The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East

Olivier Roy, Europe's leading scholar of political Islam, argues that the "war on terror" has artificially conflated conflicts in the Middle East in such a way that they appear to be the expression of a widespread "Muslim anger" against the West. In reality, though, there are no us and them , only an array of "reverse alliances" that operate according to their own logic and dynamics. Roy unravels the complexity of these alliances in order to better understand the political discontent that sustains them. He also emphasizes that the war on terror should not be regarded merely as a geopolitical blunder committed by a fringe group of neoconservatives. It is instead a problematic outgrowth of our deeply rooted Western perceptions of the Middle East, including the belief that Islam, rather than politics, is the overarching factor in these conflicts. Roy ultimately finds that the West has no alternative but to engage in a dialogue with the political forces that truly matter& mdash;namely the Islamo-nationalists of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.