When, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the onset of the Global War on Terror, the great historian Bernard Lewis asked, “What went wrong?,” he gave voice to the defining anxiety about the Middle East. His 2002 book of that name distilled a lifetime of scholarship into a single question that seemed to cut through the confusions of both postcolonial apologetics and culturally despairing self-pity. Lewis articulated a mystery: how did a part of the world that once stood at the pinnacle of science, law, and geopolitical influence fall into authoritarianism, stagnation, terror, and despair? What had derailed the heirs of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sinna, of al-Farabi and Ibn Khaldun?

Lewis’s question did not emerge in a vacuum. It was posed when the West, its illusions of post-cold-war harmony shattered, was forced to confront the possibility that a vast swath of the world harbored deep, nihilistic hatred for it. The proclamations of al-Qaeda declared not just a list of grievances but, supposedly, the final verdict of God: the West, and America in particular, are condemned. For many, this hatred was inexplicable. The jihadist was seen as a medieval relic or a nihilistic anomaly. Lewis offered a framework that gave this rage coherence: it was the fury of a civilization that had fallen behind and, shamed by the remembrance of its former glory, blamed its decline on external forces. In one short volume, he translated the blood and fire of jihadism into the language of historical development, institutional failure, and cultural woundedness.

Lewis’s answer, classically liberal and empirically grounded, portrayed an Arab-Muslim word that combined internal sclerosis and external resistance. He argued that it failed to modernize, not only technologically, but institutionally and epistemically. While the West underwent transformations in science, law, individual liberty, and self-critique, the Islamic world retreated behind a wall of tradition. Its religious authorities discouraged innovation (bid’a), its rulers suppressed dissent, and its educational institutions turned inward. A civilization that had once absorbed Hellenic rationalism and produced global centers of learning had grown suspicious of inquiry and resentful of modernity. The result was intellectual closure, political authoritarianism, and a crisis of legitimacy that endures to this day.

This civilizational narrative, though persuasive in its factual basis, ultimately remains both selective and inadequate because it misunderstands the nature of the failure. The Arab crisis is not simply a story of decline or stagnation, but of rapid modernization that went terribly wrong—of the all-too pervasive adoption of some of the West’s most dangerous ideas, and their nihilistic legacy. This story begins in the lecture halls of European universities: a particular vision of history, imported from European thought (above all, German idealism), came to reconfigure Arab identity, purpose, and symbolic life from within. The hatred al-Qaeda articulated was not premodern. It was post-Enlightenment: the product of a world in which the grand, post-religious, humanist narratives of secular progress had decomposed, leaving behind only fragments of identity built on symbolic rage.

By absorbing the key notions of German historicism, refracted through thinkers such as Karl Marx, G.W.F Hegel, and their secularized, revolutionary, and postmodern heirs, Arab intellectuals began to think of history as an inexorable process moving toward a certain destiny. Applying these ideas to their contemporary situation, they turned Palestine into a metaphysical epicenter, anti-Semitism into a moral imperative, and themselves into the priesthood of a historical religion. Today’s Arab societies are not the product of a mass reconversion to Islam, but the mass conversion from it. Where Lewis focused on cultural resistance to modernity, I here focus on the opposite: modern Arab intellectuals grew enchanted by the most dangerous metaphysical structures of postmodernity.

To explain how this happened, I’ll give a very brief outline of the past two centuries of Arab intellectual history, focusing on the revolutionary thought that dominated the Middle East for much of the 20th century, and then explain how today’s jihadism grew out of the ideas of the Arab left.

I. The Birth of Modern Arab Thought

This story begins not with ideology but with language. In 1826, a young imam named Rifa’a al-Tahtawi was sent to Paris by Mohammad Ali, the ambitious ruler of Egypt. In 1831, he returned to Egypt with a vision shaped by the Enlightenment’s foundational abstract assumption: that man, history, and reason form a self-sufficient moral order. He then set about creating a functional and morally intelligible Arabic capable of transmitting the ideas, values, and institutional frameworks of European modernity.

The terms Tahtawi introduced into Arabic—hurriyya (liberty), tamaddun (civilization), taqaddum (progress)—were not new ways to describe existing concepts. They were epistemological innovations. In the new Arabic writings, freedom no longer indicated a juridical or communal status; it became a metaphysical ideal aligned with the autonomous, rational subject. Civilization, once understood as the adoption of urban refinement, was now linked to the progressive unfolding of history in alignment with a universal civilizational arc leading to the modern European nation-state. Progress ceased to mean excellence or Sufi spiritual merit and came to imply a one-directional civilizational march through history toward secular redemption.

By the 1860s and 70s, this linguistic project, led by Tahtawi and his contemporaries, had matured into a full-blown pedagogical program for the production of a new elite culture. It was institutionalized through translation bureaus, school curricula, and state publications. It was continued and expanded by many more men who adopted the core Enlightenment triad of reason, progress, and man as the organizing principles of a modern Arab culture. By the final decades of the century, these principles had entered political life.

This new Arabic, moralized, abstract, and increasingly rationalized, proved remarkably fertile. Already in 1893, a group of Egyptian students studying in Montpellier, France published one of the first explicitly socialist manifestos in Arabic. Known as the Society for Egyptian Progress, they declared socialism to be the necessary solution to the “questions of justice, class, and the future of Egypt.” A mere 60 years after Tahtawi’s return from France, Arabic was not only translating Enlightenment ideals; it had become capable of expressing modern thought about economics, revolution, class conflict, and universal liberation.

This development would reach its most coherent articulation in the writings of Rashid Rida (1865–1935), one of the godfathers of modern Islamic thought and the Muslim Brotherhood. While his early works remained loyal to Comtean positivism and evolutionary liberalism—that is, the belief that mankind would continue to progress, guided by the light of science and the rational ordering of society—he would later shift to a more radical position, one that he articulated in a magazine he founded called al-Manar. This publication, whose name means “The Lighthouse,” revealed Rida’s ambition to reorganize the entire moral grammar of Islam through categories drawn from European philosophy. Thus Rida imbued Islamic religious terms with new meanings. The ummah, the traditional term for the global community of believing Muslims, wasn’t just a body of the faithful but something akin to a nation in the modern, European sense. The caliphate was no longer a juridical institution, but something necessary for the success of Islamic civilization. This vocabulary no longer indexed scriptural obligations or prophetic precedent, but gestured toward an emergent global political language in which legitimacy derived from historical function, not divine origin.

