Landscapes of the Jihad or Nasser

Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity

Author: Faisal Devji

What are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.

Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict.

Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity.

Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.

Author Bio:Faisal Devji is Assistant Professor of History at New School University.

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Nasser: The Last Arab

Author: Said K Aburish

Since the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 there has been no ideology to capture the imagination of the Arab world except Islamic fundamentalism. Any sense of completely secular Arab states ended with him and what we see today happening in the Middle East is a direct result of Western opposition to Nasser's strategies and ideals.

Nasser is a fascinating figure fraught with dilemmas. With the CIA continually trying to undermine him, Nasser threw his lot in with the Soviet Union, even though he was fervently anti-Communist. Nasser wanted to build up a military on par with Israel's, but didn't want either the '56 or '67 wars. This was a man who was a dictator, but also a popular leader with an ideology which appealed to most of the Arab people and bound them together. While he was alive, there was a brief chance of actual Arab unity producing common, honest, and incorruptible governments throughout the region.

More than ever, the Arab world is anti-Western and teetering on disaster, and this examination of Nasser's life is tantamount to understanding whether the interests of the West and the Arab world are reconcilable.

Nasser is a definitive and engaging portrait of a man who stood at the center of this continuing clash in the Middle East.

Publishers Weekly

According to London-based journalist Aburish, his is the 28th biography of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970). The statistic says much about the appeal of the Egyptian colonel who forced out King Farouk yet failed to modernize an unwilling nation that adored him. Nasser evicted Britain from Suez and funded the Aswan Dam, but, Aburish concedes, could not lead Egypt out of backwardness, corruption and Islamic extremism. This biography has more politics than life in it, and much repetitive and often contradictory history. Once Nasser joins with dissident fellow officers whom he quickly co-opts, the reader learns little more than that he was always a good husband and father, spurned corruption and suffered early on from the heart trouble and diabetes that killed him at 52. Aburish mourns the lost potential of the man he sees as the greatest figure in the region since Saladin, but acknowledges that the inability to delegate authority to anyone not an incompetent and thus likely to unseat him left Nasser unable to achieve real change. The book attempts to explain Nasser's contradictions regarding relations with America (and the CIA), Russia, Israel and his Arab neighbors, but Aburish is unable to persuade even himself. At one point, for example, Nasser's "heir apparent" Zakkaria Mohieddine quarreled with him "and never saw Nasser again," but 15 pages later he is named prime minister "and seldom met his leader alone." Also marred by a propensity for triteness, this biography is unlikely to appeal to readers beyond those who are fixated on Middle Eastern political turmoil. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Gile Gordon, Curtis Brown Edinburgh. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Thoughtful-though sometimes puzzling-biography of the Arab world's "most charismatic leader since the Prophet Mohammed," and the last to command international influence. Gamal Abdel Nasser's death, more than 30 years ago, marked an end to Arab internationalism, an effort to build a pan-Arab polity. In the place of that populist movement, writes London-based Arabist Aburish (A Brutal Friendship, 1998, etc.), stand, on one hand, corrupt dictatorships ("The House of Saud fails to qualify as an institution, unless perpetuating despotism is elevated to an acceptable form of continuity") and, on the other, Islamic fundamentalism. Many readers may question Aburish's view that the West is the cause of this fundamentalism, but there it is: Nasser's "dreams have been hijacked by the Islamic movements the West created to defeat him." One need not accept that odd thesis, though, to profit from Aburish's account of Nasser's rise to power and his concerted efforts, once he got there, to extend the possibilities of an Egyptian-led Arab enlightenment into the dark corners of the Arab world-which included Saudi Arabia and Iraq, whose governments opposed Nasser at every turn. Aburish also traces the origins of Nasser's growing militancy to a conference of nonaligned nations of 1955, in which China's Chou En-Lai, Yugoslavia's Tito, and India's Nehru separately urged him to lessen his reliance on the West and become an independent, neutral force in the region. Nasser did so, Aburish shows, which set him in opposition to France and England (whence the Suez Crisis of the following year), cost him American support, and drew him into the Soviet camp, even though Nasser remained a middle-of-the-roader through andthrough ("Becoming a revolutionary meant throwing caution to the wind, something Nasser the conservative, ardent nationalist never did"). "For an Arab to excel in administration is rare," Aburish remarks in another curious statement. If so, Nasser was all the more exceptional. Agency: Curtis Brown UK

