did fieldwork among black Muslims in the U.S., which would be compared with phenomena pertaining to the Rushdie affair in the UK and the Hijab affairs in France, and lead to his Allah in the West (1996). He received his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (Habilitation to be a PhD supervisor) in 1993 – from a Committee presided by Pr René Rémond, President of Sciences Po, and including Professors Ernest Gellner, Rémy Leveau, Alain Touraine, and André Miquel. He was promoted to research director at CNRS in 1995, and spent academic year 1995–1996 in the US as New York Consortium Professor (a joint position at Columbia and New York Universities and the New School for Social Research). He used the library facilities at NYU and Columbia to explore the scholarly sources for his best-selling book Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam based on two years of fieldwork in the Muslim World from Indonesia to Africa, which came out in English in 2001, and was translated into a dozen languages. Though the book was hailed due to its scope and perspective, it was criticized after 9/11 because it documented the failure of political Islamist mobilization in the late 1990s. Kepel answered his critics with his travelogue Bad Moon Rising in 2002. He then analyzed in retrospect that failure as the end of a first phase of what he would later designate as the “dialectics of Jihadism”. It epitomized the struggle against the “nearby enemy”, followed by a second phase (Al Qaeda) that learned the lessons of such failure and focused on the “faraway enemy”, which in turn failed to mobilize Muslim masses under the banner of Jihadists. It was ultimately followed by a third phase consisting of network-based Jihadi cells in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, that of ISIS. That Jihad trilogy was further developed in The War for Muslim Minds (2006) and Beyond Terror and Martyrdom (2008). With his students, Kepel also co-edited Al Qaeda in its Own Words (2006) – a translation and analysis of chosen texts by Jihadi ideologues Abdallah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In 2001, he was appointed as a tenured professor of political science at Sciences Po, where he created the Middle East and Mediterranean Program, and the EuroGolfe Forum. He supervised more than 40 PhD dissertations, and created the “Proche Orient” series, of which he was the