Herein lies the paradox of Rida, his circle, and his spiritual heirs. On the one hand, they wanted to create an Islamic revival; on the other, they completely transformed the meaning of Islam, shifting its center of gravity from law and revelation to man, history, and the world.

By the opening decades of the 20th century, the project of linguistic modernization in the Arab world had reached a pivotal threshold. Like the Hebrew of the same era, the language that had once been the vehicle of medieval scholasticism and Quranic eloquence had, within less than a century, been transformed into a capacious and adaptable medium for articulating the entire range of modernity. From scientific treatises and constitutional debates to serialized novels and socialist manifestos, there was no purpose for which modern standard Arabic was not suited. The journey from the baroque cadences of premodern Arabic to this newly austere instrument of modernity was complete.

Thanks to this new language, and the vibrant intellectual life that took place in it, the latest ideas of Europe were constantly being translated, repackaged, and disseminated to the Arab intelligentsia. But European thought had changed a great deal since Tahtawi was roaming the streets of Restoration Paris. Liberal rationalism had given way to the romantic nationalism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, the world-spirit of Hegel that moved history in a definite direction, and of course the revolutionary messianism of Marx. Translation projects, new political movements, and student missions to Europe sped up the pace of cultural exchange. And in the decades following the First World War, European, and especially German, thought became more radical still, with increasing focus on the transvaluation of values and revolutionary violence. This was the heady ideological cocktail that was being served up by Europe just as political independence was coming to the Middle East, and as the elite that would dominate much of the region’s 20th-century history was coming into its own.

We can see this playing out in the new connotations of the same basic terms: liberty, civilization, and progress. Previously, these reflected the ideal of a society made up of rational, autonomous individuals moving incrementally through civilizational stages under the guidance of a national elite that sought to educate and enlighten the masses. But as German historicism seeped into the Arab intellectual bloodstream, these categories were either eclipsed or violently reinterpreted. Freedom (hurriyya) was no longer the emancipation of the individual within a rational system based on the rule of law; it was refigured to mean the realization of a collective destiny. Nations wouldn’t achieve freedom through progress, but seize it through struggle. Likewise civilization (tamaddun) ceased to be a universal horizon; it became a mark of authenticity and organic rootedness in a national spirit.

New terms entered the vocabulary with new meanings: the will (al-irada) didn’t mean the decisions of a free, rational citizen but the metaphysical process through which a collective achieved its historical destiny. Arab intellectuals also spoke increasingly about the self (al-dhat) and the people (al-sha’b or al-umma; in German, the Volk) as metaphysical entities, and above all of struggle (jihad or nidal; in German, Kampf)—a mode of being through which history advances. The last, as Michel Aflaq, the founder of Baathism, put it, “is not merely a means, but an end in itself.”

What emerged at the end of this process was not a loose collection of borrowed terms or repurposed slogans, but a comprehensive mental system. By the 1930s, Arab intellectual imagination, especially in its avant-garde circles, had fully embraced 19th-century German philosophy, and that of its 20th-century heirs. This mode of thinking did not admit pluralism, ambiguity, or deferral. Like the systems from which it drew, it was, for its proponents, a total and closed conception of reality, demanding not contemplation but realization. And it is this metaphysical absolutism that would ultimately configure the tragic trajectory of modern Arab thought. Philosophy of History, not Abbasid scholasticism, is the true worldview of the modern Arabs, and revolution, not Islam, is their main organizing principle.

What these various philosophies had in common is that they reoriented politics away from creating a society where individuals could enjoy freedom and security and seek excellence. Instead, politics was a redemptive vehicle for achieving meaning, which individuals could only realize through participation in the collective. The new philosophy thus functioned as something magical or enchanted. And this was true not just for the ideas of metaphysically inclined thinkers like Fichte and Hegel, but also for the materialist, anti-metaphysical Marx, for whom the Proletariat was a collective entity that had come into being to fulfil its purpose in history.

German philosophy’s sacralization of history offered meaning after the retreat of revelation as the source of moral and cosmic order. It promised that suffering had a purpose and that meaning lay not behind us, in tradition, but ahead of us, in the dialectical unfolding of Spirit, Class, or Nation. As the Arab nationalist philosopher Sati al-Husri put it, this was “not the history written in books or the one buried in the pages of journals and manuscripts, but . . . History that is alive in people’s psyches, in their minds, and captivating their traditions.” For disoriented societies suffering confusion, political convulsions, and loss of their traditional religious understanding of the world, the appeal was irresistible. To enter the philosophy of history was not to adopt a theory; it was to be seized by an apocalyptic vision.

Besides the metaphysical vacuum left by the decline of traditional religion, there were four principal reasons for this conceptual transformation, each reinforcing the shift from French-derived rationalism to the German revolutionary metaphysics that came to structure modern Arab thought. The first was intellectual contagion. Following the First World War, German ideologies—whether fascist or Marxist—were no longer the obscure doctrines of European radical circles but the dominant moral language of international youth, especially within its universities.

Through the intellectual milieu of interwar France, where German thought was reinterpreted, radicalized, and exported, Arab intellectuals encountered this new fusion of Marxist eschatology and revolutionary humanism. Paris, long the destination for Arab reformers and students, became the nursery of Arab radicals. It was there that the intellectuals of decolonization absorbed the metaphysics of dialectics, class struggle, and revolutionary becoming. Earlier iterations of ideas that now dominate American cultural discourse—Western Marxism, critical theory, and the politics of total negation—entered Arab thought through the same French institutions that had once transmitted Enlightenment universalism. It was in Paris that a generation of Arab radicals—Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Algerian—absorbed the intellectual sediment of German idealism, Hegelian historicism, and Marxist theology. In other words, the Arab revolutionary mind inherited its metaphysics of struggle by its fidelity to European thought.

