After nearly a decade of blogging on Middle Eastern politics, Juan Cole is the leading public-intellectual critic of U.S. policy in the region. Using new technology to burst out of the ivory tower, this historian of the Middle East has been able to do what so many academics and former diplomats have not: develop a distinctive and uncompromising voice that translates decades of research into policy debates in the public sphere. We have grown used to reading his unblinking and acerbic commentaries on current events in the unfolding real-time of a blog, and this book allows us to step away from the fast flowing stream of the news cycle and get an overview of some of the most important themes of the last decade. Indeed, the book reminds me a little of the kind of graduate seminar we took with Juan Cole in the 1990s at the University of Michigan: a week-by-week thematic discussion of the most important new topics in the field, debunking the conventional wisdom and teasing out new connections and complexities. (Full disclosure: Juan Cole was my dissertation advisor.)

The book is organized around key themes that provoke what Cole terms “Islam Anxiety” in the West. Even so, it might have been more accurate to name the book “Engaging the Muslim Middle East,” since with the exception of an excellent treatment of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the book does not directly address South, Central and Southeast Asian Muslims. The implication is that American reconceptualization of Middle Eastern frictions would remove obstacles that muddy relations between the West and all the world’s Muslims. Even with a Middle Eastern focus, the omission of Turkey except as a supporting actor in the Iraqi theatre leaves the reader wondering how that rising regional power (now the fourteenth-largest economy in the world) with its distinctive brand of Islamist civic engagement fits into Cole’s worldview. As a matter of practicality, the essays are long (about 40 pages each), and most took more than one sitting to get through. Their internal sectioning is quirky and conversational, and this creates the feeling of listening to a skillful raconteur improvising in unexpected ways. It makes it harder to dive into the book for a particular piece of information without engaging the entire chapter — a good technique to force the reader to actually read, not just cherry-pick.

What provokes “Islam Anxiety”? The first substantive chapters skillfully show that petroleum dependency and an inability to understand the variegated nature of Islamic politics are ongoing sources of Western malaise. The later chapters have geographical orientations but are set up as trajectories rather than fixed points on a map: Wahhabism from Riyadh to Doha, Iraq as the object of strategic geopolitics, Pakistan and Afghanistan beyond the Taliban, and the Iranian challenge from Tehran to Beirut. By putting each theme in motion across space and through a well-woven and unpredictable exposition, Cole addresses the key hot spots and buzzwords, but in such a way as to challenge the notion that the conflicts are as essential or permanent as they seem to the U.S. media and public. Indeed, throughout the book Cole captures the transnational dynamics that make these issues so difficult for policy makers to pin down. He reminds us why the multidimensional skills of an academic are indispensable in these policy matters.

The first chapter serves as a useful primer on the politics of oil, especially the sticky ties of consumption and production needs that bind together the United States and the oil-producing countries of the Islamic Middle East. That said, this chapter is still an introduction to the subject, laying out the basics of global oil-market fungibility well, but treating the question of oil interdependency from the perspective of climate change and with a slightly alarmist tone of “peak oil.” A fuller discussion of the mechanics of oil interdependency would get into the nitty-gritty of petrodollar recycling, which Cole refers to briefly later in his discussion of Saudi-U.S. relations — namely, how the recycling of oil revenues by the Gulf states into U.S. debt financing has supported a strong dollar and an aggressive U.S. regional policy. But then again, Cole’s purpose is to allay and dispel “Islam Anxiety,” not to stoke the fires.

The next chapter teases apart Muslim activism and Muslim radicalisms by differentiating between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activists who pursue parliamentary politics and the extremists who espouse violence. In its bluntness, however, the chapter inadvertently illustrates the difficulties for anyone without Cole’s expertise in sorting out shades of gray. One recurring character in this chapter is the unsympathetic father of alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. It is genuinely difficult for the reader to put a lot of distance between the elder Atta’s activism and bigotry and his son’s embrace of the most horrendous forms of political violence. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the doctor turned al-Qaeda leader, is even less reassuring (a reader is more likely to remember his origins in the Brotherhood than his repudiation of it).

