Commander of the Faithful is narrative history built on the life of a devout Arab jihadist, Abd el-Kader, who resisted French colonization of Algeria for fifteen years (1832-1847) and then was imprisoned in France for five years, only to become a cultural hero of sorts in France (and elsewhere in Europe) and finally, was exiled to Turkey and Syria for the remainder of his life, where he gained still more fame as an Islamic scholar and, ironically, protector of Christians in Damascus.

The piquancy of this book is the contrast between Abd el-Kader's religious-based nobility and French exploitation and duplicity...those years of jihad and the years of jihad we are living today...and the seemingly endless effort that must be devoted to understanding differences between "Western" worldviews and Islamic perspectives.

Through the figure of Abd el-Kader, John Kiser has excavated many of the same misunderstandings, or complete lack of understanding, that divided Europe from the Muslim world 150 years ago and continue to do so today. The fundamental crunch point, of course, is the role of religion in the rule of man--the inability of religiously inspired rulers to yield or compromise, the inability of secular rulers to understand the benefits of religious rule, and the lack of intellectual effort that underpins the communication gap between the two sides.

Abd el-Kader was a prodigy of scholarship, so his biography betrays no lack of intellectual effort, either as a leader of his people, or in dialogue with his French adversaries. His problem, however, was the spotty contact he was able to make with French soldiers and politicians able to comprehend, translate, and deal with his socio-religious requirements. Whereas his perspective was theological and tribal, the French perspective was imperial and commercial. France wanted to ingest and exploit Algeria. Abd el-Kader didn't think France had a right to seize and destroy a land given to his people by God.

That's a fairly fundamental difference, and it accounts for the fifteen year hit-and-run, slaughter or be slaughtered struggle between Abd el-Kader's Bedouin constituency and a series of French generals and armies. As we read Kiser's book, we are in a familiar zone--the zone of jihad--but not a zone of aggressive terror so much as defensive assault, and not a zone of Muslims condemning Europeans but rather of Europeans condemning, aka civilizing, Muslims.

The broader backdrop to this tale, expertly etched in throughout the narrative, includes Western pretensions to controlling pieces of the decaying Ottoman empire, a process that began in the mid 19th century and continues to this day, but the sharpest focus is on the chivalrous Abd el-Kader, and for me, the intriguing question of a personality emerging out of religious practice, a somewhat impersonal "self" defined not as Westerners define self (an amalgamation of developmental and hereditary factors) but rather as an interpretation of religious strictures hammered into shape by overarching events and daily devotional requirements. For all the time Kiser devotes to Abd el-Kadar, he does not generate a portrait that "familiarizes" this figure, i.e., makes him "one of us." To me, that's a plus--an honest degree of respect for the hard-edged differences not only between those times and these, but also between personalities shaped by the collective ethos of religion and personalities shaped by the individual ethos of secularism.