Gilles Kepel, (born June 30, 1955) is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West. Considered as one of the world’s leading authorities on Political Islam and the Middle East, he is Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. His latest english-translated book, Away from Chaos. The Middle East and the Challenge to the West (Columbia University Press, 2020) was reviewed by The New York Times as “an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region”. His last essay, le Prophète et la Pandémie / du Moyen-Orient au jihadisme d'atmosphère, just released in French (February 2021), has topped the best-seller lists and is currently being translated into English and a half-dozen languages. The excerpt The Murder of Samuel Paty is presently released in the Issue 3 of Liberties Journal (April 27, 2021). Biography 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, then completed his Arabic language studies at the French Institute in Damascus (1977–78), and received his degree in Political Science from Sciences Po in Paris in 1980. He specialized in contemporary Islamist movements, and spent three years at the Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ) where he did the fieldwork for his PhD (defended in 1983) on “Islamist movements in Egypt”, which would be translated and published in the UK in 1985 in English as The Prophet and Pharaoh (US: Muslim Extremism in Egypt, 1986). This was the first book in any language to analyze contemporary Islamist militants, and it remains a standard reader to this day in universities worldwide. After his return to France, where he became a researcher at CNRS (France National Research Faculty) he investigated the developments of Islam as a social and political phenomenon there, which led to his Banlieues de l’Islam (not translated) book (1987), a primer on studies of Islam in the West. He then turned to the compared study of political-religious movements in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and published in 1991 The Revenge of God, a best-selling book which was translated into 19 languages. As a visiting professor at New York University in 1993, he also