The second reason lay in the internal collapse of the Enlightenment’s epistemic prestige. The French rationalist liberalism that had undergirded the early Arab reformist lexicon, emphasizing incremental progress, empirical knowledge, and civilizational pedagogy, presumed a relatively stable institutional and moral universe. But by the interwar period, that world had vanished. The devastation of World War I had discredited Enlightenment ideals for Europeans and Arabs alike. For the latter, moreover, the fracturing of the Ottoman system, the punitive logic of colonialism, and intensifying social disintegration made the promise of gradual progress appear naive, if not obscene. Arabs had gone from rule by the Ottomans to rule by the Christians. Reform had been tried and had failed; Auguste Comte could not provide an answer for humiliation, nor John Stuart Mill for subjugation. In this vacuum, the dream of a totally new world order—whether in the name of nation, race, or class—offered a radical break with inferiority. Positivism, with its faith in technique and moderation, could not address the new aspirations.

Third was the seduction of the esoteric. To adopt German thought with its terminology and recondite categories was to become part of a spiritual elite: those who could read the hidden purpose of history and could pierce through appearances to glimpse the totality. Fichte, Herder, Marx, Nietzsche, and later Heidegger did not merely analyze the world; they revealed its hidden destiny or lack thereof. One did not merely read these thinkers; one entered into them, as if being initiated into mystical rites. In this sense, German thought offered to Arab intellectuals what the French Enlightenment never could: the conquest of humiliation by the attainment of hidden knowledge.

Finally, this radical reorientation drew upon resentment itself. German philosophical tradition, from Fichte to Heidegger, carried within it a deep hostility to the imperial modernity represented by France and England. It was born of the German revolt against Napoleonic imperial domination. It cast the French and British Enlightenment not as the apex of civilization, but as a betrayal of being, of rootedness, of blood and soil, of primordial authenticity. This critique resonated deeply with Arabs. Here was a Europe that resented Western European dominance. Add to this the fact that Germany did not participate in carving up the Middle East, but had backed the sultan against the colonial powers.

German nationalism, German Marxism, and German existentialism all carried within them a buried hostility to the liberal, empirical, mercantile, and administratively rational culture of Anglo-French power, often expressed in anti-Semitic discourse. Thus, for Arab thinkers humiliated by the civilizing mission of the French and the managerial arrogance of the British, German thought, in which they found an echo of their own alienation, held out a secret alliance. It spoke in the tone of world-reversal, of prophetic wrath, of metaphysical vengeance against the very powers that now ruled their world.

These four elements—intellectual contagion, Enlightenment exhaustion, the seduction of gnostic elitism, and anti-imperial ressentiment—did not remain confined to the realm of ideas. They received their most formidable embodiment in the two regimes that would define the first half of the 20th century: the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. Each, in its own way, was the incarnation of German intellectual modernity: systematic, totalizing, and redemptive. Drawing on Hegelian dialectics, Marxist teleology, and atavistic nationalism, both regimes succeeded in performing what no liberal system of the time could achieve: the total transformation of societies reeling from political collapse, military defeat, and economic crisis into globally assertive powers.

Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany enacted the very promise of the will to history: they mobilized entire populations under a single eschatological vision, eradicated internal dissent through political purification, and effected rapid, radical social and economic transformations. Both regimes offered not merely reform, but salvation. They proposed a new anthropology, a regenerated man fused with collective destiny, and they did so with a clarity and violence that stood in defiant contrast to the exhausted moral language of the Anglo-French bourgeois order. Most crucially, both openly defied the hegemony of Western liberalism.

For the colonized intellectual, craving Western economic, scientific, and cultural grandeur but disillusioned with Western hypocrisy, this totalitarian spectacle was not just horrifying, but profoundly inspiring. Thus, by the mid-1930s, educated Arab youth was mostly split between support for Hitler and for Stalin. Thus the Palestinian Christian-turned-Marxist-turned-Islamist intellectual Munir Shafiq recalls Jerusalem school children having fistfights between pro-Hitler and pro-Stalin gangs.

II. The New Arab Ideologies

By the 1930s and 1940s, the Arab world had become a boiling cauldron of ideological fermentation. A new generation of thinkers—raised after Ottoman collapse, educated in French and British systems, and radicalized in the interwar and wartime global atmosphere—began to articulate political doctrines that would organize Arab intellectual life until today. These doctrines were not limited to highbrow salons or university debates; they created the very architecture of mass politics and transformed the categories through which modern Arabs came to imagine themselves, their enemies, and their historical destiny. All that came later was a product of that moment. The resulting ideologies—Arab nationalism, Baathism, Islamism—did not merely replicate or mimic fascism and Marxism. Rather, they reproduced the symbolic structure of German total politics in Arab and Muslim form.

Among the earliest and most ambitious ideologues of this emerging order was Antoun Saadeh (1904–1949), who founded the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) in 1932. Drawing deeply from German romantic nationalism and its organic conception of history, Saadeh proposed a “total doctrine” that viewed history as the unfolding realization of the nation’s essential will. The Syrian nation, for Saadeh, was not merely a cultural artifact or a linguistic community but a metaphysical entity with a historical mission. He rejected Arab nationalism—that is, the idea, championed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the military junta that seized power in Egypt in 1952, that Arabs were a single nation to be unified in single state. As a Christian, he also rejected Islam as an organizing political principle. Instead, he asserted that Greater Syria, a territory that included modern-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan—which coincidently should be symbolized with a swastika—constituted a distinct civilizational bloc with its own destiny. His political writings, especially The Genesis of Nations (1937), were steeped in the idioms of vitalist organicism, struggle, anti-Semitism, and civilizational mission. He redefined politics not as negotiation or compromise but as existential combat for the survival and realization of the Volk.

In tandem with Saadeh, Constantin Zureiq (1909–2000) laid the philosophical groundwork for secular Arab nationalism. A historian by training, Zureiq’s 1939 Nationalism Consciousness and his 1948 essay The Meaning of the Nakba became two of the most influential political documents of the 20th-century Arab world. In the latter work, Zureiq diagnosed the Arab defeat in Palestine not merely as a geopolitical loss but as a civilizational collapse which invalidated Arab existence itself in history. His writing echoed the tone and structure of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, and his call was not for tactical adjustment but for total civilizational renewal—a complete revolution in Arab spirit, education, and consciousness. He saw the nation as a “special spiritual force, and flowing fountains of vitality” that required Arabs to “touch the spirit of our history.” To Zureiq, history was a tribunal, and the Arabs, he lamented, had been found wanting. The future, he warned, belonged to those who could master it through will, sacrifice, and struggle.

