What does the 'war on terror' and a new era of religious ferocity look like to an Englishman living in the Pacific Northwest? Jonathan Raban finds that as he reads the source texts that have inspired modern-day jihad, memories of his own rigidly fundamentalist adolescent atheism help him understand why young people suffering from cultural alienation, spiritual emptiness, and moral uncertainty turn to a backward-looking version of Islam to help them resist the upheavals of modernity. Raban reflects on theBush administration's manipulation of the threat of terrorism to undermine civil rights. In diagnosing what has gone wrong in the Iraq war, he emphasizes the US failure to understand the history of the Middle East and its loyalties of religion and ethnicity. He traces the continuing support for a disastrous war to the legacy of American Puritanism, and he explores the increasing polarization of American politics.--From publisher description.