Completed in 2005, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism is based on extensive research conducted by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. This book belongs to what one might call the quantitative school of terrorism studies, as it relies mainly on data gathered on suicide attacks and their perpetrators over the last two decades. Its author takes issue with the conclusions of those who stress the importance of the doctrine of Islam in the shaping of the suicide terror phenomenon. Such a debate is part and parcel of a wider dispute within U.S. academia, boosted by 9/11 and its Iraqi aftermath, though it was already rooted in the “Orientalism” battle back in the 1980s. However, it also touches on an ongoing conflict between scholarship and partisanship: Should academics take sides and advocate specific policies, at the risk of submitting their scholarly credentials to the political goals they champion, or should they shun away from politics, at the risk of remaining clad in their ivory tower while social debates rage, uninfluenced by their expertise? The issue of terrorism is crucial to that matter.Gilles Kepel is professor and chair of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, Sciences Po, Paris.

En décembre 1981, un hebdomadaire cairote a reproduit le texte du manifeste du groupe islamiste qui avait, deux mois auparavant, perpétré l'assassinat de Sadate. L'opuscule, intitulé Al farida al gha'iba (L'Impératif occulté) est l'œuvre d'un électricien de 26 ans, ‘Abd al Salam Faraj. Ce texte aux accents révolutionnaires, qui prône la suppression par la violence du régime au pouvoir et l'édification sur ses ruines de l'Etat musulman, attire l'attention par les références massives qu'il fait aux textes des Traditionnistes musulmans pour légitimer sa démarche et son objectif.