Gilles Kepel: Impish Like Voltaire

ABSTRACT

DECADENCE, CAPITULATION, CIVILIZATION

Civilization is neither easily nor clearly defined, wrote French historian Fernand Braudel in 1963.² Defining “civilization” is not as if one were describing “a straight line, a triangle, or a chemical compound,” he noted, and the humanities and social sciences do not allow for as definitive a definition as do the hard sciences. Yet, having emerged in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, the word “civilization” has since been used primarily in contradistinction to “savagery,” or “barbarity,” in Braudel’s telling.³ It is in this spirit that another Frenchman, novelist and traveler Sylvain Tesson, famously wrote that “civilization is when we have everything to lose,” whereas “barbarism is when they have everything to gain.”⁴ Civilization is thus a carrier of both moral and material values; it is “roads, ports, and docks” but is also “a modicum of arts and sciences and order and value systems.”⁵ In sum, argued Braudel, “civilization is a body of cultural effects; its geographic hearth is a cultural space; its history a cultural history . . . and the borrowings from one civilization to the next are cultural loans, or rather cultural transfers in both the material and spiritual sense.”⁶

It is in line with this that in 1956 French novelist and former Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux (1901–1976) would come to define “civilization” as a form of spirituality binding together those sharing a kindred history and a set of shared values. The essence of a civilization, he wrote, is all that which gathers around a religious text; and when a civilization shuns its foundational texts, its spiritual bearings as it were, when it is no longer capable of erecting a religious shrine, when it no longer quivers at the sight of a burial site, which is to say when it shirks the hearth of its “fundamental values,” it shrivels and dies.⁷ “That is the reality of our times,” proposed Malraux; and this phenomenon of cultural abdication was in his telling

In Chestertonian terms, Malraux seemed to suggest that when one no longer believes in God, one will believe in nothing; and when we have nothing to believe in, we become prey to believing in anything.⁹ “Civilization” is thus a “good book”—a book of values from which unfurl all that which characterizes the energy, the life, the history of a people, a book that may be a Torah, a Bible, a Qur'an etc., from which cultural rituals and accretions will accrue. Chiming in, Charles de Gaulle himself noted that “a people needs to have pride in self; they must be imbued in the dignity of saying ‘I am the fruit of a long history that is distinctly my own and mine alone, and that is nobody else’s.’”¹⁰ Alas, for advocates of this vision of the world, Christendom and the “Judeo-Christian” space seem to be an aging exhausted set of values shrinking before an Islam that is resurgent, dynamic, vernal, conquering, and in many ways seeking to dislodge Christendom and Judeo-Christian values. According to Qurʾan 3:110, Muslims are after all convinced to be “the finest nation that was brought forth to Mankind.”

And so, in this context, a “clash of civilizations” seems to be setting in, whereby two major “human blocks” are facing off: an aging exhausted block, on one hand, and an active dynamic vernal block, on the other hand: one that is self- assured, rising, conquering; the other in its twilight, timorous, self-effacing, fading. All one has to do is read the Qurʾan, the Sira/biography of the Prophet Muhammad, the Hadiths/sayings and acts of the Prophet Muhammad, to note the conquering imperial history of Islam on a global scale, the dedication of Islam to this model and its sanctification of it. Thus, the dichotomy above becomes abundantly clear: in a morphological approach, Christendom is an aging exhausted set of values, faced by an Islam that is a dynamic, youthful, conquering set of values that seek to dislodge Judeo-Christian values. And in a sense, the problem of “Western civilization” is not the dynamism of Islam but the hatred that the West has for itself and its accomplishments. Thus, and borrowing from Arnold Toynbee, French philosopher and public intellectual Michel Onfray stresses that civilizations collapse because they commit suicide; because of their own self-loathing; because they willingly cede their place to others; because they are embarrassed by their past, by their accomplishments, by their history, savory and unsavory as this history might be. Thus, this West, in its own self-abominating self-narrative, becomes fascist, racist, colonialist, slave trader, killer of the planet, polluter etc. . . . The West’s history is certainly not a blameless beatific one. Self-criticism is a necessity, of course, a great virtue and indeed a spawn of Western civilization, an outcome of the Age of Enlightenment. But self-loathing is not a virtue but indeed a destructive disorder that often culminates in suicidal ideation according to Onfray.¹¹ And so Malraux’s adage that “the nature of a civilization is all that which gathers around a religious principle” becomes all the more relevant in this sense, “and when our [Judeo-Christian] civilization relinquishes its ability to build a temple or a burial place, when it is no longer bound by an obligation to its fundamental values, it will decay and die.”¹²

In 1992, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, a great believer in liberal capitalist marketplace values, proclaimed “the end of history” following the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. This marked, in Fukuyama’s telling, the marketplace revolution’s triumph, the proletarian revolution’s failure, and consequently his “end of history” and the end of world conflicts as such. This was of course a pleasing observation. It was also naïve, ego-centric, empirically untenable, and historically unjustified. The end of the Cold War and the West’s triumph did not mean, as Fukuyama suggested, that there would be no more wars to come, cold or otherwise. Indeed, two years following Fukuyama’s watershed proclamation, in 1994, Mark Juergensmeyer published a book with the interrogatory title The New Cold War? Juergensmeyer’s question mark is well-nigh forgotten today. Yet it was in many ways premonitory, and in its time it dismantled Fukuyama’s overly Pollyannaish The End of History. In fact, a year prior, in 1993, Samuel Huntington published another watershed work (albeit a then much reviled one) in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Civilization.” In 1996, he followed it up and expanded it in a book by the same title, sapping Fukuyama’s proposition. Huntington was vituperated back in those days for daring to suggest that history had not ended as Fukuyama had proclaimed and that the erstwhile East-West global rivalries—child’s play relative to the clashes to come—were being replaced by a civilizational struggle; in simplistic terms, global struggles pitting a “Judeo-Christian” civilizational block against a “Muslim” one. In the twenty-first century, wrote Huntington in 1996, Islam will become more assertive, the West’s luster will be on the wane, and “Muslims will have a much greater awareness of . . . what distinguishes them from non-Muslims.”¹³ And although Muslims may “not necessarily be fundamentalist . . . [they] will be much more committed to Islam than their predecessors,” and the West will have its work cut out for it fending off the new (or renewed) Eastern peril coming North and leaving a more salient footprint on the West.¹⁴ Recalling Malraux from earlier in this text, the “fundamental problem for the West,” noted Huntington, “is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”¹⁵ “All we might do at this point,” Malraux would have noted, “is accept the reality and gravity of this phenomenon and attempt to slow down its progress.”¹⁶ While in 1996 Samuel Huntington might have been attacked for his daring thesis, some may be more inclined to accepting it today, consenting that instead of a putative “end of history” that we may be confronting in our times and in the decades to come, there may indeed be a “clash of civilizations” in the offing; that subduing one adversary does not entail the end of adversarial relations (Fukuyama’s “end of history”) in the history of human relations; and that other, perhaps more redoubtable adversaries may no doubt emerge, as had been the case throughout human history, to confront and seek to dismantle what might have come before.¹⁷

Interestingly, for four decades French Political Scientist and Philologist Gilles Kepel had visited, studied, probed, and warned about all those questions. For four decades, he had been contemplating these phenomena. For four decades, his predictions have been ignored in favor of soothing bien-pensance (conformism). Then in early 2023, arguably in an attempt to silence a clear-throated academic voice deviating from the normative Woke pieties,¹⁸ Kepel was unceremoniously “nudged” into early retirement from his tenured position at the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most prestigious grandes écoles.¹⁹ Undaunted, in late 2023 and early 2024, Kepel would publish back-to-back two additional premonitory “clarion calls”: Prophète en son pays (L’Observatoire, 2023), and Holocaustes; Israel, Gaza et la guerre contre l’Occident (Plon, 2024). Supplements, and urgent updates to a chain of tours de force that speckled his intellectual journey, Kepel’s new books remained true to his vocation as an Arabist, a pedagogue, and an honest interpreter of the Arab world and Islam, a role in which he comported himself as a “Prophet” not of doom but of reason and probity and eloquent perspicacious readings of (and for) our times, a lucid observer of the Middle East whose premonitions, informed by decades of study and cogitation and discernment, continue to caution and foretell, but also get overlooked, at the risk of our own civilizational perdition. In this, Kepel is representative of a dying breed of Middle East scholars—in the tradition of Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami—who bring a world of literary, cultural, social, philological, and anthropological knowledge to their craft, but who are replaced today by intellectual “fashionistas,” vacuous “Woke poseurs” who have little to offer in terms of substance and knowledge and much to pontificate in terms of “feel good” platitudes and mood-swings and opinions.²⁰

Both of Kepel’s new books, Prophète en son pays and Holocaustes, are antsy—yet profoundly learned—texts written in the tradition of another one of Kepel’s “war memoirs”: Chroniques d’une guerre d’Orient, which he had published in 2002, on the heels of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on New York and the Pentagon. But, whereas Chroniques might have, in Kepel’s words, been written based on testimonies hastily collected on the field, in the Middle East, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Holocaustes and Prophète are the fruit of long decades of study, contemplation, and analysis—a “temps long” perspective following 9/11. In this, Kepel brings much needed nuance, erudition, elegance, and a world of historical, literary, philological, and theological references into a time period taken to simplistic memes and soundbites of an over-credentialed punditry and a new age of social media frivolity. To use Norman Davies’ analogy, Kepel the humanist brings to his craft a variety of perspectives using “counterparts of the telescope, the microscope, the brain-scanner, and the geological probe.”²¹

Dealing primarily with the latest spat of violence (what he repeatedly refers to as the “hécatombe” carnage) between Israel and Hamas following the October 7, 2023, “pogroms,”²² Kepel’s Holocaustes brings a wider historical perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict, gazing at the even wider ramifications it is bound to have on the future of the West and Islam—the ongoing civilizational struggle between what Kepel has come to term “The Global North” facing off a rising “Global South.” Kepel published Prophète and Holocaustes back-to-back—the former in September 2023, the latter barely six months later, in March 2024. In fact, October 7 happened as Kepel was in the thick of promoting Prophète. Before long, his French and British television and radio interventions morphed from their intended “book talk” format to discussions and analyses of the Hamas October 7 attacks and their aftermath. That is how Holocaustes was born, notes Kepel; as an attempt to situate the October 7 events in the context of his forty years investigating and interpreting the Middle East, the Arab World, and Islam.

A book in four chapters augmented by a prologue and an epilogue, Holocaustes is a chronicle of what Kepel terms “Hamas’ pogrom-style razzia” raid,²³ Israel’s response to the attacks, the regional ramifications in the context of an Islamist “axis of resistance guided from the vantage point of Teheran,” and “the new world war being waged against the West, carried out on the frontlines of [decaying Western] moral values and a [surging] political demography being asserted in the name of a ‘Global South’ presented as uniform, coherent, and cohesive, but which is in fact more fractious and heterogeneous that it is made out to be” (Holocaustes, 13). An authoritarian bastion besotted by corruption and deficits of freedom, this “Global South” is depicted by prevalent orthodoxies as a righteous benevolent beatific David, facing a cruel “colonialist, racist, Islamophobic” Goliath, notes Kepel—a Goliath that is nevertheless “governed by rules of law and democratic principles” (Holocaustes, 13–14). Paradoxically, Kepel reminds his readers, the abominated “Global North” remains the Eldorado of “Global Southerners,”²⁴ their prime immigration destination, both legal and illegal, “in search of economic wellbeing and higher levels of social justice denied in most countries of the ‘Global South’” (Holocaustes, 14). Thus, writes Kepel, the demography of the Global North “gets inflated by newcomers, diluted by increasingly growing cultural and ethnic divergences . . . leading to heightened conflictual relationships” between the values of host societies, and ill-accommodated newcomers, resulting in “identity subversions . . . [and a] ‘Clash of Civilizations’ the battlegrounds of which have become the campuses of elite Western universities” (Holocaustes, 15).

This phenomenon, notes Kepel, bound to have profound social and cultural ramifications with the potential of transforming Western civilization, “subverting” the historical identities of host societies, continues to be ignored, its dangers diminished, and its “whistleblowers” dismissed or discredited as hysterical sensationalists, or worse, racists (Holocaustes, 191–92). Privileging uncomfortable realities grounded in “knowledge” and rising above feel-good “ideologies,” Gilles Kepel has been among the most articulate whistleblowers of our generation, pointing to the “cognitive deficiencies” of intellectual elites and political classes relentless in their dampening of the coming dangers of what Malraux called earlier “the violent rise of Islam” and muffling the alarm bells this “rise” is sounding (Holocaustes, 15, 189).

Pedagogic indigence, failing public education systems, and misappropriation, mismanagement, misuse, or plain squandering of public funds are some of the reasons Kepel attributes to the failures of interpretation plaguing Middle East studies in our time, presaging flawed attitudes and failed policies that have proved incapable of stemming the tides of a domineering militant Islam overtaking the West (Holocaustes, 190). Again, in Kepel’s telling, those sounding alarm bells get vilified, and initially narrow battle lines eventually spread like wildfire morphing into a full-blown cultural civilizational struggle

Thus, the crucial question of the place of Islam in Western societies falters in a tug of war pitting, on one hand, a hysterical “Far Right” obsessed with a looming “Grand Remplacement,” and, on the other hand, a “Radical Left flattering Muslim separatists in an effort to appeal to electorates composed of [mainly Muslim] immigrants” (Holocaustes, 191). This is the great schema in which Kepel frames Hamas’ October 7 attacks, depicting them primarily as a struggle between a “Global South” meting out “the ultimate revenge” against an arrogant colonial “Global North”—a Western civilization represented by an Israel deserving of the frenzied orgies of “pillage, rapes, mutilations, and murders visited on her . . . [deemed] edifying heroic deeds honoring Muslims and their potential sympathizers around the globe” (Holocaustes, 18–19). This is all the more impactful, notes Kepel, in light of the October 7 massacres coinciding with a rising malaise overtaking a geriatric timorous Europe ill-prepared to adequately deal with its own “interethnic, interconfessional tensions issuing from seemingly unstoppable irreversible illegal [Muslim] migrations from across the Mediterranean” (Holocaustes, 20).

Another combustive “franc-parler” aspect of Holocaustes was Kepel’s framing of the October 7 attacks as classic textual example of “Arabian tribal razzias” with an Islamic flavor—orgies of conquest, plunder, abductions, and capture of slaves, emulating theological (Islamic) templates emerging in the seventh century. Indeed, notes Kepel, the October 7 terror, slaughter, and collection of “human trophies of war” were all reminiscent of early Islamic war conducts. Indeed, historically inter-tribal razzias were surprise-raids intended to stun and paralyze an enemy; they were swift, brutal, merciless, aiming to annihilate rival tribes, extinguishing any possibility of their eventual economic or social recovery (Holocaustes, 26). With the coming of Islam, this tribal war tactic would garner modern theological trappings, becoming the “Fatah” Muslim Conquests, offering the conquered populations the blessings of conversion to the new faith as alternative to total annihilation (Holocaustes, 27). Thus, notes Kepel, viewed as an “epic” of Muslim heroism and righteousness, the 9/11 attacks were termed “the Blessed Twin-Razzias by their perpetrators”; similar surprise raids were “often evoked in [other] modern anti-Israel attacks initiated by the Lebanese Hezbollah, and a motley Islamist Palestinian groups, carried out to the rimed chants of Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, Jayshu Muhammad sa-yaʿud (‘Khaybar Khaybar, O Jew, Muhammad’s army is coming back for you’)” (Holocaustes, 24–27).²⁵ Not an insignificant anecdote relative to this common “war cry,” Kepel reminds us that the first long-range missile that Hezbollah launched in the direction of Israel in 2006 was “christened Khaybar”; likewise is “Khaybar Iran’s newly unveiled ballistic missile in 2023, capable of reaching Israel” (Holocaustes, 25). Yet, one needn’t take Kepel’s claims at face value; the 1988 Hamas Covenant is available on the web, and its Article 7 (among others) is unequivocal in its triumphalist razzia-style genocidal plans for Israel.²⁶

In sum, whereas the world continues to slumber in the illusion that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a national territorial dispute, Holocaustes, in line with the corpus of Gilles Kepel’s scholarship over the last four decades, brings back to the fore the foundational theological bearings of the struggle. Thus, he writes, the October 7, 2023, razzia was a return to the sources of sorts, a reactivation of the “universal Jihad” from Palestine, meant to bring a reputably invincible Western colossus to its knees. In this, Kepel recalls Bin Laden’s October 7, 2001, triumphal celebration of the 9/11 attacks—twenty-two years to the day before October 7, 2023—declaring “America will never again know the taste of safety, not before Palestine [is liberated] and all the infidel armies of the West are chased out of the holy lands [of Islam]” (Holocaustes, 29).

THE FORMATION OF AN ORACLE

But Gilles Kepel has been saying this “for a thousand years.”²⁷ In his September 2023 intellectual autobiography, Prophète en son pays, Kepel traces the main milestones of his academic journey: his intellectual coming-of-age story, from a doctoral student exploring a dissertation topic in early 1980s Egypt, to a distinguished elder scholar “nudged into forced retirement”²⁸ in 2023, to a clear-eyed visionary sounding the alarm of Islamism at every turn during a career spanning forty years, yet remaining a prophet (some say of doom) ignored by his peers, often sneered, seldom given his due in the place of his birth—a France that seems to be succumbing to radical Islam’s mission creep. A distinguished specialist of the modern Arab world, Gilles Kepel seems increasingly to have become an oracle whose pointed analyses and predictions have come to pass, but who, as the antinomy in his Prophète en son pays book title suggests, has come to terms with the reality that “no prophet is accepted in his own place” (Luke 4:24); that “a prophet has no honor in his own country” (John 4:44); that in the “twilight of his career,” he will have earned the bête noire distinction from traditional French specialists of Islam and the Arab world.

A gifted Arabist²⁹ and author of more than a dozen volumes dealing with Islam and the Arab world, translated into multiple languages, Gilles Kepel is a public intellectual with a global reach and an orientalist before Orientalism made his noble craft ignoble. In his four decades of probing Islam, Kepel crisscrossed the Mediterranean traveling through North Africa, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf, teaching at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and Sciences Po in Paris, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Maxime Rodinson, Ernest Gellner, Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Salman Rushdie, Charles Issawi, and Bernard Haykel, and walking the hallways of NYU, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Princeton, and Paris’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Snubbed and often sullied by those contesting his analyses, in 2017 Kepel became the object of an ISIS Fatwa³⁰ making his killing licit and necessitating almost two years of around the clock police protection. In 2008, he had already received the honor of getting expelled from the embattled Middle East Studies Association—North America’s once prestigious learned society ostensibly dedicated to the study of the Middle East “foster[ing] . . . high standards of scholarship and teaching . . . and defend[ing] academic freedom,”³¹ yet of late succumbing to political advocacy and the militant bien-pensant anti-Israel brand of Middle East studies.

In Prophète, his bildungsroman, Kepel advances a thesis that he revisits throughout Holocaustes, which is that the modern Western university might have betrayed its mission when it comes to the study of the Middle East in particular, the transmission of knowledge in more general terms. In Kepel’s telling, Western academe does not like—and indeed discourages—probing and studying Islam and the Arab world with the same academic rigor it demands in other areas of knowledge, opting instead for engineered “debate” and “groupthink” to suit preconceived assumptions and protected biases. Throughout his narrative, Kepel notes that the kind of analysis that he did in his own work and during four decades of teaching is no longer popular in Western academies; the intimate knowledge of Islam, its languages, the Arabs, and the Middle East, all of which require asking uncomfortable deeply probing questions, in an empathetic but still critical approach, is no longer accepted in an academic universe that is largely militant rather than scholarly. In this sense, Kepel is in line with traditional historians bemoaning the “decline of factual history . . . especially in the classroom, [privileging] the rise of ‘empathy’ . . . [rather than] the study of conventional ‘facts.’”³²

The subtle deadpan wit of Kepel’s prose takes us into the inner-sanctums of his orientalist’s expeditions, dropping along our path didactic anecdotes, with a Gallic Voltairean flair reminiscent of the penetrating, playful levity of a Bernard Lewis, or a Fouad Ajami. In this, Kepel is a master satirist, reflecting on our times’ maladies with fastidious clarity, coherence, heed, but also irony. An intellectual jouster, he seeks to unshackle a modern collective consciousness tethered to an endogenous self-promoting self-perpetuating bien-pensance. Kepel’s jeux de mots, throbbing with mockery, and sarcasm, read like relentless indictments of dogmatism, mediocrity, political correctness, and the suicidal passivity gripping our modern leaderships and intellectual classes bowing obediently before the dangers confronting Western civilization. In one instance, Kepel relates a story told him by French Arabist and teacher Henri Laoust, about an unnamed French colleague, a specialist of Hanbalism, who was hosted by King Ibn Saud in the early twentieth century: “Impressed by the erudition of the [French] professor who knew perfectly well the doctrine upon which he had founded his kingdom, Ibn Saud invited him to Arabia, lodged him in his own palace . . . treated him so lavishly to the point of putting at his disposal his own harem (an offer [the French professor] will have declined)” stressed Kepel (Prophète, 267). The perfunctory parentheses at the end of the quote, perhaps otherwise imperceptible to the casual reader, exuded the discreet Gallic facetiousness with which Kepel reveals well-kept trade secrets—and Middle Eastern clichés that are neither trite, nor clichés—a stylistic and intellectual elegance permeating both Holocaustes and Prophète en son pays. (Incidentally, the “professor” in question, passing on the complementary Harem lavished upon him by Ibn Saud, was rumored to have been gay [Prophète, 267].)

The ability to look at events and actors critically is crucial, Kepel keeps reminding us throughout his work. However, he notes, Wokeism has made this approach impossible. Wokeism, as the new offspring of postcolonialism in his telling, wishes us to remain uncritical of Islam, Muslims, and Arabs. Wokeism, as Kepel defines it, is an approach that seeks to “deconstruct meta-narratives,” depicting the West as essentially colonialist, noting that Western modernity, technological advancements, military and economic superiority, etc. were all made possible thanks to the West’s colonial legacy, its brutal exploitation of “Global South” colonies, and that the West ought to be taken to task for its colonialist past and be made to make amends for it and pay restitutions to the former colonized and their descendants. This part, Kepel recognizes, is legitimate, and the causes and effects of Western colonialism ought to be examined, probed, debated, and critiqued. In this sense, Wokeism and postcolonialism are on solid moral ground. However, while this Wokeist deconstruction of the West (holding a mirror to its face so to speak) may be warranted, legitimate, even righteous—in other words “Woke”—its converse, the deconstruction of the East, Islam, Islamic colonialism, and what they wrought on their own colonial chattel is frowned upon and indeed is deemed impermissible. In fact, notes Kepel, a critical approach to Islam in our time, a deconstruction of Islam so to speak, would cause foolhardy scholars taking such an approach to be tarred, doxed, silenced, muzzled, and cancelled. The Muslim meta-narrative is therefore untouchable, lest one wishes to be labeled an Islamophobe (Prophète, 39–45).

Whereas the canonical texts of other religions (Christianity and Judaism, namely) are game for criticism, touching the canonical texts of Islam and treating them critically is anathema—again at the risk of earning those fiddling with them the effective “Islamophobe” conversation killer. Yet, in an open secular society it ought to be legitimate, nay, righteous, to submit the sacred texts (and for that matter any texts, sacred and profane alike) to rigorous critical scrutiny. Yet this infantilizing shielding of Islam has become the cause célèbre of an erstwhile secular (not to say atheist) progressive Left that has obviously betrayed its ideals, notes Kepel. In this process, orientalism, which is to say the study and critical exploration of the Orient and Islam as such, has become the pursuit of the vile, the racist, the Islamophobe—an academic pursuit that is therefore condemned, to be ignored at best, sullied and treated as a form of racism at worse. That is why, notes Kepel, the “Leftist hegemony” prevailing at Western universities discourages and disparages the non-laudatory non-hagiographic study of Islam, in an academic environment and among militant scholars where hostility to the “paradoxical” has become the norm (Prophète, 26).³³ For “Third-Worldist arbiters of academic elegance,” writes Kepel, looking critically at the Arab world and Islam has become a topic to be made null and void, given its connections to American imperialism and its Zionist master (Prophète, 27). Today, this same patronizing infantilizing, shielding of Islam has become the orthodoxy and preoccupation of Woke imperialism, with those dissenting from its catechism sullied, doxed, cancelled. And with universities clamoring to jump on this bandwagon, they seem to have morphed from venerable purveyors of knowledge to banal groupthink enforcers. Writes Kepel, at a time when even Saudi Arabia is shedding its Wahhabist rigidity under the modernizing gaze of Mohammed Bin Salman, and as gender segregation and mandatory veils are losing their luster in the Kingdom, Islamo-Gauchisme (France’s “Islamist-Left”) has made burkinis, segregated public swimming pools, and halal menus in public schools the “cause célèbre” of Woke progressive bien-pensance, a righteous struggle against Islamophobia and France’s “totalitarian authoritarianism [oppressing] minorities in this abominable Republic of Enlightenment” (Prophète, 273).

Speaking of his origins, Kepel describes himself as a man whom Arabo-Muslim anti-Semitism morphed into a Jew (on account of his ambiguous last-name) so as to better discredit his scholarship on Islam. In reality, however, Kepel notes that he is as far from Judaism as an animal is far from a human being, and that his Jewish-sounding patronymic is in fact Czech, and Catholic, and that although he was socialized in a communist family, a distant aunt insisted he be christened in the Catholic Church (Prophète, 90). And so, like most Frenchmen, Kepel is a lapsed Catholic. Undaunted by the “Jewish accusation,” Kepel notes that the orientalist that he is, in the age of Said’s Orientalism, had better remain “cool as a cucumber” (he uses the French “tranquille comme Baptiste” idiom), a cold-blooded cool-headed thick-skinned animal, lest he be eaten alive by Woke theocrats (Prophète, 90).

In times where probing, critical, disciplined, dispassionate inquiries into Islam and the West are becoming increasingly crucial, writes Kepel, Arabic and Islamic studies chairs, whether in Europe or the United States, are being replaced by fetishist programs focusing on “invented disciplines such as transgender studies,” LGBTQ Studies, Intersectionality, Masculine Toxicity Studies, and other ideologies “promoting the ‘Global South’”—in other words, privileging “ideologies” and mood swings over “knowledge” and the value-free pursuits of knowledge (Holocaustes, 15). The dominant bien-pensance therefore wins, denouncing “the tyranny of facts”;³⁴ normalizing the fairytale that the roots of violent radical Islam are attributable to socioeconomic grievances, denuded of the ideological and theological “coherence” that otherwise guides the Islamists themselves (Prophète, 261). Saying and teaching otherwise, meaning teaching textual and empirical fact, is playing into the hands of “the racist, xenophobic, extreme Right that is organically hostile to Islam and Muslims,” writes Kepel, with a sneer (Prophète, 262). And so, as Woke totalitarianism dictates, feelings ought to always trump fact, and ignorance is preferable to asking uncomfortable questions, reading foundational canonical texts (the Qurʾan, the Sira, the Hadiths, the ideological writings of Qutb, al-Zawahiri . . .) preferably in their Arabic originals (Prophète, 262–63). “So, let us then begin by getting all the facts out of the way”;³⁵ Jean-Jacques Rousseau ought to become a Woke god.

VIOLATING OMERTÀ ON EXPANDING DAR AL-ISLAM

Gilles Kepel’s journey as an old-school orientalist began in the late 1970s, in Egypt, as he was exploring possible research topics for his PhD dissertation. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had just signed a peace treaty with Israel and begun loosening the state’s grip on the Muslim Brothers—a noose tightened into a chokehold by his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Sadat, now “the pious president” as Kepel would note in sarcastic quotes, was nevertheless still flirting with the MB, allowing the publication of their previously outlawed organ al-Daʿwa (The Mission) in an attempt to counter his Nasserite socialist rivals, still omnipresent in Egypt’s consensus media, academic circles, and public discourse. In 1981, an offshoot of the MB would return the favor by assassinating Sadat on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Kepel attributes his own burgeoning curiosity about the MB to this period but also to 1979 and the “discerning pen” of a young Le Monde correspondent and Arabist, resident of Egypt, Jean-Pierre Péroncel-Hugoz and the stories his was filing directly from Cairo.

In his reporting, Péroncel-Hugoz was noting the salient rapid transformation of Egyptian university campuses into roiling oceans of veils and carefully (Islamically) landscaped beards replacing earlier less restricted sartorial habits and Che Guevara–style facial hair (Prophète, 24). In 1979, not many historians and orientalists were interested in the MB notes Kepel. But Péroncel-Hugoz was the exception, and Kepel read the signs he was carefully tracing on the walls of Le Monde. This was so, even though Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran, “a republic that had just become Islamic, and that was profoundly influenced by the MB movement and its radical ideologue Sayyid Qutb” (Prophète, 25). Indeed, Kepel reminds us, Khomeini’s Iran would “issue a commemorative stamp in 1984 featuring Sayyid Qutb’s likeness and praising his martyrdom,” and whereas Nasser might have imprisoned then executed him by hanging in 1966, Iran used Qutb as a guiding light in 1979 while most Western Leftists praised Iran’s Islamic revolution deeming it liberating (Prophète, 25).

And so, Kepel became very early on aware that what was brewing on the Eastern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean was an Islamic awakening not yet detected—and indeed perhaps occulted by the times’ “ambient theories” of modernization, often confirmed by “western chancelleries schemas” (Prophète, 26). This is when Kepel realized that becoming acquainted with the languages and cultural rituals of the Arabs “was a sine qua non prerequisite for making sense of the upheavals to come”—a knowledge still derided and discouraged by “decades of Western blissful belief in the [East’s inexorable adoption] or Western progress, whether socialist or capitalist in nature” (Prophète, 26). Kepel notes that “it was under the serene skies of such ideological certitudes” about a beatific harmless tolerant Islam, that radical Islam would explode, taking hold of the Middle East—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq—later spilling over into the West, 9/11, the Bataclan . . . (Prophète, 28). Thus, came in 1987 Kepel’s Les banlieues de l’Islam and “the birth of a new religion in France,” and ultimately Europe, and the United States. This Islam of the suburbs, as it is called in France, was in Kepel’s telling a subversion of France’s social movements, labor unions, socialism, and the republic’s rigid secularism (laïcité), heavily flavored with Islamist ingredients; “this was a first in the long history of France’s labor movements,” wrote Kepel, the bulk of which were secular, indeed socialist and communist. Although Islamization of France’s social movements coincided with the first term of France’s first socialist presidency—François Mitterand’s—French politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and “social oracles” still turned away, opting to avert their gaze from the new realities staring them down—the Islamization of French secularism—rather than reading the clear signposts before them (Prophète, 37–38).

Having sounded the alarm early on in his career, Kepel violated the omertà, the code of silence enforced by the wardens of political correctness and platitudes in face of increasingly Islamized social and political spaces, an increasingly Islamized French secularism that would soon begin feeling the ravages of Jihadist terrorism. Even the College de France, notes Kepel, one of the bastions of secularism in French higher learning, would see the etiolation of its “Arabic Studies” in the late 1990s—with the retirement of its last old-guard orientalist, the Arabist André Miquel. Thus, when September 11, 2001, hit the United States, it had long since “ceased being a requisite for the higher echelons of our [Western] university to be able to prattle a few words, let alone decipher with any level of fluency, the Arabic language [of the Jihadists], even as Jihadism was ravaging the Muslim world, the West, and reaching all the way into France” (Prophète, 41–42).

The world then was still decades away from ISIS (some three decades worth of distance by Kepel’s count), yet ISIS seemed to have already been at our doorsteps in the 1980s, he writes, as he was beginning to excavate what André Miquel had already begun calling “les banlieues de l’Islam” (the suburbs of Islam) taking hold of the heart of France (Prophète, 41). It was in these new French provinces of Islam, in 1980s Paris, in the traditional haunts of the traditional leftist intellectuals and the elites of the Polytechnique, the Sorbonne, and the College de France, that Islamism and a new kind of Muslim anti-Semitism were beginning to take hold (Prophète, 44). Thus, in revisionist, negationist, and Holocaust-denialist circles—dominated by bearded French-speaking Muslim men and their veiled chattel—that brittle “anti-Zionist façade” had become the storefront of open virulent (self-righteous religiously licit) Jew-hatred, complete with feature journal articles and caricatures worthy of 1930s Nazi propaganda, yet praised by French Muslims as “good decent publications” (Prophète, 44–45). But this was not limited to Paris. Nice, the Var, the Alpes Maritimes, and many other provinces in Meridional France would in later years furnish their own French-Muslim Jihadist contingents to ISIS and to the perpetrators of Islamist attacks on the homeground (Prophète, 53). “The Old Port of Marcel Pagnol [is] now an extension of the Bab el-Oued of Albert Camus’ Algeria—new landscapes that have forever disfigured the vistas of Cézanne” (Prophète, 53). New immigrants whose families kicked France out of Algeria have now established in the heart of France their own Muslim colonies, chiseling into them new landscapes, imbuing them in new customs and new moralities all reminiscent of the old country’s Casbas (Prophète, 55). Thus, “all those descended from populations that were once colonized have become ‘indigenous children of the French Republic’ today . . . in [an inexorably expanding] dar al-Islam” (Prophète, 55).

Incidentally, one of France’s most prolific authors and vocal public intellectuals today, philosopher Michel Onfray, often speaks of the War of Algeria being “not yet over.” Yet, Onfray’s is not an observation nourished by personal discernment and deduction. Rather, it is a restatement of what is often heard in Franco-Algerian circles where, sixty-two years after Algerian independence, many still consider their war against France “not yet over” and their struggle for retribution and restitution ongoing.³⁶ Thus, through a relentless aggressive process of Tabligh (Muslim proselytism), in heavily accented southern French (the brogues of Marseilles and Toulouse), “the high fertility of North African couples . . . encouraged by generous family allowances and tax credit incentives, a new generation of French-born Muslims is being ensconced; a new alien and alienated majority is emerging, replacing ‘indigenous’ provençaux; a drain augmented by a concomitant Christian out-migration of Frenchmen of Italian, Spanish, Greek, Armenian, and Corsican extraction” (Prophète, 56). This new France is eloquently encapsulated in a brief interchange that Gilles Kepel had almost forty years earlier with a Marseillais of the neighborhood of La Castellane, the same North Marseilles neighborhood where Zineddine Zidane, “voted in 2004 the best European soccer player in history,” grew up. As Gilles Kepel engaged his interlocutor, the conversation went as follows:

Kepel writes how this simple seemingly innocuous answer “still filled [his] ears in 2023, even as forty years after the fact the face and name of the interlocutor had long since lapsed from [his] memory” (Prophète, 56). Yet the symbolism of it is haunting: a pithy condensation of “France’s cultural and political defeat on French soil, and the integration of France into dar al-Islam” (Prophète, 55).

This was the result of a “fusion of Islamism, Third-Worldism, and anti-imperialism,” which Gilles Kepel began pointing to in the early 1980s; the perfect basic ingredients of what the French call “Islamo-gauchisme,” or intersectional Wokeism in American parlance. In Kepel’s telling, this would precipitate our times’ academy’s intellectual and moral disarray, slipping us ever deeper into a slow comatose stupor, augmenting the West’s civilizational nihilism and its eventual abdication and replacement (Prophète, 64).

FIRST CALUMNIATED, THEN VINDICATED

Ultimately, both Kepel’s September 2023 bildungsroman and his March 2024 Holocaustes are about a civilizational quest and civilizational choices for our times. They are clarion calls to the West, in favor of Judeo-Christian values, a caution to avert a cultural makeover, or rather a takeover, surrendering the West to an Islamist abyss. The choice between, on the one hand, a West remaining a bastion of enlightenment, freedom of expression, freedom to debate, criticize, and dissent, and, on the other hand, a West bowing obediently to religious obscurantism is a stake Kepel is unafraid to claim. A West with 2,000 years of Christendom and Judeo-Christian values behind it is a cultural space well worth preserving in Gilles Kepel’s telling—absent which the West would be staring at the abyss of acquiescence, in the style of Michel Houellebecq’s dystopic Submission of a few years earlier.³⁷

At this writing, Saturday, March 16, 2024, France has moved into RST (Ramadan Standard Time) zone; a shariʿa d’atmosphère as Kepel calls it, and a complete Hallalization of French society (Prophète, 65). This may not be the politically correct observation to make; Kepel recognizes the combustive nature of such statements; he may not get an invite to rejoin MESA tomorrow morning; but in his telling there ought to be no shame in sounding the alarm of creeping Islamization; and there ought to be no doxing, outing, tarring, or cancellation for one advocating for the protection and valorization of one’s own civilizational and cultural references. France, and Western values for which it once stood sentry, are the spawn of millennial civilization worthy of preeminence, preservation, and adulation in the face of a conquering Islam intruding on the “lands of disbelief.” In that sense, Kepel is a scholar with vision, not a philosophical axe to grind, a visionary in the sense that knowledge and intelligence may prove worthless without the right intuition, without an intimate spontaneous discerning awareness of our past and our present days illuminating our searching gazes on our journey into the future. In this role, Kepel was able to look clearly into the future, from the vantage point of his present and its past, informed by a lifelong quest for understanding, sensing forty years ago what events of his times were conducing to, in and for our time.

Kepel perceived a civilizational transformation very early on, called it out for what it was, was sullied for it, persisted in his quest, only to witness history redeeming him and proving him right all along. In an academic universe taken to Wokeist tyranny today, where abstruse theoretical frameworks are constructed in order jam pack them with ill-fitting realities, Kepel privileged empiricism, subjecting established certitudes and inherited assumption to “reality checks”—a rigorous method that muzzled him and is today consigning him to “early retirement” from the academy. But that seems to have only strengthened his resolve to speak truth to falsities. When he sounded the alarm of a creeping Islamization of France in 1987, his Les Banlieues de l’Islam initially received laudatory press coverage. He was even invited to the Elysée palace for a conversation with Jacques Attali—then Special Advisor to Socialist President François Mitterrand. But the honeymoon was short-lived. Kepel would soon get excoriated by the academy. Some of his colleagues would even “wonder sarcastically why the leader of the [then far Right] Front National party [at the time the loose cannon anti-immigration Jean-Marie Le Pen] did not pen the book’s preface” (Prophète, 67). Incidentally, Kepel’s intellectual rival (although hardly his equal), the widely read Olivier Roy (who is not an Arabist) would scoff at Kepel’s Arabic learnedness, quipping that “knowing Arabic is useless to someone wishing to study Islam in France.” Roy had better credentials in mind; impugning those like Kepel whose intimate knowledge of Arabic was the mainstay of their historian’s toolkit (Prophète, 68). Yet Roy seemed oblivious, in the inanity of this claim, to the “method” of his own intellectual hero, the infamous Edward Said and his belief that only Muslims are qualified to study Islam.³⁸ The dog-whistle was arguably that Kepel was Jewish and therefore ill-equipped to adequately study the Muslim world. That claim was a rumor whipped out on account of the putative Jewishness of the patronymic “Kepel.” This was of course baseless. As mentioned earlier, Kepel’s father was of Czech descent. His mother was what the French call “française de souche” (a full-blooded “ethnic French”) from southern France. Both his parents—although issuing from a Catholic lineage—were Communists, and Kepel himself cut his political teeth in Trotskyist circles. But the “Jewish accusation” had taken hold very early on in his career and would remain a “tough stain” to wash off. In 1977, before being granted a Syrian visa to study Arabic at the prestigious Institut Français de Damas, Kepel had to present proof of his “Aryan blood” to Syrian authorities—a baptismal certificate—in other words, evidence that he was not a Jew. That evidence was reluctantly presented. But facts don’t matter; “everyone is always someone else’s Jew” he wrote tongue-in-cheek (Prophète, 69–71).

Nevertheless, rather than the critical and empathetic approach with which Kepel apprehended Islam, as a legitimate (albeit undesirable) carrier of a political and civilizational project, incompatible with Western values of equality, freedom of expression, and secularism, Olivier Roy’s approach to Islam was rather “exotic” and borderline patronizing “neocolonialist.” In this infantilizing approach, Roy and other like-minded apologists suggested Islam will with time overcome its adolescent rebellious phase and mature into something more compatible with Western values. If there is one, this ought to be the very definition of Islamophobia: shying away from taking Islam to task for claims its canonical texts themselves make about its own avowed militant proselytizing impulses and subjecting it to the same critiques given other religions, namely Christianity, which, let it be said, is not dissonant with nor dissident from Western, Judeo-Christian history, but which in fact conserves and expands that history, whereas Islam seeks to dismantle and replace it.

This, in sum, was Kepel’s main affront: challenging politically soothing orthodoxies, indicting regnant “intellectual clericalisms” that mandate what is fact and what is conspiracy, questioning official correctness, and what are the right or wrong ways of reflecting on our times and their challenges. The events of October 7, 2023, triggered a “rediscovery” of Gilles Kepel’s work and his relevance for our times—to the same extent that 9/11 had made Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis a household name. And like 9/11 relative to Lewis, October 7 also unleashed a cavalcade of ad hominem scatology directed at Gilles Kepel, leveling at him accusations of prejudice appealing to “Far Right” conspiracy theories about a putatively militant Islam that is otherwise beatific, peaceful, and unfairly slandered by Islamophobes like Kepel, impersonating scholars.

A case in point is an April 3, 2024, Groupe Le Monde Telerama essay.³⁹ A hatchet job by any other name, the article was penned by radical Leftist journalist Olivier Tesquet, who dismissed Kepel’s Prophète en son pays and Holocaustes as the puerile antics of an aging, obsolete, resentful “former scholar” lashing out at colleagues and a profession supposedly withholding decorations and accolades his ego craved, expected, and deserved.⁴⁰ In a Tweet promoting his hit piece, Tesquet denigrated Kepel as “an erstwhile researcher who was once revered and respected” but who “has now devolved into the new darling of the far-right,” trotting out conspiracies such as “‘Jihadisme d’atmosphere’⁴¹ and ‘Wokeism’ alleged to have ousted him from university.”⁴²

A veritable guidebook of ad hominem scatology, Tesquet is in sum representative of the “right thinking” air du temps, writing with eloquence hiding a sordid axe to grind, feigning journalistic probity. Yet Tesquet’s profile of Kepel lacked the bare minimum of nuance, confirming how it is “woe to those who make the hitlist of the Woke righteous indignant.” Notwithstanding Kepel’s decades-long venerable career, he was deemed game for sullying, cancellation, and erasure by the wardens of orthodoxy for having dared deviate from the media and academic “consensus.” In brief, a new kind of totalitarianism is dawning, and an “all-comprehensive, all-pervasive, rigid, and inflexible” form of group think that is “mystical, magical, infallible . . . intolerant, [is] demand[ing] total conformity, and seek[ing] total control.”⁴³

Ironically, the above description of “totalitarianism” comes from an old out-of-print 1984 political science textbook. But it might as well have been written as a description of Wokeism in 2024. Specifically, like totalitarianism—or rather taking a page out of totalitarianism’s playbook—Wokeism abominates and spurns the “existing order as corrupt and immoral” presenting itself as an alternative condensing superlative virtue, with plans and programs of its own, instructing and illuminating the path to a perfect virtuous world, a utopia that is in fact nothing short of militant fanatical extremism dressed up in righteousness.⁴⁴ This is the “re-education” (and whipping back into shape) that Kepel and other truth-telling scholars have brought upon themselves. The same awesome totalitarian education apparatus is being deployed in the Western academy today; of course, an apparatus without the horrifying spectacles that were its Soviet extortionist concentrations camps of yore, but the same results are being sought.⁴⁵ Writes Franco-Canadian sociologist Matthieu Bock-Côté,

Gilles Kepel waves this fad away. And whereas the analyses of his adversaries may not have aged well, his not only did not age at all but indeed offer learned premonitions that are today proving relentlessly timeless and timely. “I’ve been telling you this for a thousand years” is an expression attributed to Charles de Gaulle.⁴⁷ Gilles Kepel has been telling us what he’s been telling us for only forty years, and we have yet to learn how to listen. Alas, “nul n’est prophète en son pays,” no prophet is heeded in his own land and may indeed be sullied, defamed, reviled by his own. “When Visé insults Molière,” wrote Victor Hugo in Les misérables, “when Pope insults Shakespeare, when Fréron insults Voltaire, it is an old rule of envy and hatred that is taking hold; geniuses attract slander, great men are more or less always maligned.”⁴⁸ Indeed, the fact that Kepel and others like him are being targeted, proves they’re striking where they must, and where it hurts. It is in fact the totalitarian far left (what in American congressional parlance is the marginal but loud “The Squad,” and what in French parliamentary language is the domineering and even louder “Islamo-Gauchisme”) that is enabling the rise of Islamism, its normalization, the banalization of its antisemitic proclivities,⁴⁹ and the muzzling of politicians, academics, and public intellectuals who dare sound the alarm and shine the spotlight on those groups.

But Gilles Kepel is unrelenting, wrote Andrew Hussey in his review of the author’s 2017 Terror in France, stressing he “has no theoretical or philosophical axes to grind.” Instead, notes Hussey, Kepel is a cerebral, deliberate, determined researcher, giving us “a grown-up version of events . . . assembl[ing] his material like a detective and present[ing] his case with the subtle but remorseless logic of a lawyer . . . [bringing to his craft fastidious] forensic precision.”⁵⁰ Kepel’s Holocaustes and Prophète en son Pays are both a clarion call to us, attempts to save us from ourselves and from our self-inflicted moral, cultural, civilizational, and spiritual decay. To revisit André Malraux one last time, when a civilization is no longer capable, able, or willing to erect a temple or a burial place, when a people no longer believes in its own transcendental values, when its spiritual bearings wear out, when its national energy is drained, when its genius runs dry, when its radiance loses its luster, its cultural glow gets dimmed and its voice gets dumbed, and all that might have once been sacred and superb in it gets sacrificed. When a civilization no longer believes in its “most fundamental values” (toujours Malraux), it begins believing in anything—even believing in the goodness of the pathologies drowning it, deconstructing it, vandalizing it, demolishing the foundational evidence of our natural world, our humanity, our intelligence, the real about us.

With this, an aging civilization shrivels and bows obediently to postmodernist assaults on fact, knowledge, reality, and common sense, dismantling the canon of historical methodology and devaluing documentary source materials and both textual and empirical proof. Yet, Gilles Kepel is unrelenting with his Gramscian “optimism of the will” guided by the “pessimism of the intellect.” With his Voltairean grin, he casts a sententious gaze telling things right, telling them convincingly, telling us “I told you so!”

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