Current affairs: Hardly anyone had heard of al-Qaeda before it announced itself to the world with explosive force over Manhattan. Three years earlier, the name had figured in intelligence reports as the prime and shadowy suspect in the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, but on September 11th, 2001, shadow gave way to substance and a new enemy strutted the earth.
No sooner had we got rid of the legacy of Lenin, it seemed, than another bearded fanatic rose up in the East to divide the world between good and evil. Now we were haunted by a new spectre which would unite us all in common fear - the spectre of al-Qaeda and its evil genius, Osama bin Laden.
There is nothing like fear to bring the masses to heel. Within a year the media had built up this phantom enemy as an organisation with tentacles reaching around the globe ready to activate its cells at the bidding of its leader. Evil stalked the earth, we were assured, and it was time to take sides between the bearded one hiding out in the Afghan hills and his nemesis holed up on his Texan ranch. Between the two of them, God was back in fashion with a vengeance that few had anticipated in this secular age.
No one has more clearly demystified the Western image of al-Qaeda as a coordinated body of mindless terrorists than the chief reporter of the Observer. In his acclaimed book, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, Jason Burke brilliantly dissected the phenomenon of al-Qaeda and demonstrated that the organisation should be understood more as an idea, an attitude, attaching itself to loosely-connected and like-minded individuals, than a coherent body masterminded by some evil potentate. When the London Underground was bombed in July last year, it was not the activity of a cell directed from afar but a plot hatched by British citizens acting with homemade materials and initiative. Burke was right.
Now he widens the focus to Islam in general, to question the coherence of this world just as he had done persuasively with al-Qaeda. The book is part travelogue, taking the reader on a challenging, if grim, tour through the patchwork of Islam in Thailand, Iraq, Algeria, Afghanistan and the variants of religious nationalism which have taken root there. And it is part critique of the dangerous habit of reducing the bewildering reality of 1.3 billion people whose god is Allah to a terrorist bloc "in a way that would have been utterly laughable, and indeed quite offensive, if they had been referring to 'Christians' or even the world's relatively small Jewish population".
Politicians of every hue know how to twist and spin the new enemy of "terrorism" to instil fear and exploit it to perverse end. "For governments such as those of Algeria, Uzbekistan, the Philippines and Russia," Burke writes, "attributing long-running local insurgencies to al-Qaeda, the newly discovered international bogeymen, was extremely useful, simultaneously releasing a flood of diplomatic, military and financial aid from Washington while also obscuring the role their own corruption, nepotism, repression and mismanagement had played in fomenting violence."
Burke's travels through the Islamic world make for a lively and enjoyable read, notwithstanding the terrible price its Muslim inhabitants continue to pay for the crime of 9/11 and the crimes that occasioned it.
Volume 93 of the journal Granta, entitled God's Own Countries, is also a commentary on the persistence of God against the odds. In the age of reason and science it was never supposed to be like this. "Is it that we notice the godly more only because of the politicisation of Islam?" asks the editor, Ian Jack. "Today the godly have bounced back," he answers, pointing to Blair, Bush and outraged Muslims, all invoking the almighty in support of their politics.
Included in this wonderful collection of fictional and non-fictional reflections, in what must be his last piece for publication, John McGahern recalls a time in Ireland when hell and heaven and purgatory were real places and we were really en route to one or other of them. "Gradually, belief in these sacred stories and mysteries fell away without my noticing, until one day I awoke, like a character in a Gaelic poem, and realised I was no longer dreaming."
Maureen Freely, novelist and translator of Orhan Pamuk's Snow, has an extended and fascinating interview with Pamuk. On a different plane, we read that Lucretia Stewart was raped in her flat in Camden, threatened with a carving knife, escaped, and never thought of asking God what in hell was he at. "Bizarrely, I am even grateful that I was raped . . . sometimes it takes something terrible to make you act," she says.
The essay by photographer David Graham is a beautifully-crafted picture essay which takes its origin and its pathos from the accident which left his son Nick a tetraplegic. Nick dived off a low pier in St Tropez and hit his head on a sandbank. The pictures of 20 others, all paralysed by "Acts of God", as Graham puts it (without irony, it should be added), are accompanied by simple, poetic captions which brilliantly capture at once the banality of the event and the mood of epiphany that is the common thread. "He slipped in a paddling pool" (Robert). "I was riding a very talented young horse" (Paul). "The second dive was perfect" (Nick).
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
On the Road to Kandahar: Travels Through Conflict in the Islamic World By Jason Burke Allen Lane, 297pp. £20
God's Own Countries Edited by Ian Jack Granta, volume 93, 256pp. £9.99