Pb, in-8, 327 pp., map, bibliography, index.
Bio: Gilles Kepel, (born June 30, 1955) is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West. He is Professor at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Chair at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. He has been described by Alain Elkann as “the best possible guide through the frightening labyrinth of militant Islam.”
Kepel has made significant contributions to the understanding of Islam as an ideological, political, and social force, both in the Muslim world and within immigrant communities in the West. He has focused in particular on the fundamentalist phenomenon, showing that since the 1970s fundamentalism has been a crucial force throughout the world and across religions—among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews as well as Muslims. Fundamentalism is to a large extent a negative reaction to modernity, which it views as an external corruption that must be eradicated in order to return to an earlier age of religious purity.

According to Kepel, jihadi terrorism is caused by fundamentalist Islam, an ideology which clashes with the values of Western democracies.

Modern Standard Arabic
The meanings of fitna as found in Classical Arabic largely carry over into Modern Standard Arabic, as evidenced by the recitation of the same set of meanings in Hans Wehr's Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic.[5] In addition, Wehr glosses the noun fitna as also meaning "charm, charmingness, attractiveness; enchantment, captivation, fascination, enticement, temptation; infatuation, intrigue; sedition, riot, discord, dissension, civil strife."

Buckwalter & Parkinson, in their frequency dictionary of Arabic, list the noun fitna as the 1,560th most frequent word in their corpus of over 30 million words from Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic dialects. They gloss fitna as meaning "charm, allure, enchantment; unrest; riot, rebellion."


src: wiki, 20190225