Parallel to these nationalist movements, a different but no less potent ideological current was taking form in Egypt under the banner of what would soon evolve into Islamism. Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), a pupil of Rida who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, did not simply seek religious revival. Rather, he constructed a new political theology in which Islam became the organizing principle of total social transformation. While Banna’s early rhetoric retained the moralism of Sunni orthodoxy, his conceptual apparatus increasingly borrowed from contemporary ideas of mass mobilization and of the need for an elite vanguard that would lead the common people in revolution and renewal.

For Banna, Islam was “a religion, a civilization, a way of life, an ideology, and a state, . . . essentialist, unchanging, and beyond the rules of history.”  This notion of Islam as a total system—encompassing politics, economics, and personal ethics—mirrored the totalizing ambitions of Marxist and fascist systems of the same period. Islam, in this conception, was no longer a body of inherited jurisprudence but a metaphysical project of worldly political salvation.

More striking still is the transformation that occurred within this new Islamic thought after Banna. While they may appear, at first glance, as a return to tradition, the writings of Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), especially those he composed while in an Egyptian prison in the 1960s, constituted a profound hermeneutical and ontological revolution that had moved far beyond the original Muslim Brotherhood activism. In form, it bore the imprint not of classical Islamic jurisprudence, but of German Romantic aesthetics and revolutionary mysticism.

Qutb began his life as a completely secular, and apolitical, romantic poet and literary critic, writing poems about personal alienation (perhaps the one motif that ran through his entire career). “I do not weep over a bygone past,/ nor do I weep over a wasted future./ But in myself, there is a lost meaning,/ To which I find no symbol but weeping,” ran a typical poem. In 1941, when German forces seemed poised to seize Egypt from the British, and coffeeshops roiled with discussion of the war, Qutb published the poem “At Crossroads,” an adaptation of the two-souls monologue in Goethe’s Faust, describing inner torments.

In 1944, Qutb began writing literary analyses of the Quranic passages, informed by the romantic aesthetics of Goethe and Schiller, as well as by more recent trends—notably the Symbolist movement of interwar France. These works have much in common with those composed by Erich Auerbach around the same time, and owe almost nothing to traditional hermeneutics. Qutb’s exegetical efforts culminated in his monumental In the Shade of the Quran, written in the early 1950s. By this time, he had undergone his metamorphosis from secular romantic to grand theorist of Islamism. What did not change were the basic elements of his literary approach.

Qutb read the Quran not as a repository of legal rulings or scholastic theology, but as a total symbolic text—a world unto itself, housing pure moral consciousness accessible through immersion and intuition rather than systematic method. Drawing heavily on the methods of German thinkers like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, he transformed Islamic scripture from divine law into an immanent moral cosmos demanding revolutionary actualization. In Qutb’s political theology, the ideas of the divided soul that dominated his youthful poetry remained evident, but the division had become cosmic, between the truth of Islam and Jahiliya—a term for pagan ignorance that Islamists used to describe secularism. Jahiliya, for Qutb, is something more still: the essence of the modern condition, and its evils.

Qutb, in his 1964 manifesto Milestones, articulated a vision that is romanticist in substance and Leninist in structure: it imagines a morally purified vanguard, spiritually elect and historically destined to incept revolutionary rupture. The call to jihad is not a return to historical precedent, but a revolutionary re-creation of it rooted in Marxism-Leninism. The totality of this vision—its metaphysical absolutism, its rejection of mediation, its insistence on the will to re-found the world—reveals Qutb as a profoundly modern Romantic revolutionary.

While Qutb’s followers were eagerly reading his words, Communist and socialist movements were proliferating in the Middle East. By the 1940s and 1950s, virtually every Arab country had a local Communist party, often composed of students, intellectuals, and urban workers. These movements were not just appendages of Moscow, although they were that as well, but dynamic ideological forces that translated Marxist categories into local idioms. The Iraqi Communist Party became the largest in the Arab world, playing a significant role in urban politics and labor organization. In Egypt, local Communist movements grew alongside the Islamists and the nationalists until suppressed by Nasser’s regime. In Lebanon and Syria, the somewhat weaker Communist parties formed alliances with nationalist and Islamist groups, creating hybrid ideologies that combined secular leftism with a romantic civilizational mission, whether Arab or Islamic.

By the time the war ended in 1945, the Arab intelligentsia had transformed the Enlightenment moral language into a program of struggle. Arab intellectual life no longer revolved around translating European ideas into local terms, but had created its own iteration of the German philosophical tradition. In place of the jurists and philosophers of old, these intellectuals anointed themselves as the new priests of revolution. And playing a central role in their creed was Palestine: no longer just a territory, but the crucible of sacred history, the test of moral truth, and the goal of redemptive war.

World War II also saw another ideology enter not just the mental world of the educated elite, but the cultural mainstream. Even before the war began, Berlin Arab Radio was transmitting Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, calling for Arabs to rise up against British rule and conveying an apocalyptic message: that the world was collapsing, that Zionism was an occult enemy, that revolution was sacred duty. The Nazi aspiration for historical purification, redemptive war, and the moral necessity of enmity was translated into common Arab terms, thanks to figures such as Hajj Amin al-Husseini, formerly the British-appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem. In other words, Nazi Arabic propaganda played a decisive role in shaping a broad social base that could be receptive to the ideas of the new intellectual class. And it brought not just Nazism per se, but its underlying principles of romantic nationalism, redemptive struggle, and mystical anti-Semitism.

