Rating: 
Summary: The DEFINITIVE BOOK proven more correct every single day
Review: This is THE definitive book so far on Al Qadea for several reasons. One of the biggest is that since it came out in 2002 (it is now in paperback too) it has proven more correct every single day. If you've heard some of this information before or read some of it before it's mainly because this is the book that clearly has been the authorative source for many of journalists (I was a journalist and know how that works!)who do not attribute their on-the-air brilliance to the fact that they read this book. It's all HERE. And more and more of this book is proving to be correct every single day. The latest sign of author Rohan Gunaratna's solid scholarship, analysis and nuts-and-bolts-inside-info in Inside Al Qaeda has been displayed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times which ran a story about how the terrorist organization is undergoing a "major shift" in strategy -- mutating into more of a decentralized network, relying on an array of regional and local allies to launch more frequent attacks on targets. If you read the book before, you KNEW that this network was in place -- and that this development was coming. Guanaratna painstakingly lays out the huge worldwide network of terrorist groups that are directly or indirectly allied with Al Qaeda. He breaks it down into regions and countries. In fact, this book is a virtual directory: see an event in the newspapers, then look it up in this book and you have all the background to sound like an on the air expert (but you won't get paid big bucks). No, it does not read like a novel. But this superb book is highly readable -- reading like a straightfoward newsmagazine report. There is not a word of filler or ideological rhetoric in it -- the author only lays out....facts. When he states that there is no evidence of a solid connection between Iraq and 911 he has 100 percent credibility due to what has come before. He's NOT proclaming it due to any political agenda. The book details it all: the bloody and highly political rise of Osama Bin Laden, Bin Laden's motives and goals (basically achieve a political goal by garnering a high victim body count, and whether that includes civilians, women, children or Muslims is absolutely irrelevant); the skyrocketing rise of militant Islam; how slights from fellow Muslim national leaders created and radicalized the Al Qaeda into a terrorism Frankenstein; an account of 911 from an operational standpoint; predictions on what is likely to come; and the highly detailed profiles of various cells. To those who are not sympathetic to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda's political goals (in other words, those who do feel upset if they see innocents intentionally murdered to make a political statement)this book is depressing, as it documents Al Qaeda's highly fluid and adaptable "multidimensional" nature -- which you now see in newscycles each day. Nor will it vanish soon. Writes Gunaratna: "Al Qaeda's leadership, membership and supporters firmly believe that everything happens according to God's will."
Rating: 
Summary: Misleading is a mild term.
Review: What's truly scary are the totally mistaken perceptions that many people who read this book have come up with. Worse than the bad editing there is the misunderstanding of basic Arabic words(jihad means struggle, not just Holy War, Ummah is the old concept of a nation of believers, and so on). These lead me to wonder if the author had studied Arabic as a language, or Islam as a religion, at all. Al Qaeda is NOT a single organization, as the author tries to portray it. The view of most experts is that Al Qaeda almost like a "United Nations" of different terrorist organizations who share some goals and parts of the Muslim religion. There is no evidence that OBL assasinated Al Qaeda officers, and there is very little evidence that he has ever technically been in control of Al Qaeda. What I, and most others who have studied the man and the groups, believe is that OBL was a nominal figure head, a man with an education, money, and extremism rolled into a charismatic package. And the man has plenty of charisma - if you know Arabic, and listen to his speeches, he offers many intelligent, well-reasoned arguments for why America (and Israel) are to blame, along with the vitriolic hatred most Americans view as his signature (due to the heavily edited "translations" aired on CNN and Fox, and the idea that OBL "hates our freedoms". Uh huh. Read "1984" again, like you ought to have in high school, and THEN re-read Bush's speeches and the raw translations of OBL). There is a difference between being well-educated and religious, and being well-educated about one's religion. Just as Dominican priests do not go out and blow up their neighbors, neither do those Muslim Imams, Mullahs, or other clerics (preachers) who attend mainstream theological colleges, such as Al Azhar in Cairo. The "well-educated" Muslims who are referred to over and over have mostly received WESTERN or Western-style educations as engineers or medical doctors. One of OBL's brothers (not a terrorist), for example, attended the University of Miami in Florida and has a Master's degree in Civil Engineering. OBL is an engineer by training, and his Egyptian assistant is a doctor. These are people who received their religious education from narrow-minded, extremist Imams who were NOT educated at reputable theological colleges. Most of them were educated by village imams, who were trained by the imam before them, and had all the prejudices and bigotry that any American who spends time in the small-town southeast (say, Western Georgia) is familiar with, but with a dose of being invaded by an alien way of life (Western culture) combined with a sense of military inferiority, which leads to an expression of their bigotry in aggression. The children who are best educated in Islam read the whole of the Qur'an, not just parts of it and emphasize what they "like". Al Qaeda's favorite prey are like the bigots who insist upon following Leviticus when it comes to condemning homosexuals but refuse to follow the food rules, or mix their materials for clothing, and so on. The Qur'an does say that you should kill Unbelievers. But if you read on, you find out that Jews and Christians are characterized as Believers, that you can only kill Unbelievers in self-defense, and that if Unbelievers sue for peace, the believing Muslims (Islam is derived from the same root as "salaam", which means peace) must accept any peace treaty that is offered in good faith. There is also the misperception that Islam has something to do with race, which this book promulgates. There are Muslims from every continent (except Antarctica, and no one is from there) and from every ethnic background. There are Arabs, Persians, Turks, Indonesians, Kenyans, Germans, Americans, Australians (and I've even met two Apaches, as in Native Americans) who are Muslims. The word of the Qur'an has not been changed by these groups. What has been changed (like Jerry Falwell and the Bible) is the emphasis. As for the image of OBL cowering in a cave and wearing women's clothing... He's over 6 feet tall, and does not a convincing woman make, for one. For another, I REALLY doubt the man is anywhere near Afghanistan. All he had to do was head into Pakistan and make it to a port city. There a plenty of small, uninspected boats (such as fishing craft) that could easily head toward Indonesia or Malaysia. Or he could have waited until hajj season, and dropped off the boat at a port city in Yemen (security and customs are considerably less there than in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and OBL has family in Yemen).
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