When people see the size of this book, over 550 pages, they ask me "How long did it take to write it?
Typing the words into my computer and printing them out on the pages, plus editings and revisions, cutting sections and adding others, all took about a year and a half. But that is really not representative of "how long it took to write this book," because this book is the result of not years, but of decades of research and monitoring of the rise of fundamentalism and its ugly daughter, terrorism, in the Middle East.
A quick tour through the book's bibliography should give prospective readers an idea of the scope of research that went into producing this book. The sources listed in the bibliography include in addition to a vast number of books and magazine articles in both English and Arabic, other essays in scholarly journals, and materials from an MA thesis I wrote years ago comparing the Jihad philosophies of Wahhabi cult founder Muhammad bin 'abd al-Wahhab with that of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna.
Also, in addition to those sources listed in the Bibliography there are numerous other sources quoted and/or paraphrased in the text of the book which were drawn from Newspaper articles and internet news sources in both English and Arabic which were not listed in the bibliography. As for these sources, as well as all other "footnotes," the attributions are embedded into the text rather than placed at the end of the book and/or at the end of chapters so as to make the reading easier on the reader.
However, even all of that does not tell the entire story, because the views expressed in this book have also been influenced by much additional monitoring for many years of the Arabic news sources such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya satellite TV channels and Arab news organization's websites on the internet. From all of this one can gain a "feeling" for the trends taking place in the societies and the psychologies of the peoples of the Middle East--trends and concepts one will never see in an official U.S. government report or in the Mainstream Media.
www.amazon.com
www.barnesandnoble.com
Typing the words into my computer and printing them out on the pages, plus editings and revisions, cutting sections and adding others, all took about a year and a half. But that is really not representative of "how long it took to write this book," because this book is the result of not years, but of decades of research and monitoring of the rise of fundamentalism and its ugly daughter, terrorism, in the Middle East.
A quick tour through the book's bibliography should give prospective readers an idea of the scope of research that went into producing this book. The sources listed in the bibliography include in addition to a vast number of books and magazine articles in both English and Arabic, other essays in scholarly journals, and materials from an MA thesis I wrote years ago comparing the Jihad philosophies of Wahhabi cult founder Muhammad bin 'abd al-Wahhab with that of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna.
Also, in addition to those sources listed in the Bibliography there are numerous other sources quoted and/or paraphrased in the text of the book which were drawn from Newspaper articles and internet news sources in both English and Arabic which were not listed in the bibliography. As for these sources, as well as all other "footnotes," the attributions are embedded into the text rather than placed at the end of the book and/or at the end of chapters so as to make the reading easier on the reader.
However, even all of that does not tell the entire story, because the views expressed in this book have also been influenced by much additional monitoring for many years of the Arabic news sources such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya satellite TV channels and Arab news organization's websites on the internet. From all of this one can gain a "feeling" for the trends taking place in the societies and the psychologies of the peoples of the Middle East--trends and concepts one will never see in an official U.S. government report or in the Mainstream Media.
www.amazon.com
www.barnesandnoble.com
