may appear to exist throughout the Islamic world, Burgat shows how such similarities are the legacy of colonialism, and are more incidental in fact and linguistic in origin than ideological. The mostly profane violence that divides the region, nurturing terrorists and suicide bombers, makes use of the confusion and the West’s own words to bolster its agenda.

Burgat structures his argument around the three eras of radical Islam: the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brotherhood; the rise of the post-colonial dictatorships; and the radicalization of “Generation Al-Qaeda”.