Table of Contents:

	Introduction: The Painful Truth	1
1.	The Dreamer from Nowhere	7
2.	The Encounter with Power	29
3.	The Road to Suez	57
4.	Give Them Dignity	87
5.	The Dark at the End of the Tunnel	123
6.	And I Shall Divide Your Araby into Two	155
7.	Search for an Honorable Exit	187
8.	Leader of the Arabs	221
9.	The Politics of Decline	249
10.	We Are Defeated	283
	Epilogue: "You Live, Abu-Khalid, You Live"	313
	Notes	321
	Interviews	337
	Select Bibliography	339
	Index	343

Befriend and Betray or Baghdad Diaries

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Author: Alex Cain

The Hells Angels. The Bandidos. Asian triads. Russian mobsters and corrupt cops. Even the KKK. Just part of a day’s work for Alex Caine, an undercover agent who has seen it all.

Alex Caine started life as a working-class boy from Quebec who always thought he’d end up in a blue-collar job. But after a tour in Vietnam and a stretch in prison on marijuana-possession charges, he fell into the cloak-and-dagger world of a contracted agent or “kite”: infiltrating criminal groups that cops across North America and around the globe were unable to penetrate themselves.

Thanks to his quick-wittedness and his tough but unthreatening demeanour, Caine could fit into whatever unsavoury situation he found himself. Over twenty-five years, his assignments ran the gamut from bad-ass bikers to triad toughs. When a job was over, he’d slip away to a new part of the continent or world, where he would assume a new identity and then go back to work on another group of bad guys.

Told with page-turning immediacy, Befriend and Betray gives a candid look behind the scenes at some familiar police operations and blows the lid off others that law enforcement would much prefer to keep hidden. And it offers an unvarnished account of the toll such a life takes, one that often left Caine to wonder who he really was, behind those decades of assumed identities. Or whether justice was ever truly served.

Publishers Weekly

Chilling and gritty, this new account by Caine, an undercover police agent for 25 years, showcases his skills as a shrewd chameleon who could infiltrate any group while tallying their vices and offenses. Following stints in Vietnam and behind bars, he teamed with the cops to penetrate the criminal netherworld populated by cruel Asian triads and street gangs battling for territories and riches. Caine, a tough cookie, was recruited by all of the federal enforcement agencies to get the goods on the big four outlaw bike gangs-the Hells Angels, the Bandidos, the Outlaws and the Pagans-and some of his exploits are the stuff of high-tension torture and lawlessness. His resourcefulness is uncanny, as is his sheer will to survive as he matches wits with a group of Russian mobsters and lawmen on the take. It's to Caine's credit that he lived to tell this riveting tale of bloodshed and corruption. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Feb.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

Infiltrator-for-hire Caine writes with disarming candor about going undercover everywhere from Newfoundland to Hong Kong. The child of a broken family in a small Quebec town, he was a directionless 20-year-old ne'er-do-well when he signed up in 1969 to fight with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam. A horrific tour of duty, which saw him coordinating extrajudicial assassinations and accidentally killing at least one civilian, left him prone to detachment, something he put to use after returning to Canada. Accidentally getting too friendly with a Vancouver criminal, he informed the police; but instead of giving him a reward, the Mounties signed him up as an informant. The investigation widened into an international operation that sent Caine flying to Hong Kong (along with plenty of cops looking for a taypayer-funded vacation) to move higher up the Triad's chain of command. After that, he became an undercover mercenary specializing in biker gangs. Caine's unassuming demeanor made him fit in better than the undercover officers who overdid it. Indeed, he displays considerable contempt for cops who relish playing the bad boy, portraying one police ambush he witnessed as little more than a gangland hit. Most of the narrative details his work inside the Bandidos, a Pacific Northwest gang, and a long assignment with the Hell's Angels in California. Along the way he also describes operations involving Toronto gangs and the KKK. His personal life suffered from all the role-playing: "My mind is really a graveyard for all the people I've been," he writes. Two marriages broke up, and an investigation involving a family member estranged his sisters. Unlike ATF special agent Jay Dobyns (No Angel, 2009),Caine remains resolutely unromantic about his targets and has no problem doing exactly what the book's title directs. A refreshingly open and clearheaded account of the dirty side of law enforcement.