These ideological currents came to a head with the 1952 coup in Egypt that catapulted Nasser to power, and with him the new doctrine of Arab socialism that fused Marxism with nationalism and quasi-religious thirst for redemption. Nasser’s 1964 Philosophy of the Revolution reads like a synthesis of Zureiq’s philosophy of history and the Leninist doctrine of the party vanguard that must lead the revolution. With rhetorical grandeur, he invoked Revolution, Will, Nation, and History as sacred forces animated by the people’s spirit. He and the army officers who joined him in overthrowing the pro-British monarchy weren’t just a new government, but heralds of historical inevitability. “History and Revolution have entered this hall before us; both wish to look upon this glorious new scene upon which all eyes are riveted today,” he wrote. The goal was “crushing imperialism, reaction, and capitalist exploitation.” Nasserism became the de-facto state ideology across much of the Arab world, particularly between 1956 and 1967, when the charismatic leader was venerated not only in Cairo but in Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut.

III. The Birth of Arab Mass Culture

Until now, I’ve spoken primarily about ideas that were limited to a relatively narrow, if influential, intellectual elite. But the aftermath of World War II saw the emergence for the first time of mass politics in the Middle East. Unlike Europe, where literacy, printing, and national consciousness matured over centuries, and arose from an emergent civil society, the Arab world entered modern mass literacy and political consciousness rapidly under the direction of ideological revolutionary regimes. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, institutions of modernity like newspapers, mass-market books, public schools, and broadcast television were created not by a bourgeoisie but by the states themselves. They therefore were saturated with the official ideologies of the new postcolonial states.

This was no accident of history. Arab decolonization was not led by liberal reformists or traditional elites. It was led by revolutionaries, armed not only with guns but with a new philosophy. Nasser in Egypt, the Baath party in Syria and Iraq—which gave us the Assads and Saddam Hussein, respectively—and the FLN in Algeria were not pragmatic nation-builders. They were executors of a vision of History with a capital h, armed with dialectics, authenticity, the language of liberation, and Soviet support. They came to power at the exact moment when the Arab peasantry and urban poor were being integrated into national cultural for the first time—when Arab mass society itself was being constituted. Whereas, in the West, mass culture arose over the course of centuries, congruent with the emergence of the public sphere, in the Middle East, it came suddenly from the top down. Arab ideological modernity did not descend upon an already-formed public; it created the Arab public itself, through education, mass media, state institutions, and educational formation.

There had been nothing like universal literacy before this moment. Arab children had not been taught in schools governed by a shared cultural framework. There were no unified media. It was these revolutionary regimes that built the national school systems, created the first ministries of culture, launched the state-controlled radio, and defined the national curricula. And it was through those textbooks, broadcasts, and pedagogical canons that political mysticism was transmitted: not through reasoned persuasion, but through repetition, ritual, and emotional saturation. Arab children were taught to read using socialist tracts, nationalist slogans, and, in too many cases, works like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose circulation was sanctioned in the name of historical redemption.

The new regimes mobilized history, art, literature, film, music, and public ritual in the service of the revolution. Modern Arab cultural forms were not born as autonomous domains of expression but as instruments of historical social engineering—designed not to contemplate reality, but to remake it. Ministries of information, culture, and national guidance, often built with the aid of Nazi fugitives supervised ideological formation. The intellectual, the artist, and the filmmaker were servants of the state system.

For instance, Egypt’s Ministry of National Guidance, founded in 1952, quickly became the most sophisticated cultural apparatus in the Arab world. Under Nasser, the state invested heavily in film, theater, literature, and radio, establishing national syndicates, censorship boards, and state publishing houses that enforced a singular ideological aesthetic. Radical intellectuals, many of them Marxists or fellow travelers, enlisted literature, theater, radio, cinema, and song to serve the civilizing mission of the postcolonial Arab states.

Egyptian cinema, already the most developed in the Arab world, experienced its golden decade in the 1960s, even as the regime turned it into a tool of propaganda. Films such as Al Nasser Salah al-Din (1963), produced under state supervision, presented medieval Islamic history as allegory for anti-Western resistance. The titular hero, a militarized Saladin, became the cipher through which Nasser’s contemporary war on Zionism was sanctified.

Literature and theater embraced a new Arab aesthetic of resistance. Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris, and Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi redefined the novel and the play as vehicles of historical allegory and class struggle. Sharqawi’s dramatizations of Islamic history depicted exploitation and social rot under feudal landlords and their Jewish agents, while his earlier film Earth (1954) depicted the rural poor’s awakening into revolutionary consciousness. In the Levant, the Marxist and nationalist poets Mu’in Bseiso, Mahdi al-Jawhari, Nizar Qabani, and Mahmoud Darwish, and the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, transformed poetry and prose into weapons of historical narration and the mobilization of murderous rage at the colonizers.

Music, too, became a battleground. Umm Kulthum, the uncontested queen of Arab classical song, was recruited into the national project. Her concerts became state events, her voice broadcast over Cairo’s airwaves as the musical embodiment of Arab dignity and resistance. In 1956, following the Suez Crisis, she recorded “It’s Been a Long Time, Oh Weapon!,” a martial anthem that became the soundtrack of pan-Arab rage. The song, composed by Kamal al-Tawil with lyrics by Salah Jahin, exemplified the fusion of traditional melodic structures with revolutionary lyricism. Jahin himself was a key architect of the Nasserist aesthetic: a Marxist poet, cartoonist, and playwright, he epitomized the fusion of folklore and ideology.

Children’s literature, theater productions, and textbooks were rewritten to mirror the revolution’s sacred narrative. As Nasser explicitly declared, the revolution aimed not merely to reform society, but to create a new Arab man. This was to be done not only through land reform and nationalization, but through an “art that teaches,” a “cinema that awakens,” and a “theater that convinces.” Radio and print media reached their apogee under the banner of Sawt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs), Cairo’s state-run pan-Arab station launched in 1953. Broadcasting revolutionary messages, poetry, and propaganda into every Arab capital, Sawt al-Arab became the auditory infrastructure of mass political enchantment. Its announcers narrated the world in a Manichaean tone: Arab unity was destiny, Zionism was evil, and imperialism was the existential obstacle to history’s fulfillment. Entire generations, recent arrivals from the countryside, were formed by the radio’s lyrical catechism of enmity and transcendence.

