A Fury for God: Islamist Attack on America

In A FURY FOR GOD, Malise Ruthven, a renowned scholar of Islamic history and Middle Eastern affairs, traces the religious and intellectual background behind the terrorist attacks on the United States. They were carried out, he argues, by men steeped in "Islamist" ideology: an amalgam of traditional Islamic concepts such as "jihad" and extremist ideas adapted from European leftism, fascism, and anarchism.

Ruthven investigates the hijackers' motives, particularly those of their leader, Mohammed Atta--a figure troubled, like many of his contemporaries, by the clash between Islamic and Western values, including unresolved conflicts over gender and sexuality. It would be a mistake, Ruthven insists, to treat these men as medieval fanatics: their attitude to modernity is dangerous and ambivalent.

In a challenging analysis, the author exposes the crucial importance of the Saudi Arabian connection: it is an authoritarian regime responsible for the massive sponsorship of "fundamentalism"; the birthplace of Osama bin Laden; and the home of fifteen of the hijackers. At the same time, Saudi Arabia remains America's closest ally in the Arab world, armed and tolerated for its oil. Though Ruthven rejects the thesis that the Western and Islamic worlds are heading inevitably for a clash between "civilizations," he concludes by suggesting that if left unchecked, pressures from religious fundamentalists (both Christian and Jewish) in the United States and Israel, added to the religious forces at work in the Muslim world, might wellc onspire to produce just such an outcome.

Malise Ruthven is the author of the highly acclaimed Islam in the World and Islam: A Very Short Introduction. A former writer with the BBC,. he has also written for the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego.