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Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog (review)

of the movements often lumped under the singular title “Islamist.” By acknowledging their originality and intellectual labor, Chalcraft is moreover able to situate thinkers like Ali Shari‘ati and Tariq al-Bishri within, rather than outside, the longer trajectory of contentious mobilizations. If Chalcraft’s resolve to dismantle common frameworks thus yields some of the book’s most striking arguments in the first and last chapters, it also leads to some peculiar omissions and implausible assertions in the two central sections that cover the years 1914–1976. Chalcraft is certainly right to eschew the crude class determinism of an older generation, but it is one thing to reject vulgar economism and quite another to bracket the profound transformations and convulsions of global capitalism. Though listed in passing as a factor contributing to both the “crumbling hegemony” of the Wafd Party (p. 278) and the allure of the Soviet Union (p. 282) in Egypt, the Great Depression receives no further comment or discussion. One major consequence of that dramatic crisis was a marked intensification of rural inequality and dislocation that contributed to mounting discontent among agrarian social classes across the region. Chalcraft’s near silence on the “agrarian question” in the interwar period may, in turn, help to explain his glancing treatment of land reform in the 1950s and 1960s. The sections on Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser and the Free Officers are long on detail about their “hegemonic incorporation of the labour movement” (p. 319) and conquest of the organized Left but barely mention the land reform policies that, however limited in their redistributive effects, were crucial to the revolution’s mass appeal. Even these somewhat puzzling features of Chalcraft’s study, however, attest to his determination to write against the grain of long-entrenched narratives. Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East is an immensely important book, and it is likely to inspire vigorous and lively debate about how to understand politics in the Middle East for years to come.