This total mobilization of culture was not unique to Egypt. In Algeria, the FLN commissioned novels, films, and pamphlets that aestheticized the war of liberation as cosmic deliverance. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), written in the height of Algeria’s war of liberation, became scripture for Third World artists. In 1969, the PLO launched the Palestinian Cinema Unit, headed by Mustapha Abu Ali, to document its struggle and mythologize its martyrs. Its films, such as They Do Not Exist (1974), were exercises in dialectical pedagogy.

This cultural project naturally penetrated the sacred realm as well. Unlike in the USSR, there was no effort to repress religion. Instead, religion was rewritten as part of the state ideology. Mohammad ceased to be the transmitter of the legal and moral order; instead he became the prototypical revolutionary who challenged an unjust system, built a state, and brought about total societal transformation. Films with large state budgets popularized this image to mass audiences across the Muslim world. In them, Mohammad’s life is framed as a political epic and his adversaries not as theological opponents but tribal oligarchs standing in the way of social justice.

The result was a transformation of Islam itself: no longer a system of divine command, it was now a this-worldly project. Its central figures, events, and symbols took on new meanings. A selectively curated Islamic canon, Quranic motifs, citations of the Hadith (the sacred extra-Quranic traditions), and prophetic biographies were reinterpreted as symbols of the Arab state and its eternal struggle against its triad of enemies: reaction, Zionism, and imperialism. Revelation was made history. Jihad was made revolution.

What is often missed in conversations about Islamism is that the violent prophetic reinterpretation saturated Arab political culture far beyond the Muslim Brotherhood. And even those who admit this fact often mistakenly conclude that this consensus between Islamists and their secularist enemies must indicate something about the true nature of Islam—that these sort of beliefs have been so deeply embedded in Middle Eastern culture that neither the secular nor the religious can escape them. But a close study of these ideas shows their common, modern origin: Islamist, Marxist, and nationalist thinkers alike adopted the anti-imperialist, anti-Semitic, and political reading of Islam in which divine revelation was subordinated to the logic of historical redemption at the moment of the birth of modern Arab and Muslim culture.

By the late 1960s, Arab culture had been almost totally politicized: every novel a sermon, every poem a call to arms, every song a military march, every film a theology of struggle. And this culture more than in anything shaped the worldview of the modern Arab. Even the architecture of Arab cities was mobilized: monumental socialist buildings, museums of resistance, and revolutionary statues represented the ideology of the state. The hold of radical politics on today’s Arabs isn’t the product of primitive resentment or some collective inferiority complex. It is, rather, the consequence of a specific historical formation. The modern Arab is not a passive inheritor of radical thought; he is its native son.

IV. 1967 and the Global Crisis of Ideology

The Israeli victory in the 1967 war came as a serious shock not just to the Arab regimes whose armies were defeated, but to their very ideological foundations. If history is the unfolding of an inexorable logic, then the success of the Arab revolution against the West and Zionism was not just desirable, but inevitable. The Six-Day War didn’t just signify the failure of the revolutionary regimes in Egypt and Syria to achieve their strategic aims, but the betrayal of history itself.

The defeat occurred just as the old universalist Marxist ideological framework was beginning to fragment, giving way to a new international revolutionary movement grounded in Third Worldism, an obsession with cultural authenticity, and youth revolt that came to be known as the New Left. It was no longer the age of Stalin and Comintern, but of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, the Black Panthers, the Viet Cong, and Parisian student uprisings. Across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, revolution was no longer a single-party doctrine of the industrial proletariat; it was a theater of the wretched, a performance of redemptive violence by those whose suffering had been elevated into a historical principle: Christs with AK-47s.

In this new ideological landscape, the Palestinian national movement emerged not merely as another anti-colonial cause. It stood at the supposed intersection of Zionism, imperialism, and global injustice. As a result, the Arab New Left—and much of the global New Left with it—came to understand Palestine as the moral center of the world.

The effect was twofold. For the Arabs, Palestine became the symbolic axis around which revolutionary meaning could be organized; a theology of national martyrdom at time when the political future was bleak. But for the Western and non-Arab Left, Palestine offered something even more profound: a moral mirror. The Palestinian fighter, stripped of his homeland, history, and worldly power, became the incarnation of a redemptive universal victimhood that could sacralize violence and turn hatred into a means of universal redemption. Here, the influence of Frantz Fanon, the grand theorist of anticolonial rage, especially as interpreted by Jean-Paul Sartre, was decisive. Fanon did not merely describe the violence of decolonization; he made it into a moral necessity. Sartre’s infamous preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, sanctifying vengeance as spiritual rebirth, gave license to an entire generation to see brutality as a form of truth.

Zionism, meanwhile, was cast as a transhistorical antagonist: no longer the political project of an exiled people, but the final form of colonial evil, the distillation of whiteness, capitalism, and historical betrayal. In this new symbolic economy, anti-Semitism re-entered political life not as a reactionary ideology, but as a virtue, the only possible position of solidarity with the oppressed. The Palestinian revolution thus came to function as a universal rite of political purification: a theater in which others could rehearse their own traumas, purge their historical guilt, and be reborn in the image of the oppressed.

I suspect Bernard Lewis never fully grasped just how deeply these ideas—Fanon’s worship of violence, Sartre’s militant nihilism, and Régis Debray’s romantic portrayal of South American revolutionary brutality—had saturated Arab intellectual life. These were not distant echoes or superficial influences on a medieval Arab mind. They were translated, disseminated, debated, and ultimately embraced as the catechism of a new moral order.

For Arab radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s, it was not the Quran or the Hadith that formed the structure of conviction. It was The Wretched of the Earth, Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, and a library of radical European texts that transformed violence into sacrament and struggle into salvation. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the social vision of the Palestinian leadership—especially in its secular, Marxist factions—owes more to Debray’s model of armed mobilization than to any Arab writer, medieval or modern. The refugee camp was to become the guerrilla cell; the mosque, the propaganda unit; the school, the training camp; the people, the revolutionary army. It was radical chic, not Islamic jurisprudence, that was instructing underfed, semi-literate Palestinian boys in the rituals of martyrdom and sacrifice. The tragedy is not only that this was mistaken for authenticity, but that it was hailed, in universities from Beirut to Paris to Columbia, as the acme of moral righteousness.

