1. Gilles Kepel, was born on June 30,1955 and is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West.
12 Facts About Gilles Kepel
1. 2.
Gilles Kepel was Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Universite Paris Sciences et Lettres and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Superieure.
3.
Gilles Kepel first graduated in Philosophy and English, then completed his Arabic language studies at the French Institute in Damascus, and received his degree in political science from Sciences Po in Paris in 1980.
4.
Gilles Kepel then turned to the compared study of political-religious movements in Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and published in 1991 The Revenge of God, a best-selling book which was translated into 19 languages.
5.
Gilles Kepel used the library facilities at NYU and Columbia to explore the scholarly sources 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 into a dozen languages.
6.
In 2008, accused of assaulting Pascal Menoret at the Middle East Studies Association in Washington, after the latter had circulated online slanderous material, Gilles Kepel was expelled from the association.
7.
Gilles Kepel was elected a senior fellow at Institut Universitaire de France for five years, which allowed him to refocus on fieldwork.
8.
Gilles Kepel serves on several advisory boards such as the High Council of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and, since 2016, Gilles Kepel is a member of the advisory board of the Berlin-based Middle East think tank Candid Foundation.
9.
In 2017, Gilles Kepel was one of the seven public figures mentioned by Larossi Abballa, the jihadi terrorist who murdered a policeman and his wife in front of their son in 2016 Magnanville terrorist attack.
10.
Gilles Kepel is director of the Middle Eastern Mediterranean Freethinking Platform at the Universita della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland where, since September 2018, he is an adjunct professor.
11.
In 2017, Gilles Kepel criticized Olivier Roy's assertion that jihadi terrorism is only loosely connected to Islamic fundamentalism as Roy neither speaks Arabic nor looks into the Salafi doctrine behind the jihadism.
12.
Gilles Kepel has "repeatedly dismissed claims of widespread Islamophobia in French society as fraudulent, saying the word has become little more than a rhetorical club used by Islamists to rally their base".