Summary
Title: Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader
Author: edited by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019515715X
Pro:
• Extensive original material not easily accessible otherwise
• Demonstrates a continuum of Islamic extremism for some sixty years
Con:
• None
Description:
• Collection of speeches, interviews, and other original source material on radical Islamic extremists
• Many primary documents from government agencies in wake of September 11, 2001 attacks
• Detailed chronology of Middle Eastern terrorism against Americans; Glossary
Book Review
So much information about what Islamists think and say gets filtered through so many different secondary sources that it is easy to lose sight of just what is going on. There is, then, a real need for a collection of original documents that can document the movement of Islamic extremists - and that's just what Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin have created.
Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader was originally published in 2002, gathering together not only a wealth of material relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but also Islamic extremism throughout the past decades. There are, as described above, many speeches and excerpts from the writings of various Islamists going all of the way back to the 1940s, thus helping demonstrate that the ideas of terrorists like Osama bin Laden are part of a larger and richer Islamic tradition. The book also contains reactions to those attacks from the Middle East, American governmental documents and Executive Orders, and more - nearly 100 documents in all.
These latter selections will probably be more interesting some time in the future when researchers want to look back and get a sense of how things progress in the aftermath of the attacks. Right now, however, it is likely that most readers will focus upon the material written over the past decades by the Islamic extremists. These are not short quotes like you might find in other books; they are instead detailed explanations of a worldview which has captivated the imagination of many Muslims in the Middle East yet remained strangely unknown in the West.
Selections range anywhere from a half page to several pages. Key pieces include "Paving the Way" by Sayyid Qutb on the importance of jihad, Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against the "Zionist-crusaders alliance," Ayman al-Zawahiri on the importance of Afghanistan and need to attack America, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's "Islam is Not a Religion of Pacifists." Some are speeches, some are journal articles, some are interviews, and there are even some scholarly analyses of the primary literature.
Many responsible and moderate Muslim leaders continually emphasize that Islam is a religion a peace, but if this is true then it begs the question of just how so many others could possibly conduct violence and terrorism in the name of Islam. These selections, I think, do a very good job at representing the Islamist ideology, how it is justified, and what Islamists hope to achieve through their efforts. Anyone who asked "how could this happen" in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., could find a lot answers by reading some of the material in this volume.
