It's an entertaining & provocative read -- although not quite as provocative as the author thinks, I suspect. It's a take on some fairly well-worn cliches of liberal academia (being cliches doesn't necessarily make them untrue, like): -
* ideologies which self-presented as eclipsing or replacing religion are in fact forms of secular religion
* modern fundamentalism is not a "harking back," but is a distinctively modern phenomenon
* political "Terror" as something distinctive about secular religion
He puts them together in quite an entertaining way, but sometimes he's like a little kid saying something rude and then running away. It's full of unevidenced "provocative one-liners," like his claim that Heidegger was a bigger influence on the Qutb (the founder of the Islamic Brotherhood) than earlier forms of "purist" Islam. Good fun, but not a shred of evidence to back this up, beyond the fact that Qutb studied in Europe.
His take on the Christian apocalyptic tradition is good (just about the only area of the book that I have anything like "specialist" knowledge of), and covers some of the same ground as the novel Q, which I know lots on here have read. Anyway, it's cheap on Amazon, and I'm quite pleased I bought it. It's not heavy going at all, and it gets you thinking.
It's also one of those books where the whole argument is there in the first chapter, and then each successive chapter goes into elements of his argument in more depth. So if you wanted, you could get away with just reading the first chapter, as a sort of "executive summary." Which I know some posters on here are quite keen on. A final word of slight criticism is that some of the stuff in there on recent events (war in Iraq, Bush/Blair, etc) reads like it's been cobbled together from newspaper "think pieces," but then I rarely read them, so it's all new to me.
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