Roger Hardy, the author of The Muslim Revolt: A Journey Through Political Islam, is very much aware that skeptical readers may brush his literature off as “just another book about political Islam” — but it’s not. Hardy confronts this idea early on and offers a unique take on the issue inspired by a 30-year personal quest throughout the Muslim world.

As is necessary, Hardy summarizes historical events by casually leading the reader from the dawn of Islam and the Crusades and fast-forwards all the way to Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. He continues the narrative in emphasizing the influences of Hassan Al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Al-Qaeda’s de facto leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri — illustrating, although notoriously, the incredible importance that Egypt has played in political Islam.

“Egypt’s role in the Muslim revolt has been crucial. [… It has ] struggled to find answers to the question that has haunted Muslims for more than two centuries: how to revive and reinvigorate Islam in a world dominated by Western power, technology and culture?”

As with any book on Islam, there will be an expected overlap in content when talking about the Battle of Karbala, when Imam Hussein was martyred, or the consequences of 9/11. What Hardy does well though is capture the reader’s attention by weaving ‘stories from the ground’ with millennium-old traditions.

Rare indeed is investigative thought that aids the reader in understanding a fractured part of the world; rarer is the opportunity to have a journalist-cum-travel guide trace the intricate mind-set of Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya during the final moments of the mass explosion in Bali or beg to understand the House of Saud.

“[...] The fact remains that a flow of Saudi petrodollars has — with or without their knowledge — helped fund, legitimize and mobilize a movement of global jihad [author’s italics]. Even if they were not directly responsible for the rise of Al-Qaeda, they cultivated the soil from which it sprang.”

However, if Egypt is the womb from which political Islam has grown, and if the ideology’s power culminated in Saudi Arabia, a literary hurdle perhaps is found in Shia Iran.

Iran is one of only a handful of countries with a Shia majority, and its Islamic Revolution was surely a watershed for the ‘Shia Crescent’ in reiterating just how powerful the persuasion of religious thought can be. In 1997, shortly after President Muhammad Khatami was elected, he stated that for Iran, “a civil society in an Islamic context” was desired. Whether that truism has been followed in the years during his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reign may still be unanswered. To paraphrase, to determine the impact of the Islamic Revolution is too soon to say — but undoubtedly, without it, political Islam would not be where it is today, if only because of the number of people it has affected.

Jumping from continent to continent, paralleling the course in which political Islam has taken in its history, The Muslim Revolt does best in acknowledging that the reader possesses a working knowledge of the movement of Islam across the Middle East and the ‘Muslim Archipelago’. Aiming to bridge the gap between East and West, the book fittingly opens with a once-Indonesian resident — President Barack Obama and his much publicized address at Cairo University in 2009.

“‘I have come here […] to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.’”

Perhaps one of Hardy’s reasons for doing this is to ‘put a face to a name’, highlighting a particular man who is unafraid of bridging divides and approaching once-taboo subjects. The book both educates the reader in learning from the journalist in Hardy and to a degree, a trailblazer like Obama, in their journeys across the philosophical realm of political Islam. To the four corners of the Earth this book ventures, and to your bookshelf it should find refuge. bt