But in the Middle East as well as in the West, the euphoria of the New Left could not endure. In the late 1970s, hope for a new revolution gave way to disillusionment, civil wars, and repression. The rhetoric of dialectical struggle no longer convinced; the myth of secular history’s moral arc no longer inspired. A deepening crisis of identity ensued. Across the Arab world, and throughout the broader Third World, intellectuals and militants alike began to confront a gnawing anxiety: if History was a lie, where was person to find meaning? Those beset by this spiritual crisis ceased asking Where is history going? and began to wonder Where do I come from?

The Egyptian ex-Marxist Tariq al-Bishri summed up this feeling at a 1980 conference on Arab nationalism and Islam in Beirut: “If progress refuses me as a people, I do not support it. And if [historical] progress is going to crush me and exile me as a people, then I will go the other way.”

If Hegel and Marx had been the sources of the revolutionary mindset up until this point, from then on it was Martin Heidegger, who was fixated on authenticity, rootedness, and belonging to a forgotten origin. After 1973, which saw another failure of Arab arms against a U.S.-backed Israel, Arab intellectuals turned away from History and toward asala, rooted authenticity. In the wake of decades of cultural dislocation, they sought something uncontaminated by imitation of the West, and found it in Islam. But this was not a return to Islamic tradition in any substantive sense. Nobody seriously wanted to reconstruct society as it existed when Napoleon’s ships landed on the Egyptian coast. Rather this was a turn inward, toward a purified self. The return of Islam was in fact an embrace of Islam as constructed by the revolutionary regimes—not to the ways of grandparents and great-grandparents. This new movement owed more to postcolonialism than to Islamic tradition, and sprung from the same well that nurtured the shift in the American toward identity politics.

V. The Birth of Islamism and the Quest for Authenticity

This essay begins with a discussion of vocabulary, and it’s appropriate then to introduce the most important term of post-1973 Arab culture: turath, or heritage. Classical Islamic thought, turath, was layered, legalistic, exegetical, and accepting of multiple contending ideas. The Islamists and others understood turath in Heideggerian terms as the sign of mystical authenticity. They fetishized turath as the dialectical opposite of modernity (hadatha). Thus the heralds of the return to tradition unwittingly smuggled back to religion the radical concepts of secular Arab radicalism. Their vision of Islam was built on the politicized Islamic symbolism of the secular regimes they rejected, an avatar of collective identity. At the same time Islam became a symbol of what had been lost, or thought to have been lost, in the march to modernity.

The Islamist was not, in origin, a traditionalist. He was a post-leftist, often born of the revolutionary state, educated in its schools, and fluent in its slogans—but disillusioned by the collapse of its ideology. What he sought was not restoration of pre-revolution but a continuation of the modern saga of revolutionary political salvation, now understood in the existential language of belonging. The Islamist critique of alienation, of Western decadence, of historical fragmentation, all echoed the Heideggerian diagnosis of modernity as the forgetting of Being. The Islamist project wasn’t about a return to Sharia, but the sacralization of a world cleansed of inauthenticity, an existential project to recover the essence of the Muslim self and civilization.

As a result, truth itself was redefined. It was no longer grounded in revelation, nor in reason; it became a function of identity. In this way, the Islamist shares much in common with postmodernists of all stripes, whose worldview was also born of the collapse of leftwing ideologies. What was true was what was ours. The sacred was what was native. The authentic was what could be opposed to the modern, the foreign, the West, even if it was invented yesterday. Lost in this transformation was the entire structure of traditional religious meaning as it completely dissolved in revolutionary and postmodern thought. By the 1980s, this metaphysical shift had become complete. Whether Islamist, post-leftist, or cultural- nationalist, nearly every ideological project in the Arab world began to speak the hollow language of identity.

This shift from history to identity changed the landscape of Arab political violence. Like those of the Fanonists, the ideals of the new radicals, secularists and Islamists, demanded bloodshed. In the 1970s, Palestinian militant organizations—especially those under the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—became the global avant-garde of this new aesthetic of violence. Hijackings, bombings, and mass civilian killings became acts of communication—designed to announce the presence of a people through the performance of death. The airplane became a stage; the victim, a symbol; the martyr, a sacrament. The spectacle was the message. Emissaries of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP to Palestinian refugee camps put it clearly to the youths they sought to recruit, “We don’t want people who want to die for Paradise, we want people who will die for the Revolution.” It was only a matter of time for new competitors to promise paradise too.

Nowhere did this symbolic logic explode more violently than in Lebanon. Long a fragile society made of several confessional identities and cultural contradictions, Lebanon was a stage haunted by its own revolutionary imagination. The Lebanese left, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had embraced its own version of radical New Left historicism. It did not seek to reform society; it sought to detonate it, to dissolve its confessional order and bourgeois culture in the fire of revolutionary becoming.

When the Palestinian armed movements, expelled from Jordan and radicalized by their new acquired Fanonian mission, entered Lebanon with weapons, training camps, and their war of liberation, they did not destabilize a stable society; they completed the revolutionary rupture its own intellectuals had already begun. The Marxist weekly Socialist Lebanon promised that the entrance of the Palestinian resistance into Lebanon would “revolutionize the Lebanese situation.” The veteran Lebanese Communist Fawwaz Traboulsi would later reflect with brutal clarity: “We wanted to reform by way of the gun, . . . using the Palestinian stick to force the bourgeoisie into change.” And the means—they “way of gun” became as important as the ends, as summed up in 1981 by the Palestinian intellectual Hanna Moqbal: “One who does not write with blood is not a Palestinian. . . . We will keep writing Palestine in blood until we write in Palestine.”

