Although often thought of as a unified movement, militant Islamism is fractured, spent and in danger of dying. By assaulting the west and murdering Muslims, violent Islamism has written its own death warrant. Its nihilists have lost almost every war that they've launched (whether intellectual or on the field) and represent a vision that even jihadists themselves are increasingly rejecting. That's the argument Fawaz A. Gerges, Middle Eastern studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York state, makes in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global.

Exploring the history of the jihadist movement to the present, Gerges asserts that it's living on borrowed time. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, far from being heroes to most Muslims, are despised as mass murderers.

A tiny minority materially supports the groups they represent and, outside of the Iraq theatre, relatively few Muslims are drawn to their call. That undoubtedly comes as news to many in the west who are treated to a constant stream of stories proclaiming the vastness of al-Qaeda, the rage on the so-called Arab street and the uncounted numbers rushing to battle on behalf of the Muslim ummah.

For most of jihadism's 20th- century history, he writes, the movement had a relatively narrow scope. Jihadists targeted Muslim leaders who refused to institute the sharia (Muslim laws) and were generally secular. Although US foreign policy was a focus of anger, jihadists viewed their war as a local one. They believed that only by instituting what they saw as authentic Muslim governance of Middle Eastern nations would their world withstand the power of the west.

The governments they were fighting, however, were no less vicious then the jihadists. Realising that the rifle would never bring power, by the mid-1990s many jihadists turned to working within the system. But not all were seduced by mainstream politics. Seeds sown in Afghanistan would eventually result in the rise of a new animal: the transnationalist jihadist.

Whereas the jihadist thought local, the transnationalist jihadist acted globally. The logic was simple: rather than attack the body of the snake - corrupt Muslim governments, or 'the near enemy' - they went for the head: the US or 'the far enemy'. Confident after their victory against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, transnationalist jihadists believed that the US would flee the battlefield after two or three blows. But as recent history has shown, the movement has been all but smashed, with only Iraq proving a fertile ground for recruitment.

Gerges argues that whereas the US-led invasion of Iraq has angered many in the Muslim world, the jihadist movement itself remains unpopular. Most Muslims disagree with the use of violence to affect political and cultural change. Although terrorist strikes against western powers make the news, the primary victims of the jihadists have been other Muslims. Most importantly, however, jihadists - whether traditional or transnationalist - have nothing to offer to the ummah.

'The jihadis have conceptually reached a dead end and no longer possess radically original ideas of any consequence. On the whole, jihadis and their followers are subsisting on an old stale diet that provides no intellectual or moral nourishment ... They try to compensate for the paucity of original ideas by marching to war.'

The Far Enemy is one of those rare efforts that delivers far more than it promises. Thanks to extensive research, including interviews with many jihadists, no reader will fail to gain an appreciation of what is a complex world. The war against transnationalist jihadists has only just begun, but thanks to Gerges and his like we know who the enemy is.