Gilles Kepel

Gilles Kepel (born 30 June 1955) is a French political scientist and Arabist who specialises in the contemporary Middle East and in Muslims in the West. ^{1 2} He was a professor at Sciences Po Paris and at Paris Sciences et Lettres University, where he directed the Middle East and Mediterranean Program. ¹ Kepel is included in this museum as a contributor to the study of modern Islam — the founder's queue marks him "(Contributor)", following the honoured-contemporary precedent of Fairuz — and not as a Muslim: no source consulted attributes any personal religion to him, and his record states that plainly. ^{1 2}

Kepel was born in Paris on 30 June 1955. ^{1 2} Originally trained as a classicist, he started to study Arabic after a journey to the Levant in 1974; he first graduated in philosophy and English, completed his Arabic-language studies at the French Institute in Damascus in 1977–78, and received his degree in political science from Sciences Po in 1980. ¹

He specialised in contemporary Islamist movements and spent three years at the Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ) in Egypt, where he did the fieldwork for his PhD, defended in 1983, on Islamist movements in Egypt. ¹ Published in French as Le Prophète et le Pharaon and in English as The Prophet and Pharaoh (United Kingdom 1985; United States, as Muslim Extremism in Egypt, 1986), it was the first book in any language to analyse contemporary Islamist militancy and remains a standard university reader. ^{1 2}

After returning to France he became a researcher at the CNRS and investigated Islam as a social and political phenomenon there, leading to Les banlieues de l'Islam in 1987, a primer on studies of Islam in the West. ¹ He then turned to the comparative study of political-religious movements in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, publishing The Revenge of God in 1991, a bestseller translated into nineteen languages. ¹ Fieldwork among Black Muslims in the United States as a visiting professor at New York University in 1993 fed into Allah in the West (1996). ¹

He received his habilitation in 1993, was promoted to research director at CNRS in 1995, and spent 1995–96 in the United States as New York Consortium Professor. ¹ His Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, based on two years of fieldwork across the Muslim world, came out in English in 2001; though hailed for its scope, it was criticised after 11 September 2001 because it had documented the failure of political Islamist mobilisation in the late 1990s, a reading he developed in Bad Moon Rising (2002), The War for Muslim Minds (2006) and Beyond Terror and Martyrdom (2008), and, with his students, in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (2006). ¹ In 2001 he became a tenured professor at Sciences Po, where he created the Middle East and Mediterranean Program. ¹

Later work surveyed the 2005 French suburb riots in Banlieue de la République (2012) and Islam in France in Quatre-vingt-treize, documented the Arab upheavals in Passion arabe (2013), awarded the Pétrarque Prize as book of the year, and analysed jihadist attacks in France in Terror in France (French 2015; English 2017). ¹ Since February 2016 he has chaired the Program of Excellence on the Mediterranean and the Middle East at Paris Sciences et Lettres, based at the École Normale Supérieure, and since 2018 he has also been a professor there and director of a platform at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano. ¹ Away from Chaos (English 2020) was reviewed by The New York Times as "an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region", his 2021 essay The Prophet and the Pandemic topped bestseller lists, and in 2024 Plon published his Holocaustes: Israël, Gaza et la guerre contre l'Occident. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. According to Kepel, jihadi terrorism is caused by "the entrenchment of Salafism", an ideology whose most radical elements clash with the values of Western democracies. ¹ His 2017 debate with Olivier Roy — Kepel's "radicalisation of Islam" against Roy's "Islamicisation of radicalism" — is reported in the article with both men's words. ¹ The article also reports that Kepel claims to belong to the left in France, has distinguished mainstream Islam from hard-line Islamist ideologues, and has repeatedly dismissed claims of widespread Islamophobia in French society. ¹ None of these reported positions is a statement of Kepel's own religion, and none is treated as one here. ¹

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