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Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle Of War And Exile

Author: Nuha Al Radi

The only available book about daily life in modern Iraq, BAGHDAD DIARIES offers American readers a first-person account of the human toll of war and the price paid by ordinary Iraqi citizens.

The author, Nuha al-Radi, is a cosmopolitan, Western-educated Iraqi woman who writes with surprising humor and stoicism about the reality of daily life in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and the subsequent bleak years under sanctions. She describes the difficulties of day-to-day survival but also the funny and macabre goings-on about town. Following her into exile in Jordan and later Beirut, the diary continues to November 2002. It ends with several dramatic new entries written as Baghdad is bombed again and U.S. troops advance towards the city.

The New York Times

Ms. Radi is a painter and sculptor not a writer, but she has an artist's eye for the telling detail: the birds flying upside down after an air raid, people gathering mementos from a rocket that has fallen into the garden of the Rashid Hotel, bicycles becoming the transport mode of choice as gasoline supplies dry up. — Michiku Kakutani

The Washington Post

Al-Radi looks at Iraq like a woman who insists on viewing a canvas only through a magnifying glass, intimately describing its texture while failing to see the wider scene. But however narrow its focus, Baghdad Diaries offers an unfiltered perspective on a widely misunderstood world. — Frank Smyth

Publishers Weekly

A London-educated Iraqi woman, al-Radi, recounts 10 years in her life, covering the Persian Gulf War in 1991, then the Western embargo on Iraq and finally the years she entitles "exile," which she spent primarily in Lebanon, occasionally visiting the United States. Al-Radi, an artist by training, writes powerful but not ostentatious prose, with abrupt, fragmented and simple sentences as she interweaves the violent, chaotic effects of war with everyday incidents. One may feel the urge to skim the detailing of run-of-the-mill events regarding, say, al-Radi's dog and his adventures. And the artistry and authenticity of al-Radi's voice will be marred for some by her ardent anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments. The author rightly addresses the devastation of war, the inevitable violence wrought on innocent civilians. But she does not address the context in which the Gulf War and the embargo took place. Mention of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and ruthlessness toward his own people is reduced to a bare minimum. Al-Radi singles out Israel for criticism of its policies regarding Lebanon and the Palestinians, at one point comparing Israeli policies to Nazi tactics. There is no question that war is brutal, and al-Radi touchingly portrays the Iraqi plight, but in her eagerness to cast blame, she loses sight of the bigger picture. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Penelope Power - KLIATT

