God Has Ninety-Nine Names
Reporting from a Militant Middle East
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER IN TODAY'S MIDDLE EAST
God Has Ninety-Nine Names is a gripping, authoritative account of the epic battle between modernity and militant Islam that is is reshaping the Middle East.
Judith Miller, a reporter who has covered the Middle east for twenty years, takes us inside the militant Islamic movements in ten countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Isreal and Iran. She shows that just as there is no unified Arab world, so there is no single Islam: The movements are as different as the countries in which they are rooted.
Vivid and comprehensive, Miller's first-and report reveals the meaning of the tumultuous events that will continue to affect the prospects for Arab-Isreali peace and the potential for terrorism worlwide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Indispensable for Middle East watchers, Miller's eye-opening, firsthand report begins in Sudan in 1985 with the jubilant public execution of Mahmoud Taha, founder of a nonviolent Islamic reformist group. His conviction for sedition and heresy by a militant Muslim regime that commits appalling crimes, she observes, should serve as a warning to other Middle Eastern states tempted to institute theocratic rule. In virtually every country she visited-Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.-Miller, New York Times correspondent and former Cairo bureau chief, found that the appeal of fundamentalist, militant Islam was growing, though it was often brutally suppressed, as in Algeria, where a war raging between the secular government and armed Islamic radicals has claimed an estimated 40,000 lives. In Israel in 1993, she interviewed a terrorist of the Muslim group Hamas and met with members of the largely nonviolent Islamic movement, which was increasingly divided over whether Arabs should integrate into Israeli society or pursue cultural and institutional separatism. Her trenchant observations on Libya, Lebanon, Jordan and Iran round out a compelling odyssey.
