Away from Chaos - by Gilles Kepel (Hardcover)

About the Book

Away from Chaos is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. Gilles Kepel offers a clear and persuasive narrative of the long-term causes of tension while seamlessly incorporating on-the-ground observations and personal experiences from the people who lived through them.

Book Synopsis

The Middle East is one of the world's most volatile regions. In recent years, from the optimism and then crushing disappointment of the Arab uprisings through the rise and fall of the Islamic State, it has presented key international security challenges. With the resilient jihadi terror threat, large-scale migration due to warfare and climate change, and fierce competition for control over oil, it promises to continue to be a powder keg. What ignited this instability?

Away from Chaos is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. Gilles Kepel, called "France's most famous scholar of Islam" by the New York Times, offers a clear and persuasive narrative of the long-term causes of tension while seamlessly incorporating on-the-ground observations and personal experiences from the people who lived through them.

From the Yom Kippur/Ramadan war of 1973 to the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Away from Chaos weaves together the various threads that run through Middle East politics and ties them to their implications on the global stage. With keen insight stemming from decades of experience in the region, Kepel puts these chaotic decades in perspective and illuminates their underlying dynamics. He also considers the prospects of emerging from this long-lasting turmoil and for the people of the Middle East and the world to achieve a more stable future.

Review Quotes

A powerful, sweeping overview of major Middle Eastern political change since the 1970s--W. Andrew Terrill "Middle East Journal"

An excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region...devoid of the crippling ideological blinders that sometimes disfigure books about a part of the world so rife with ideology.--Michael J. Totten "The New York Times"

Gilles Kepel has long been France's most sophisticated scholar of radical Islam, and Away from Chaos is his personal and political summa--a remarkable synthesis of decades of passionate engagement with the Middle East.--Robert F. Worth, The New York Times Magazine

More than other observers of events in the Middle East and North Africa today, Kepel offers a persuasive framework for understanding the turbulence and uncertainty facing the region--and how events in one country affect those elsewhere in the region and beyond.--Dale F. Eickelman, coauthor of Muslim Politics

If you want to understand the contemporary Middle East, this is the place to begin. Gilles Kepel's book is a deeply insightful, empathetic, almost elegiac text that both explains how the region ended up in its present predicament and how it may find its way out of it.--Odd Arne Westad, author of The Cold War: A World History

Gilles Kepel has lived the torment of the modern Middle East as a scholar and, ultimately, as a target of the jihadists. In Away from Chaos, he narrates that tortured story and proposes a return for the steadying forces of a century ago--the European nations, a rising Russia, and the internal balancers of the Levant whose destiny is to bridge East and West.--David Ignatius, Washington Post

In Away from Chaos, Gilles Kepel, one of the world's most prominent scholars of Middle Eastern politics, provides a grand narrative of this region's history over the last four decades, explaining the rise and possible end of Islamism as a mobilizing force. Relying on his deep personal engagement with the Middle East and also with Islam in Europe, Kepel masterfully charts the region's upheavals and their grave implications for the West. What emerges is an intimate and deeply learned portrait--the culmination of a lifetime of study and sympathetic observation.--Bernard Haykel, Princeton University

Who else but Gilles Kepel could have written this seductively provocative book? Kepel has drawn on his decades of deliberation and argument in this tour d'horizon of the development of Islamist movements in the Middle East since the 1960s. Away from Chaos offers a review, equally challenging and accessible, of the modern political history of the Middle East.--Lisa Anderson, author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century

About the Author

Gilles Kepel is chair of Mediterranean and Middle East studies at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and former special envoy of President Emmanuel Macron of France. He contributes to Al-Monitor and is the author of many acclaimed books, including Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (2017).