The reek of the twin towers' rubble still permeated Lower Manhattan when Yaroslav Trofimov

's editor at The Wall Street Journal gave him an assignment that is the stuff of a foreign correspondent's fantasies: to travel through the lands of Islam and find out how Muslims were reacting to America's tragedy. Fluent in Arabic and carrying an Italian passport, the Ukrainian-born Trofimov gained access to people who wouldn't speak to most Westerners, especially Americans. Over three years, he met jihadists in Yemen, politicians in Bosnia, liberals in Tunisia, conservative clerics in Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon, caravaneers in mythic Timbuktu. and now gives us "Faith at War, " part travel book, part political and cultural commentary, part adventure story and altogether superb, gracefully written guide into what he calls "the Islamic universe. "

The cosmological description is apt: the countries Trofimov visited seem, in their values, outlooks and aspirations, very distant from our own. "Faith at War" serves as a kind of wormhole, through which we can enter that parallel universe and begin to comprehend it. The news it brings will not comfort those who believe that globalization is drawing us closer together. On his first stop, Cairo, undergraduates dining in a McDonald's a few days after 9/11 demonstrate that it's possible to delight in a Big Mac and in the fiery deaths of 3, 000 Americans at the same time. "Everyone celebrated, " an 18-year-old university student gushes as she dips her fries into ketchup, "cheering that America finally got what it de- served. "

This and similar encounters lead Trofimov to conclude that poverty is not the root cause of Islamic extremism: "Often those with the most bloodthirsty ideas were the well-to-do and the privileged who have had some experience with the West—and not the downtrodden and ignorant' masses' that are usually depicted as the font of anti-Western fury. "

At his next destination, Saudi Arabia, Trofimov sips tea with a dissident who echoes a mantra of the Bush adminis- tration—the Middle East's repressive regimes are responsible for terrorism, and the key to defeating it is to democratize the region. The country's justice minister, though, tells him that democracy is "un-Islamic. "

Some of Trofimov's material is, unfortunately, dated, especially in the chapters dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraqi Shiite leaders express deep antipathy to the United States ("Even if you turn this country into heaven, we don't want it from you, " says one); he might hear different opinions now that a Shiite-dominated government is more or less in place.

Trofimov's episodic narrative creates a mosaic of the Muslim universe, which is less monolithic than generally pictured. Each tile is exquisitely wrought, but the overall pattern is not always clear. Trofimov implies that in the eyes of a great many Muslims, what began as a war against terrorism has morphed into a war against Islam—a clash of civilizations. But Muslims in more moderate countries like Tunisia and Mali don't seem to share that view, and I for one couldn't tell which vision is likely to prevail.

That said, this book deserves a wide readership. The Muslims don't understand us, we don't understand them. "Faith at War" goes a long way toward solving the second part of that dismal equation.

Concerning the book, which of the following statements is NOT true？

A．It is partly a travel book.

B．It is partly a political one.

C．It is partly a cultural commentary.

D．It is partly an academic one.