In the chapter on Wahhabi Islam, we get a spirited round of myth-busting on the form of Islam that so many love to hate. How could Wahhabi Islam spread anti-Americanism when in its mature form it is a creature of American alliances and sponsorship? This stance is somewhat disingenuous, since it assumes a level of transparency on the part of the Saudi establishment that is not always warranted. Cole invokes Qatari Wahhabism as a counterexample to Saudi Wahhabism and even goes so far as to mobilize Al-Jazeera’s success as evidence of how misunderstood Wahhabism can be. Cole convinces the reader that we need to shed our prejudices about Wahhabism, and that there is nothing inherently anti-American or even pro-jihadi about it. Yet he does not fully address the driving power of intolerance in this particular brand of Islam, nor the effects of its distillation and export to South Asia through Saudi-funded madrasas.

From the start, Cole has been a proponent of the orderly and timely withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq as the most important step in treating “America Anxiety” in the Islamic world and thereby engaging Muslims in productive dialogue. He argues in the chapter on Iraq that the fear-mongering “Islam Anxiety” linked to Iraq in American public opinion was little more than the result of a skillfully run public-relations campaign for a war that had little to do with Islam other than to create an incubator for its most extreme forms. For antiwar veterans, the most interesting part of the chapter is a four-page section (pp. 136-140) developing an educated theory about Dick Cheney. Cole theorizes that he was the point man in turning a decades-long standoff between oil interests and AIPAC into an alliance, through a regime-changing war that looked good on paper to both factions.

The chapter on Pakistan and Afghanistan is one of the best in the book and shows Cole’s extraordinary range of expertise. As the subtitle indicates, it gets beyond the Tali-ban and contextualizes the radical Islamist movement and the terrorism associated with it in a much more complex view of urban and rural contradictions and pressures in the two countries. The chapter starts with complicated, cosmopolitan Pakistan and avoids the usual approach of starting with Afghanistan (embodied in the ugly “Afpak” formulation). Asaf Ali Zardari’s colorful career as scion of a Sindhi landholding clan, the trailing spouse of Benazir Bhutto and key player in many minor schemes and scandals before assuming his wife’s mantle of leadership, helps the reader understand the cross-cutting identities of the state. And Cole refreshingly reminds us (in an inverse of the usual cliché) that Americans need to pay less attention to culture and religion and more to social and economic processes that have nothing to do with religion in a precarious system like Pakistan’s. On the one hand, Pakistan’s rulers mismanage an urban bourgeoisie, whose values — embodied in a free media and bustling judiciary — are chafed raw by military dictatorship. On the other hand, the poverty and the Pashtunwali and Deobandi Islam of the Northwest Frontier Province comprise a volatile mixture that responds poorly to American pressure.

The chapter on the Iranian challenge hits all the right notes on the history of U.S.-Iranian relations and, oddly, includes most of Cole’s discussion about Lebanon, the Palestinians and Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini are coolly evaluated against their relevant peer group (former President Khatami, a liberal scholar) and come across as the crude and unimaginative politicians they are. However, Cole leaves no doubt as to his objectivity by refraining from the temptation of making them out to be genocidal madmen and spending plenty of time debunking the well-known mistranslation concerning “wiping Israel off the map.” Evidence about Iran’s nuclear projects and support of Hezbollah are similarly treated in a balanced way, weighing their risks to regional stability against their legitimating justifications. The treatment of Hamas in Gaza in this chapter is a bit puzzling, given Cole’s correct assertion that “Iran did not create Hamas, and it is not clear what proportion of Hamas’s resources come from Teheran.” Indeed, the chapter ends with a call for the U.S. government to curb the ambitions of right-wing Israeli governments. It’s an unexpected way to end a chapter on Iran, but on second glance, perhaps not. Cole makes it clear that much of the energy expended on “Islam Anxiety” in the West — and particularly the Iranian challenge — could well be directed towards pressuring recalcitrant and nuclear-armed Israeli governments back toward a real peace process.

In the conclusion to the book, Cole returns to his title with a project for engagement. In his view, engaging the Muslim world involves unambiguous repudiation of the Bush doctrine of preventive warfare and reaffirmation of the American tradition of religious neutrality. Other tactics Cole suggests are cultural, legal and security exchanges featuring special programs for translation of the great books of both traditions and renewed commitment to democratization and development. Ironically, the book ends on a weak note, positing that the threat of global climate change and crippling dependence on fossil fuels are the real problems that could bring together the West and the Islamic world. The cynical observer might find the banding together of East and West to solve the global climate crisis utopian at best and a flimsy straw-man scenario at worst. A more pressing and immediate common challenge, the intransigence of the Israeli right, is evident throughout the various chapters of the book. But Cole has given us a much-needed opportunity to catch up with his historian’s framing of the events on which he comments.