SOURCE: Arnove, Anthony. “Islam's Divided Crescent.” Nation 275, no. 2 (8 July 2002): 25-6.

In the following review, Arnove offers a generally positive assessment of The Clash of Fundamentalisms, but argues that the work would have been stronger if Ali had proposed alternatives to modern Islamism.

On September 23, 2001, midpoint between the horrific events of September 11 and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, the New York Times ran an intriguing headline. “Forget the Past: It's a War Unlike Any Other,” it advised, above an article by John Kifner noting that “Air Force bombers are heading toward distant airfields to fight a shadowy foe flitting through the mountains in a deeply hostile land already so poor and so ruined by two decades of war that [it] is virtually bereft of targets.” It was a poor headline for an article that began by noting the long history of conflicts among great powers over control...