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Fawaz A. Gerges

The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda 1st Edition

by Fawaz A. Gerges (Author)

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In this concise and fascinating book, Fawaz A. Gerges argues that Al-Qaeda has degenerated into a fractured, marginal body kept alive largely by the self-serving anti-terrorist bureaucracy it helped to spawn.

In The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda, Gerges, a public intellectual known widely for his expertise on radical ideologies, including jihadism, argues that the Western powers have become mired in a "terrorism narrative," stemming from the mistaken belief that America is in danger of a devastating attack
by a crippled al-Qaeda. To explain why al-Qaeda is no longer a threat, he provides a briskly written history of the organization, showing its emergence from the disintegrating local jihadist movements of the mid-1990s-not just the Afghan resistance of the 1980s, as many believe-in "a desperate
effort to rescue a sinking ship by altering its course." During this period, Gerges interviewed many jihadis, gaining a first-hand view of the movement that bin Laden tried to reshape by internationalizing it. Gerges reveals that transnational jihad has attracted but a small minority within the Arab
world and possesses no viable social and popular base. Furthermore, he shows that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a major miscalculation--no "river" of fighters flooded from Arab countries to defend al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as bin Laden expected. The democratic revolutions that swept the
Middle East in early 2011 show that al-Qaeda today is a non-entity which exercises no influence over Arabs' political life.

Gerges shows that there is a link between the new phenomenon of homegrown extremism in Western societies and the war on terror, particularly in Afghanistan-Pakistan, and that homegrown terror exposes the structural weakness, not strength, of bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Gerges concludes that the movement
has splintered into feuding factions, neutralizing itself more effectively than any Predator drone.

Forceful, incisive, and written with extensive inside knowledge, this book will alter the debate on global terrorism.

ISBN-10

0199790655
ISBN-13

978-0199790654
Edition

1st
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

September 14, 2011
Language

English
Dimensions

5.75 x 1 x 8.75 inches
Print length

272 pages
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About the Author

Fawaz A. Gerges, the Director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, is Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations. His books include Journey of the Jihadist and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (September 14, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199790655
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199790654
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,418,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #874 in Middle Eastern History (Books)
- #3,809 in Terrorism (Books)
- #4,086 in Middle Eastern Politics

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Fawaz A. Gerges

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Fawaz A. Gerges, the Director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, is Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations. His books include Journey of the Jihadist and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global. (Photo Credit: Jane Hoffer)

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William B. Messmer

Paints Broad and Compelling Canvas

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2011

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Fawaz Gerges has written a compelling and detailed analysis of Al-Qaeda, the broader Middle East, and American foreign and security policy related to both. At its core this most well written and read-able book (it is absorbing enough to be finished in an evening) is an up-to-date study of key personalities and events of bin Laden's organization and its development and decline. Based on numerous interviews and an awareness of the broader literature on the topic, this study measures the strengths and weaknesses of Al-Qaeda against a well-painted portrait of today's events and motive forces in the Middle East. It is full of recent history as well as contemporary references to the Arab Spring, drone attacks, bin Laden's killing, and their influence from the Pakistani rimlands to Libya. As important is the book's very insightful analysis of the evolution of America's security and foreign policy toward the region, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, that followed the original 9/11 events.
Gerges' book, full of accessible critcal analysis and opinion, would be an excellent addition to any university seminar on the topic. It would also serve as a solid introduction to a casual reader wanting to enrich their own understanding of today's world.

One person found this helpful

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James Kalomiris, The Peripatetic Reader

Homeland Security Should Read This Book

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2011

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This book is a well-rearched, even-handled examination of Al-Qeda, and shatters the misconceptions citizens and politicians have had on the "Islamic threat." As Gerges documents, the threat is there, there will likely be future events of terrorism, but there is no monolithic world-wide organization behind these acts. Instead, the groups are fragmentary. The actors are not sophisticated wide-eyed terrorists. The members of these ad-hoc organizations in fact are largely uneducated and frankly incompetant. What they have been very good at doing is scaring the begeezers out of the Western world, such that we are all afraid of our own shadows and are happy to destroy our own constitutional principles for the sake of feeling safe. In this respect Al Qeda has been very successful. The author details how since 9 11 the defense and counter-terrorism industry has mushroomed. Much like Dorothy ultimately finding out that the Wizard of Oz is actually a small, insignificant person, this book reveals Al-Qeda for what it is, a bunch of thugs increasingly excluded by their own peoples and lacking any legitmate purpose.

