[4] Washington Monthly journalist Joshua Micah Marshall particularly remarked that "Berman's book is by turns penetrating, insightful, honest, sloppy, erudite, superficial, hot-blooded, serious, and florid.

[5] Berman then argues against the two popular views that the success of groups such as al Qaeda are either, first, the lashing out of the socially oppressed or, second, an alien, distant product of a Muslim people with fundamentally anti-Western religious beliefs and values.

[3] He additionally stresses the importance of staying strong against authoritarian extremists, arguing in support of assertive, preemptive war as well as active police efforts to root out the radicals within Muslim states themselves as well as in Western countries.

[3] American atheist author Sam Harris cited Berman's book in his own work The End of Faith, which explored the same themes regarding jihadist terrorism and the nature of modern liberal democracy.

Bright also remarked, "Berman's description of a paranoid 'people of God' convinced of its own righteousness, prepared to kill its enemies and sacrifice its own in pursuit of a realm of pure truth might just as easily apply to the United States".

[3] Washington Monthly ran a mixed review by journalist Joshua Micah Marshall, who commented that "Berman's book is by turns penetrating, insightful, honest, sloppy, erudite, superficial, hot-blooded, serious, and florid."

Marshall also wrote, "Though this is a serious book, it is shot through with an equally serious flaw: the desire to inflate the threat of Islamist violence—and particularly its intellectual stakes—to levels beyond what they merit and to force them into a template of an earlier era, for which Berman has an evident and understandable nostalgia.