Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East

This collection of eight biographies of fundamentalist leaders is an outgrowth of the Academy's Fundamentalism Project, which Mr. Appleby co-directed with Martin L. Marty. The contributors to Spokesmen for the Despised show that behind the bloody acts of terrorism, the mobs chanting with upraised fists, and the back-room and front-page politics in the Middle East stand powerful religious leaders who have turned their fanaticism and charismatic authority to political ends. This volume presents vivid profiles of fundamentalist leaders who have made history and headlines: the late Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, head of the Lebanese Shi'ite movement; the group of Jewish rabbis who appear to have instigated the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, the spiritual leader of Hamas; the spiritual guides of the radical Jewish settler movement Gush Emunim; the Sudanese sponsor of "the Islamic Awakening"; the preacher who inflamed Upper Egypt; and the ideological leader of the Zionist International Christian Embassy. The portraits - which include interviews with true believers, with bitter opponents, and in several cases with the subjects themselves - place the lives of these charismatic leaders in the contexts of their religious traditions and their varied social and political settings.

(Summary excerpted from the Bulletin, Vol. LI, No. 1, Sept/Oct. 1997.)