One person found this helpful

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Casey Hicks

Dispels Myths

Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2013

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Gerges completely turns what he calls the "terrorist narrative" on its head. He exposes al-Qaeda to be a numerically and structurally weak organization that holds no threat at present. Including citing that al-Qaeda only has around 300 fighting members at the moment.

Very good book, the only downside is it's shortness. A little more time could have been spent on each chapter.

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2019

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Best book ever

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Kristján Þór Sigurðsson

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2014

Very good

Brief Comments on The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda

Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2012

Having lived through a decade of the war on terror, I had not yet read a full length book on the subject. I followed the media, read news articles, book reviews, etc. I thought I had a good grasp of the issues. Having just read this excellent book, I realize there was much I did not know. This book disabused me of a number of misunderstandings. For example, I saw jihad as in large part an attack on the U.S. and Europe. Gerges shows that jihad has always had a more local focus and that Bin Laden's movement went against the grain. He also shows that Bin Laden alienated himself and Al Qaeda from the larger Muslim community and even other jihadi groups through his use of violence against the West. This is another thing I did not fully appreciate. Finally, Gerges explains the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Taliban in a way that makes it possible to distinguish them and their interests. Again, this was something that was a bit blurred in my mind prior to reading this book.
I would recommend and hope that many others, especially in the U.S., read this book. The war on terror has dominated our politics, culture, and legal system. It led us into two full scale wars. Given the profound affect it has had on our core institutions, we have a moral duty to have a basic understanding of the facts. There is no better person than Fawaz Gerges to help us fulfill this duty. In addition to being a leading scholar in his field, Gerges has been able to interview more people in the movement and access more source materials than a team of journalists and historians. As a non-expert in the field, this grounding in evidence is critical. Also, as a non-expert, I cannot read 10 books and 100 articles on the topic so I have to choose only the most informative, explanatory, and expert books on the topic. This is clearly such a book.

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Liberty Dog Productions

Prt of the solution

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2014

Maybe part of the solution is preventing people such as Luis Dumont who did much torture to people knowing how innocent they were and then raped & robbed various other innocents. Dumont obtained sadistic pleasure drowning people almost to death and raping women, undermining their rights, and then stealing money for himself after threatening people with much bloodshed. Although Luis Dumont is an American and shameful to any person of high integrity and any religion. You didn't have to be guilty for Dumont to torture you though. He is pleasured by torturing any minority member of any society when and if he can, and will ok, rob his own too.

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Top reviews from other countries

Steph S.

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on January 21, 2015

Verified Purchase

Required text for a course but good read regardless.

F Henwood

Cuts the Al-Qaeda Bogeyman Down to Size

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2012

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What sort of threat is Al-Qaeda today? Many commentators (especially in the United States) regard it as a cosmic menace, lurking everywhere, plotting to kill civilians en masse. Informed by this perception, a counter-terrorism bureaucracy has proliferated in the United States - 200 plus counter-terrorist organizations established since 9/11. In addition, the US has spent between one and three trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars justified in part as wars against 'terror' generally and Al-Qaeda specifically. Judging then by the resources allocated to fighting it, one might well conclude it is a most serious threat.

While terrorism is a real hazard, Fawaz A. Gerges shows that the perception of Al Qaeda as an existential threat is vastly overblown. Al Qaeda is a busted flush. The organisation has been degraded by a combination of ideological bankruptcy and external pressure. Military and police action has contributed to this but the organisation's fundamental weaknesses were and are political and ideological. Al-Qaeda's ambition to be the vanguard of a mass Muslim uprising, leading a transnational Jihad against the West, has failed.

