Jason Burke is one of the world’s leading experts on militant Islam. He embedded with the Kurdish peshmerga (currently at war with ISIS) while still in college. He was hanging out with the Taliban in the late 1990s. He witnessed the bombing of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001 firsthand.

With the current emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria and the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, no one is as well placed as Burke—whose previous books have been chosen as books of the year by The Economist, the Daily Telegraph, and The Independent—to explain this dramatic post–Al Qaeda phase of Islamic militancy. We are now, he argues, entering a new phase of radical violence that is very different from what has gone before, one that is going to redefine the West’s relationship with terrorism and the Middle East.

ISIS is not “medieval,” as many U.S. national security pundits claim, but, Burke explains, a group whose spectacular acts of terror are a contemporary expression of our highly digitized societies, designed to generate global publicity. In his account, radical Islamic terrorism is not an aberration or “cancer,” as some politicians assert; it is an organic part of the modern world. This book will challenge the preconceptions of many American readers and will be hotly debated in national security circles.

杰森-伯克(Jason Burke)是世界上研究激进伊斯兰教的主要专家之一。他还在读大学时就嵌入了库尔德佩什梅加部队（目前正在与ISIS交战）。20世纪90年代末，他曾与塔利班混在一起。他亲眼目睹了2001年阿富汗托拉博拉的爆炸事件。

随着目前伊拉克和叙利亚的ISIS的出现以及阿富汗和巴基斯坦的塔利班的重新崛起，没有人像伯克这样有资格解释这个戏剧性的后基地组织阶段的伊斯兰激进主义，他的前几本书被《经济学人》、《每日电讯报》和《独立报》选为年度书籍。他认为，我们现在正进入一个与以往截然不同的激进暴力的新阶段，这个阶段将重新定义西方与恐怖主义和中东的关系。

ISIS并不像许多美国国家安全专家所声称的那样是 "中世纪的"，而是，伯克解释说，这个组织的壮观恐怖行为是我们高度数字化社会的当代表现，旨在产生全球宣传。在他的描述中，激进的伊斯兰恐怖主义并不像一些政客所断言的那样是一种反常现象或 "癌症"；它是现代世界的一个有机组成部分。这本书将挑战许多美国读者的成见，并将在国家安全界引起激烈的争论。