On the Road to Kandahar

More about the book

From one of the world’s leading experts in modern Islamic militancy comes an intellectual and personal voyage through the Islamic world, the Muslim faith, and its perception throughout the world. A brilliant, fearless journalist who knows huge areas of the Islamic world intimately, Jason Burke now turns to the wider question of how we are to get to grips with radical Islam and what it really means. Burke has travelled all over the great arc of Islamic land, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. In describing this journey, On the Road to Kandahar shows how various and completely unmonolithic Islam really is and how the sort of standard Western generalizations about it are both stupid and dangerous. Burke has met berbers in the Atlas mountains, Palestinian politicians, and hardline Taliban mullahs, and has examined how the actions of an extreme minority have exploited Islam, provoking fear and terror. And he explains how and why Western prejudices and stereotypes have evolved for what is actually a diverse cultural and historical heritage – and what the future holds.