But such a vision never had much credibility in the first place. Al-Qaeda was born out the defeat of armed Jihad in places like Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s, and its failure to make any headway elsewhere, like Indonesia. Its foundation in the badlands of Afghanistan in the 1990s was a marriage of convenience between two fugitives, the Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Saudi Osama Bin Laden, both of whose respective ambitions to topple the secular Egyptian and theocratic Saudi regimes had failed. Their joining forces in the 1990s was a desperate attempt to revive their flagging struggles. It was Bin Laden's vision of a war against America, Saudi Arabia's ally, (as opposed to Zawahiri's war against local, `apostate' regimes) that prevailed. But Bin Laden's (seeming) success in 9/11 did not provide him with the vindication he sought. 9/11 (widely condemned in much of the Islamic world) failed to galvanise the Muslim masses against the West. America's military response shattered Al-Qaeda Central and the Muslim masses did not rally to save it.

However, the United States' invasion of Iraq was a boon for Bin Laden. For a while, it generated a surge of pan-Islamic outrage against the United States, something 9/11 never achieved - and a provided Al-Qaeda's golden opportunity. It soon squandered it. Al-Qaeda failed to establish itself in Iraq for the same reasons that armed jihad failed in Egypt and Algeria: its indiscriminate violence against fellow believers, its insensitivity to local varieties and understandings of Islam, its failure to appreciate the strength of local nationalisms.

The book makes very clear that, down the years, Al-Qaeda's military weaknesses have been on account of its political weaknesses. These were manifest before 9/11 (even the relationship between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda before 9/11 was nowhere near as cosy as widely assumed) and they are especially pronounced now. It is true that the movement has a presence in places like Yemen, and several plots have been allegedly traced to there. But rather than see this as a revival of a transnational Jihad, its off-shoots should be understood as `franchise' elements, inspired by the tenets of Bin Laden's example and ideology, but not centrally directed by his successors. The fragmented nature of the organisation makes such central coordination all but impossible. Further, it does not follow that the local presence of Al-Qaeda inspired elements in trouble spots like Somalia and Yemen means that the prospects of a revived global Jihad are going to improve anytime soon. The various strands are too disparate to coalesce into any such entity.

This is not to say that Gerges is complacent. He does not say that terrorism is no longer a threat. The global, transnational jihad terrorist model has exhausted itself but there is a noticeable ideological disaffection among young Muslims resident in the West. This provides tinder for the replication of the `franchise' model of terrorism closer to home, and indeed the example of the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing in 2009 seems to be the shape of terrorism to come in the near to intermediate future. For Gerges the roots of this disaffection are in the West's on-going 'War on Terror' in Afghanistan-Pakistan and the `occupation' of Muslim lands. Although I differ from him regarding this, I accept his point that terrorism needs to be seen as a criminal and local threat, not an ideological, transnational menance. The scale of threat needs to be properly appraised. There are after all many possible threats and harms and proposed remedies need to be assessed in terms of costs and benefits. A dollar spent on fighting the threat of terrorism is a dollar that is not spent to fight another threat, like pandemic flu. With regards to terrorism, cost-benefit thinking has gone out of the window. Instead we have a never-ending demand on the part of an ever-inflating terrorism industry of a greater and greater share of resources, with no sense of competing priorities.

Overall, this book cuts Al-Qaeda down to the size. For this reason, many security experts will in all likelihood not bother to read this book, for many of them may have to look for work elsewhere if they accepted its analysis. Nonetheless, it deserves the widest readership and the broadest discussion.

2 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Interesting but more for students of the Middle East

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2013

Verified Purchase

I bought this book while I was in Jordon and have found it illuminating, although at times rather heavy weather. It is well researched and has one basic message, Al-Qaeda is not all its cracked up to be. Once you have absorbed that fact I found the book a bit boring. I was hoping for more details on the internal working of Al-Qaeda, particularly on the run up to Sept 11th.. I struggled a bit with all the Middle Eastern names, a problem not just associated with this book. It might have been helpful to have a Whose Who and pictures somewhere in the book so readers can understand the significance of each person. If you are au-fait with the Middle East and dont get confused between people it will be a lot easier to follow. Students may find this book useful and I am certainly more relaxed about Al-Qaeda than I used to be.

johnho

a good book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2012

Verified Purchase

its a book people should read and have to learn about the world outside our own windows, so glad he took the time to write it and open my eyes, im english and only hear the BBC reporting, so when this pops up, i get my mind opened

Dr. Gavin Hall

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 13, 2013

Verified Purchase

Very well written and argued, Compliments the Far Enemy superbly in providing a clear picture of just what threat Al Qaeda, esp Al Qaeda Central, plays in the modern world.

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