A September 18th article in the Books & Arts section of The Economist compares Alison Pargeter's The New Frontiers of Jihad: Radical Islam in Europe to Bruce Riedel's The Search for Al Qaeda. Here's a quote:
Mr Riedel gives a top-down account of jihadism through profiles of key al-Qaeda leaders: Mr bin Laden; his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri; Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda’s especially vicious Iraq branch. By contrast, Ms Pargeter adopts a bottom-up approach in analysing the many strands of Islamist ideology as it has manifested itself in Europe, whether in the Madrid and London bombings, or the culture wars over Salman Rushdie’s books and Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
The complete review is available at economist.com.
