Talking with terrorists: Jessica Stern's new book reports from the front lines of the war on terror.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

FOR THE LAST five years, Jessica Stern has been interviewing terrorists for her new book, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (Ecco). The book is a synthesis of the often-sensational popular literature on terrorism that has bloomed after the 9/II attacks and academic attempts to understand religious militancy at an abstract level. By interviewing militants in Indonesia, Pakistan, the Middle East, and even the United States, Stern, a former fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, provides a ground-level view of the tactics, philosophies, and obsessions shared by faith-based terrorists from a variety of social, religious, and national backgrounds.

Stern lectures on terrorism at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and is a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center for Science and international Affairs. Her 1999 book The Ultimate Terrorists examined both fringe and state-sponsored groups in the era of weapons of mass destruction. She spoke with reason's Web editor, Tim Cavanaugh, in August.

reason: You draw on literary and historical material to contextualize the attraction of martyrdom. What light does that shed on contemporary problems?

Jessica Stern: We often have the feeling that this is new, and we're shocked. We forget that it's not just Islamist extremists who do these horrible things, but that it's been done [by others] in the past. In fact, one of the things I really tried to study in this book was how terrorists organize themselves--how they create an organizational weapon, a machine that produces suicide bombers. Although I don't think the Christian martyrs were in any way morally equivalent to suicide murderers, I think some of the ways martyrdom was encouraged in the early Christian era are surprisingly similar to what we see today.

reason: Your book is very ecumenical, profiling Jewish and Christian militants as well as Muslims. Some readers might say: Come on, the mortal threat to this country isn't coming from Jews or evangelicals or Shintoists. It's coming from Muslims.

Stern: There's some truth to that argument. The Islamic extremists have developed an ideology that is very appealing today. Christian extremists were far more successful in earlier eras. For the most part they're not nearly as successful at being terrorists today as are Islamist extremists. Christian extremists are supportive of September it and of some of the objectives of the Islamist extremists...