Nuha Al-Radi, a potter, painter and eco-sculptor from a prominent and sophisticated Iraqi family, began her diary in 1991 at the beginning of the Gulf War, writing from her house in Baghdad. She was not privy to government plans (who was?) and her diary reflects the concerns of an ordinary citizen whose country is under attack. She describes the loss of electricity and the subsequent neighborhood feasts, as the people of Baghdad cleaned out their freezers and refrigerators and cooked the soon-to-be spoiled food. Friends and family leave for the safety of the country, hauling their freezers on trucks and barbequing on the way. Water and phone service are unavailable. The lush orchard surrounding her house becomes the site of the "loo" as water is too scarce to use for flushing. On the eighth day of bombardment she writes, "Depression has hit me with the realization that the whole world hates us." With the end of war comes the chaos of defeat. Wild dogs roam the streets and private yards. Shattered windows must be replaced but there are no available materials. The dirt and dust from the bombardment fills the streets and houses and the rain is black. The police force is decimated; thievery and car jacking become rampant. There is no army and the author comments, "We are told to rebel by the West, with what and how?" The subsequent embargo makes life difficult, and in some cases impossible. Medical care is non-existent; a visit to the hospital is useless, as there are neither supplies nor equipment. Despite the grim drain on the amenities of everyday life Nuha Al-Radi's sense of humor cannot be subdued. She gives up painting and begins to sculpt from cast-off automotive parts and stones. Her"Embargo Art" becomes well known. A U.S. representative promises to get her a U.S. tank to put in front of a famous Baghdad hotel; her intention is to paint it and invite people to write comments on it. She will call it "An Anti-Tank Missal," but the representative lets her down. In 1995 the artist left Iraq to show her art in Lebanon and has been an exile since. She says that Beirut is a gathering place for exiles as the Lebanese are famous for their grumbling and complaining and free speech is still allowed. On September 15, 2001 her entry reads "They know the names of the hijackers now and they are all Arabs; God help us." A March 2003 postscript for the Vintage edition records this painful entry: "In the name of peace and humanity, thousands have to be killed. In the name of liberation, in the name of democracy, there will be a military occupation. Would someone please tell me where the democracy lies in 'Either you are with us or against us'?" KLIATT Codes: SA;Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1998, Random House, Vintage, 217p.,

Healthy Voices Unhealthy Silence or When Washington Shut Down Wall Street

Healthy Voices, Unhealthy Silence: Advocacy and Health Policy for the Poor

Author: Colleen Grogan

Public silence in policymaking can be deafening. When advocates for a disadvantaged group decline to speak up, not only are their concerns not recorded or acted upon, but also the collective strength of the unspoken argument is lessened-a situation that undermines the workings of deliberative democracy by reflecting only the concerns of more powerful interests.

In Healthy Voices, Unhealthy Silence, Colleen M. Grogan and Michael K. Gusmano address issues of public silence through the lens of state-level health care advocacy for the poor. They examine how representatives for the poor participate in an advisory board process by tying together existing studies; extensive interviews with key players; and an in-depth, firsthand look at the Connecticut Medicaid advisory board's deliberations during the managed care debate. Drawing on the concepts of deliberative democracy, agenda setting, and nonprofit advocacy, Grogan and Gusmano reveal the reasons behind advocates' often unexpected silence on major issues, assess how capable nonprofits are at affecting policy debates, and provide prescriptive advice for creating a participatory process that adequately addresses the health care concerns of the poor and dispossessed.

About the Author:
Colleen M. Grogan is associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago

About the Author:
Michael K. Gusmano is assistant professor of health policy and management and Lauterstein Scholar in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University

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When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy

Author: William Silber

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled America's ability to repay its debts abroad. Fear that the United States would abandon the gold standard sent the dollar plummeting on world markets. Without a central bank in the summer of 1914, the United States resembled a headless financial giant.

William McAdoo stepped in with courageous action, we read in Silber's gripping account. He shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. He smothered the country with emergency currency to prevent a replay of the bank runs that swept America in 1907. And he launched the United States as a world monetary power by honoring America's commitment to the gold standard. His actions provide a blueprint for crisis control that merits attention today. McAdoo's recipe emphasizes an exit strategy that allows policymakers to throttle a crisis while minimizing collateral damage.

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street recreates the drama of America's battle for financial credibility. McAdoo's accomplishments place him alongside Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan as great American financial leaders. McAdoo, in fact, nursed the Federal Reserve into existence as the 1914 crisis waned and served as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction: The Legacy of 1914     1
The Opening Salvo     8
The European Gold Rush     26
The Nightmare of 1907     42
Unlocking Emergency Currency     66
Sterling Steals the Spotlight     86
New Street Defies McAdoo     104
Rescue     116
End Game     131
Birth of a Financial Superpower     151
Epilogue: Blueprint for Crisis Control     173
Notes     177
References     201
Index     207