Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu

An eye-opening political travelogue that reveals the Muslim world as never before. Drawing on reporting from more than a dozen Islamic countries, Faith at War offers an unforgettable portrait of the Muslim world after September 11. Inverting the question of what "they" have done to "us," Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov examines the unprecedented American intrusion in the Muslim heartland and the ripples it has caused far beyond the Afghanistan and Iraq's battlefields. What emerges is a penetrating portrait of people, faith, and countries better known in caricature than reported detail. The ordinary Muslims, influential clerics, warlords, jihadis, intellectuals and heads of state we meet are engaged in conversations that reveal the Muslim world to us from a new, unexpected perspective. In Mali, one of the most successful democracies in Africa, we encounter cleric Ousmane Madani Haidara, who sees Wahhabi extremists, rather than his country's secular government, as the real enemy of the true faith. In Saudi Arabia, we explore the bizarre world of exporting dead bodies from a kingdom that bars non-Muslim burials. On a US Navy aircraft carrier off the coast of Pakistan in October 2001, we witness the onboard assembly of bombs that, hours later, are seen on T.V. exploding in Kabul. And in Iraq, we accompany Trofimov as he negotiates his escape from insurgents, rides in a Humvee with trigger-happy GIs, and gets lectured by a Shiite holy man on why America is the foe of mankind. Faith at War helps us understand the hidden relationships and often surprising connections, so crucial to America's future, that link the Islamic world to our own.

© 2015 Henry Holt and Co. (Ebook): 9781627796705

Release date

Ebook: 9 June 2015