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 Rémy Leveau , Ernest Gellner , 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 prepare the bibliography 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 in 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 the 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 . This Jihad trilogy was further studied 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
9/11
September 11 attacks
Gilles Kepel