Lisa Anderson, author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century:
Who else but Gilles Kepel could have written this seductively provocative book? Kepel has drawn on his decades of deliberation and argument in this tour d’horizon of the development of Islamist movements in the Middle East since the 1960s. Away from Chaos offers a review, equally challenging and accessible, of the modern political history of the Middle East.

Bernard Haykel, Princeton University:
In Away from Chaos, Gilles Kepel, one of the world’s most prominent scholars of Middle Eastern politics, provides a grand narrative of this region’s history over the last four decades, explaining the rise and possible end of Islamism as a mobilizing force. Relying on his deep personal engagement with the Middle East and also with Islam in Europe, Kepel masterfully charts the region’s upheavals and their grave implications for the West. What emerges is an intimate and deeply learned portrait—the culmination of a lifetime of study and sympathetic observation.

Odd Arne Westad, author of The Cold War: A World History:
If you want to understand the contemporary Middle East, this is the place to begin. Gilles Kepel’s book is a deeply insightful, empathetic, almost elegiac text that both explains how the region ended up in its present predicament and how it may find its way out of it.

David Ignatius, Washington Post:
Gilles Kepel has lived the torment of the modern Middle East as a scholar and, ultimately, as a target of the jihadists. In Away from Chaos, he narrates that tortured story and proposes a return for the steadying forces of a century ago—the European nations, a rising Russia, and the internal balancers of the Levant whose destiny is to bridge East and West.

Robert F. Worth, The New York Times Magazine:
Gilles Kepel has long been France’s most sophisticated scholar of radical Islam, and Away from Chaos is his personal and political summa—a remarkable synthesis of decades of passionate engagement with the Middle East.