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Review
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, while in 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. (Kirkus Reviews)
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Yaroslav Trofimov, who had previously worked as a reporter in the Middle East, returned to the region two days after the September 11 attack on America. He spent the following three years crisscrossing the Islamic world, from the rebel badlands of Africa's Ivory Coast to the Taliban-infested mountains of southern Afghanistan. A speaker of Arabic, he penetrated the deepest corners of war-torn Arab lands, trekking in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah's militiamen and finding himself stuck in a roomful of anti- American insurgents in Iraq's Sunni Triangle. Mingling with ordinary Muslims, prominent clerics, and heads of state alike, Trofimov paints a ground-level picture of the Islamic world as it is being changed by America's war on terror and by a Western onslaught that's without precedent since colonial times. The Muslim countries and regions through which Trofimov travels, from Kosovo to Kuwait and Kenya to Kandahar, reveal the pitfalls of trying to revamp a civilization that's so misunderstood, and that often sees only the worst in our intentions. A subtle and provocative portrait of a critical period in Muslim history, FAITH AT WAR introduces the hidden relationships and often surprising connections that link the Islamic world to our own.
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