Jeremy Harding

The American whaleman was a kind of prospector, the ancestor of the oilman, while the New England whaling industry itself . . . was killed off by the refining of kerosene from fossil fuel. Ishmael is an active participant in the process of extraction for profit, turning the wheels of production at home while extending the frontier abroad.

How interesting, then, that at the moment of the great unleashing, as the jihadists-salafists began to disperse, to Pakistan, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, the United Kingdom and Bosnia, and at the point at which the Gulf War had discredited the conservative Islamist option in the eyes of so many believers, Kepel should conclude with some relief that the whole business of jihad lay in ruins. What he means is that the bid to seize power by force and govern by the laws of God had failed everywhere except in Iran, and that it would not succeed anywhere in the foreseeable future: nowhere was there evidence of the class alliances that Khomeini had forged. To Kepel, the high-tide mark of Islamism was reached in 1989, with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, an Islamist regime taking power in Sudan, the fatwa against Rushdie, the FIS poised for government and the emergence of the Palestinian Muslim Brothers (Hamas) from the first Intifada to challenge the PLO’s nationalist agenda. It even shook France’s ‘deep-rooted secularism’: ‘the year when all parties were supposed to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in a spirit of consensus’ became a year of bitter recrimination over the wearing of veils in schools.

Every afternoon on RMC INFO, a French commercial radio network where phone-ins are the order of the day, the concerned but knowing voice of the sex counsellor Brigitte Lahaie can be heard fielding calls from listeners/participants. Her motto last week was ‘sexuality at the heart of a harmonious life’. One caller wanted to know if it was OK, as a woman, to be watching X-rated...

The sight of a man in fatigues stalking around a poor country is guaranteed to arouse the interest of ideologues in richer ones, whatever their persuasion. Yet the recent ‘martyrdom’ of Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the Unita rebel movement in Angola, has had nothing like the same effect as the death of Che Guevara 35 years ago in Bolivia, mourned by millions of vicarious...