Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu

From Publishers Weekly
Trofimov covers Islamic culture for the Wall Street Journal, a wide beat that has him reporting stories from West Africa to Central Asia and even in Eastern Europe. This political travelogue includes dispatches from the front lines of the American invasion of Iraq and the subsequent attempts at creating a democratic regime. There are plenty of by now familiar stories of American troops and politicians bumbling through an increasingly resentful Iraqi society (including the deaths of an Italian diplomat and legitimate Iraqi politician at the hands of U.S. troops). But Trofimov gets fresh material on Saudi Arabia, where, despite severe economic downturns, men continue to hire thousands of foreign workers because they refuse to trust fellow "sex-obsessed" Saudis to chauffeur their wives who are forbidden from driving. By contrast, in the African nation of Mali, Islam exists comfortably alongside indigenous religions, resulting in a healthy democratic environment. If there isn't much of a theme to all this globe hopping beyond showing that Islam is a lot more diverse than most Americans realize, Trofimov puts just the right blend of cultural perspective and personal experience into his tour. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"To read Yaroslav Trofimov's dispatches from around the Muslim world in The Wall Street Journal was to find the unexpected, the interesting and the true. Now he has delivered a beautifully written book that is at once enormously well reported, humane and amusing, even as he takes on such serious subjects as the deeply flawed occupation of Iraq. I could not recommend it more highly."
--Peter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst, author of Holy War, Inc.

"Yaroslav Trofimov writes in such an eloquent and vivid way that, while reading this fascinating book, we involuntarily travel with its author through the lands of Islam. It is an immensely instructive expedition inside a world that amazes us with its richness, variety, and astonishing paradoxes."
--Ryszard Kapuscinski

"Yaroslav Trofimov's Faith at War is not only a breathtaking account of what a sharp-eyed reporter sees, feels and understands under fire and duress while crisscrossing the Muslim world set ablaze by the consequences of 9/11; it is also a great contribution to the intricate relation between faith, war and terror which is at the core of the new century and will be molding the state of world affairs for quite a while. A brilliant narrative, with a vibrant human dimension."
--Gilles Kepel, Professor and Chair of Middle East Studies, Institute of Political Studies, Paris; author of The War for Muslim Minds and Jihad

"Faith at War is a clear-eyed and compelling narrative from behind the front lines of the ever escalating conflict between Islam and the West. From Jeddah to Baghdad, from Kabul to Beirut, Trofimov's stories of death, honor, intrigue and war provide a penetrating, nuanced, and necessary antidote to the bland homilies of the nightly news."
--Craig Unger, author of House of Bush, House of Saud

"A landmark book about the crisis of Islam today. Trofimov takes us into a Muslim world as much at war with itself as it is with American cultural hegemony, to places where McDonald's competes with Wahhabi fundamentalism and memory of the Crusades is as fresh as rage over the most recent air strike by American F-18s. His work brings to mind the best of V. S. Naipaul."
--Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill


Book Description
An eye-opening political travelogue that reveals the Muslim world as never before

Drawing on reporting from more than a dozen Islamic countries, Faith at War offers an unforgettable portrait of the Muslim world after September 11. Choosing to invert the question of what "they" have done to "us," Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov examines the unprecedented American intrusion in the Muslim heartland and the ripples it has caused far beyond the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. What emerges is a penetrating portrait of people, faith, and countries better known in caricature than reported detail. The ordinary Muslims, influential clerics, warlords, jihadis, intellectuals and heads of state we meet are engaged in conversations that reveal the Muslim world to us from a new, unexpected perspective.

In Mali, one of the most successful democracies in Africa, we encounter Ousmane Madani Haidara, an influential cleric who sees Wahhabi extremists, rather than his country's secular government, as the real enemy of the true faith. In Saudi Arabia, we explore the bizarre world of exporting dead bodies from a kingdom that bars the burial of non-Muslims. On a US Navy aircraft carrier floating just off the coast of Pakistan in October 2001, we witness the mechanics of war: the onboard assembly of bombs that, hours later, are seen on T.V. exploding in Kabul. And in Iraq, we accompany Trofimov as he negotiates his escape from an insurgent mob, rides in a Humvee with trigger-happy GIs, and gets lectured by a Shiite holy man on why America is the foe of mankind.

Whether exploring the badlands of the Sahara or a snow-covered village of Bosnian mujahedeen, Faith at War helps us understand the hidden relationships and often surprising connections, so crucial to America's future, that link the Islamic world to our own.


About the Author
Yaroslav Trofimov, who reported from the Middle East for a variety of publications during the 1990s and speaks Arabic, joined The Wall Street Journal in 1999 and became the newspaper's roving foreign correspondent for the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and the Balkans in 2001. He lives with his family in Rome. For more information, please visit www.faithatwar.com.



Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

Eye-popping peregrinations in places where people are most likely to succeed in hating Americans-and in killing us, too. Soviet-born, Rome-resident Wall Street Journal correspondent Trofimov-his Italian passport comes in handy, we see-has been traveling about the Muslim world for years, speaks Arabic and knows his way around the Arab street. It's a dusty road, filled with people who have lately come to dislike the U.S., thanks to "a nagging suspicion among some Muslims, a firm belief among others, that what started as a war against terrorism in 2001 is mutating into an intractable, almost apocalyptic conflict between the West and Islam." But out in the tonier neighborhoods, where the doctors and government folk live, hating Americans has been de rigueur for years now; even the staff of the Jeddah Chuck E. Cheese, by Trofimov's account, is likely to assume that any Westerner is a Zionist spy. The fact is, several interviewees suggest, the greater the American influence in the region, the more likely it is that Islamists will flourish. (Not all Americans are verboten: one semiofficial Yemeni newspaper Trofimov thumbs through features a long op-ed piece by Klansman David Duke.) Trofimov roams the Arab world looking for evidence of how we're doing out there. The answer is not encouraging: having weathered ethnic slaughter, many Bosnian Muslims are drifting into the fundamentalist camp; secular democracies such as Tunisia are steadily losing ground to the mullahs; a steadily poorer Saudi Arabia is ever more "defiantly different from the West in its core"; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, where, relative to the size of the force there, American casualties are as high as in Iraq, whilein Iraq, those who were supposed to cheer our liberating them are counting coup on the bodies of our soldiers. As one mullah says, "We only believe in American technology. We don't believe in American democracy, because the Americans themselves don't have any."Essential for readers walking the minefield of U.S.-Arab relations-for anyone trying to follow the news.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices