The author's profile of Hezbollah is just one of many reasons to purchase and admire Faith At War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, From Baghdad to Timbuktu.

Trofimov is a veteran international affairs journalist, of a polyglot heritage and life. Faith At War is a travelogue of sorts, reporting his journeys throughout various Muslim societies after 9/11, with much emphasis on his period covering Iraq during and after the US invasion in 2003. The book's original release not long after the superficially successful purple-finger election in late 2004 caused many to challenge the pessimism on Iraq that prevades several of his chapters. But the author makes certain things painfully clear about his perspective: he was on the ground, he was initially hopeful, he listened, he watched. And he knew his stuff, knows his stuff, and knows how to tell it well. His negative view has proven as lethally accurate as his early estimation of Hizbullah.

On Iraq specifically, Trofimov's tracking of the degeneration of Iraqi perceptions of Americans (never high to start with) is well-told. He traces his own guides' reactions to their new rulers and watches them go from cynically dismissing Iraqi anti-Americans as mere whiners to themselves ultimately cursing an incompetent, condescending, and recurrently cruel alien presence. A useful human-level perception of the failures of the intervention is created for the ordinary reader.

Trofimov's other accounts of Iraq, made possible by his refusing to embed, are also worth the price of admission. One narrative is exemplary. Like a Shakespearean tragedy with all the main figures onstage at the opening, his text gives a blow by blow by blast account of the original meeting and interaction of Shiite leaders and their followers in Iraq right after the invasion. We get a glimpse of Chalabi's militia showing up, asking Americans for directions on how to get about Iraq, and chanting a leader chant reminiscent of Saddam's personality cult. And then we see an up front view of the killing of Shiite personage al-Khoei in the near-presence of a Michael Corleone-like Muqtada el-Sadr, who absents himself from the dirty deed after, by all indications, setting it up.

Trofimov occasionally seems to fall for the rigid secular-religious divide that most Western critics have. Indeed, his final effort is to present Mali, of all places, as an exemplar of liberal Islam. Perhaps. But wanting to hear the "religion and government should be separate" line in every Islamic society is stupidly unrealistic. Despite that, Trofimov nevertheless does not fall for the infatuation with enforced veil-ripping secularism and singles out Tunisia as a place where anti-Islamist policy became a soft underbelly for general repression:

The West -- by encouraging Ben Ali's repression in the name of combating Islamic radicalism -- was pushing its natural allies, the secular and educated elite, into a deadly embrace with political Islam.. . . To qualify as a moderate, he had only to use familiar language, employing catchwords like democracy, tolerance, and human rights -- while emptying these concepts of any substance back home.

First, they came for the muhajab----, well, one gets the point.

And it may not be an overdone point when one considers Trofimov's being "struck by the virulence of the attacks on Tunisian Jews -- not, as one would expect, for supporting Israel, but for their backing of Ben Ali's regime. This was, of course, the milennial conundrum of precarious minorities lining under dictatorial rule." Oppression breeds unnecessary dilemmas for the most vulnerable, even when done in the name of fighting another oppression.

There are some minor annoyances in Faith at War. Petty perhaps. In telling of Saudi Arabia's distressing habit of refusing non-Islamic burial rites, thereby forcing dying foreign workers to have their bodies shipped out, Trofimov seems obsessed by some mysterious irony in the use of the term "human remains" in the official documentation, as if that represents some type of Saudi pathology. As anyone who has ever worked in cargo in the United States knows, "human remains" is the standard term for transported bodies. The treatment of the bodies sounds no worse than any other shipping situation. Another annoyance is the tendency of journalistic writers (including excellently perceptive ones) like Trofimov to add distracting physical descriptions to many reports and encounters, particularly about how their subjects appeared when they or he entered the room. (I call it Shadid Syndrome.)

Potentially more serious is what Washington Post reviewer Steve Coll noticed on the book's first release: a certain lack of empathy towards or even awareness of the ordinary piety of the ordinary person. But the book isn't really about faith, despite its title. It is more about people in Islamic countries interacting with oppressive social forces of all types; in that his empathy comes across as real, or real enough not to fundamentally mar the book.

Despite these issues, this final impression prevails: Faith At War is an interesting and accessible read, full of perception and prescience. Both the popular and specialized reader ignore the contents at their peril.