The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Ahmed H. al-Rahim (Yale University, PhD) is an assistant professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His areas of research and teaching include medieval Muslim intellectual history, broadly conceived but with a focus on the reception history of Avicenna (d. 1037) between the eleventh and the fifteenth century; and the development of political Islam as ideology as well as the typology of Salafism after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, on which he is currently writing a monograph.
Professor al-Rahim is the co-editor (with David C. Reisman) of Before and After Avicenna (Leiden, 2003) and the author of The Creation of Philosophical Tradition: Biography and the Reception of Avicenna's Philosophy from the 11th to the 14th Centuries AD (forthcoming); and "Whither Political Islam and the 'Arab Spring?'" The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2011).