Today’s Jihadism Uses Ancient Vocabulary, but Its Ideas Are Modern

I would like to begin by thanking both Martin Kramer and Daniel Sonnenfeld for their generous and thoughtful responses to my essay, “The Enchantment of the Arab Mind.” That a piece so wide in scope and so critical in tone should receive such close reading and sophisticated engagement is not something I take for granted, and I am grateful to both scholars for the seriousness with which they took the argument.

Professor Kramer describes my essay as “hypnotic”—a colorful characterization that, while perhaps intended as a stylistic compliment, risks framing the argument as a work of enchantment rather than analysis. My purpose is not to cast a spell, but to trace a genealogy. Nor does my essay offer a “meta-theory” or a “unifying explanation for all Arab intellectual and political failure,” as he suggests. Its aim is more specific and, I believe, more defensible: to provide an intellectual history of the modern revolutionary ideas that came to dominate Arab political culture and to diagnose the process by which they were absorbed.

I must also respectfully request that my argument not be grouped with the postcolonialists’ critiques of Bernard Lewis or those leveled by Edward Said in Orientalism. As Professor Kramer sagely notes, the intellectual tradition of Fanon, Sartre, and their postmodern heirs is one I consider a deep, if not the deepest, circle of the Inferno. If I must be consigned to suffer in the afterlife for my own intellectual sins, I would prefer to stand alone on the lowest step of Purgatory.