This is a remarkable book. On one hand it is written as a travelogue that makes for pleasant reading and on the other hand it contains observations and interviews that provide a significant insight into what is happening in the Moslem world. Most of the time the author does not offer his own opinions explicitly, but lets readers draw their own conclusions. Even when he does they are mostly pointers to facts that the other side ignores. For example, when Muslims rail against the Crusaders the author reminds the reader: "Nobody in the (West) dwells on how Muslim armies, before and after the Crusades, burned and pillaged Christian towns all the way from Budapest to Bordeaux, or how lands from Tunisia to Turkey used to be Christian."

About one third of the book is devoted to Iraq (four chapters) and this part provide significant insight on what is happening and why. For example, he describes how Sunnis detonate a roadside bomb near a Shiite village and U.S. troops search for the culprits there. Some villagers are killed and now the villagers are hostile towards the U.S. His account of the events in Iraq left me with the impression that the U.S. campaign was poorly planned and several poor decisions were made afterwards. As a result, even Iraqis who were happy to see the Americans in the beginning became unfriendly, if not outright hostile, eventually.

Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have two chapters each, while Tunisia, Yemen, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mali, and Bosnia one chapter each.

The book shows that bin-Ladden's version of Islam is not mainstream even though he would like the West to think otherwise. Western actions that ignore that distinction and are directed against all Moslems serve as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda.

The author was a colleague and friend of Daniel Pearl and there are touching references to the latter's ordeal and tragic death.

This remarkable book is Trofimov's journalistic Haj to almost every Muslim country from Bosnia to Saudi Arabia where he manages to interview every prominent Islamist, evading bullets, as history unfolds around him. Secondly, and perhaps more disturbingly, this is Trofimov's quest to understand the Islamist psyche and his analysis of why Islamists hate the West. The most surprising part of this book was that the rational part of the collective Islamist psyche, the part that the West assumes is simply masked by "extremists", is to be found in Mali! I had to check my atlas. Certainly this book will change your perspective of the post 9/11 world with a harsh dose of reality served with ceremonial roast lamb, rice and the smile factor.