The result was a total civil war. Countless factions, unspeakable violence, and endless bloodshed made Lebanon the opening tragedy of a long line of disasters that would culminate in the Arab Spring. In 1982, when Israeli forces invaded southern Lebanon to stop the terrorism launched against Israeli civilians from there, the Lebanese Marxist philosopher Husayn Muruwwa declared, “Our generation opens its arms now in these cruel moments to tell you, oh, History, thank you!, . . . for now you are feeding us the great happiness and the great sorrow, both at the same time on the same table.” It’s hard to find a better distillation of German historicism, Fanonist fetishization of violence, and pro-Palestinianism than in the perfervid essay in which those words appeared. Muruwwa, who a few years earlier had declared that Palestine “ignited the fire of my aspiration and my struggle formed my dream and my cause,” was now euphoric to see that his homeland had become the bloodstained battleground of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

While the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion brought bloodshed, it brought neither the spiritual nor the political redemption that the Arab New Left longed for, and this movement too eventually lost much of its luster. Jihadism eventually came to fill the ideological vacuum.

VI. Jihadism and the Collapse of Meaning

The Islamist movements that rose from the rubble of Lebanon’s war were born from the ruins of leftist organizations. Disillusioned militants who had once read Fanon and Lenin now turned to Sayyid Qutb and the Quran, not as students of theology, but as seekers of new ideological purity. Fatah splinter groups and Marxist factions, once led by Orthodox Christians, re-emerged in Islamic dress, armed not only with weapons but with an ethic of theological absolutism. The Islamic revolution in Iran crystallized this shift. It was not a conservative reassertion of tradition, but a total ideological synthesis of modern revolutionary technique and Islamic symbolic language. Like his leftist (and fascist) predecessors, Ruhollah Khomeini built his ideology on charismatic leadership, historical struggle, symbolic violence, the sacralization of politics, and the purification of the willed self through revolutionary action—and put it in an Islamic form.

Across the Sunni world, similar dynamics unfolded. The Muslim Brotherhood, long marginal, became increasingly militant in ethos and apocalyptic in tone. Its offshoots, of which Hamas and al-Qaeda were the most prominent, would evolve into jihadist movements whose language was Islamic but whose content embraced the same revolutionary nihilism as its secular predecessors: a politics of total identity and an apocalyptic view of history in which salvation lay beyond mercy, in the act of struggle itself.

Jihadism, contrary to widespread belief, did not grow from the theology of a careful reconstruction of early Muslim life. It grew from the rubbles of political, intellectual, and social failure. It was the child of lost revolutions, shattered identities, ruined states, and broken utopias. Its dream was a final act of cosmic revenge: Islam as apocalypse. Its doctrine was primarily theatrical, as can be seen in the videos recorded by Palestinian suicide bombers before they go off to achieve martyrdom. It demanded no coherence but only spectacle, and this was most true of Islamic State, which appears to be the endpoint of the logic of Islamism. Like a real-life version of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, it staged the end of a world with operatic grandeur: the desert caliphate, the enslaved women, the black banners, the beheadings before a global audience. It was a post-political ritual theater, an answer to modernity’s collapse, a sacrificial liturgy of symbolic rebirth through destruction.

For the traditional Muslim believer, submitting to Allah constituted salvation. For the jihadist, this was not sufficient: salvation could only be found in flames. The utopia it promises doesn’t lie in the messianic future or in the afterlife (talk of 72 virgins notwithstanding); it is a utopia found right here on earth. Martyrdom, once constrained by juridical rules, became a formidable modern Middle Eastern myth. The suicide bomber is more than an expendable soldier; he is the hero in the final act of a cosmic tragedy. His death is liberation in and of itself from a meaningless world. And so the bomb becomes the last sacrament. His goal isn’t to restore the caliphate, but to purify the world through fire, and if not, to punish it.

This is what remains when every ideology has burned through its symbolic reserves. Jihadism is the result of Islamism failing to fulfill its promise of authenticity. It offers no law, no community, no theology—only myth, blood, and spectacle. In this sense, jihadism is the consummation of the symbolic collapse that began with the first act of philosophical mimicry.

VII. What Went Wrong?

What Went Wrong? Though now associated with Bernard Lewis, the question first originated within the Arab intellectual tradition itself; on the very pages of al-Manar, the journal founded by Rashid Rida, and where the young Hassan al-Banna, fresh from university, would cut his teeth before he went on to found the Muslim Brotherhood. It was there that the question appeared in its fully modern form as an inquiry into the meaning of history. Its very formulation, and its catastrophic answer, presupposed the internalization of the modern European understanding of history: a narrative arc in which civilizations rise and fall on their journey toward political improvement. In this sense, the Arab world did not fall into modernity by accident or conquest; it stepped into it through that very question.

Even more catastrophic than the borrowed question was the answer, which now seems almost prophetic: according to a 1930 article in al-Manar, what Muslims needed to reclaim was their “enthusiasm” for “fighting, strife, and struggle.” While the Germans and French sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives in World War I, the author observes, the Muslims of today are far indeed from “their ancestors who sought death.” The climax of the essay is an ode to “death for the sake of life as called for in the Quran. . . . It is the death chosen by the Frenchman for the sake of France, the German for the sake of Germany, and the Englishman for the same of Great Britain.”

Lewis’s failure, then, was not that he misunderstood the Arab predicament. It was that he understood it all too easily. He and the Arab radicals he studied spoke a mutually intelligible language; not Arabic or English, but the conceptual idiom of modern historicism. The categories through which they interpreted crisis, decline, reform, and revolution were the same, even if Lewis preferred a liberal answer over a totalitarian one. This mutual comprehensibility allowed Lewis to take Arab and Islamist intellectuals at their word, to read their rhetoric of failure and redemption as transparent accounts of reality. But to have truly criticized them would have required questioning not just their conclusions, but the very epistemology that made such conclusions possible, the very same epistemology that underlay Lewis’s own scholarly methods.

Most importantly, to read this story solely as an account of what went wrong in the Arab world alone is to miss the possibility that what went wrong there might also be going wrong in the West. The Arab pathologies are a mirror for own. The collapse of meaning that unfolded in Arab intellectual life, and the resulting cult of authenticity and obsession with the spectacle of anti-Semitic annihilation should be familiar. It is a condensation of a global crisis which has become clear for everyone to see since October 7. If the Arab intellectual believed too deeply in the redemptive myths of modernity, it is only because those myths had already been accepted by the children of the European Enlightenment. The Arab tragedy plays out, in heightened form, the same collapse of inner structure and restraint I fear might now be reverberating through the entire Western world.

The West, too, has passed from truth to narrative, from history to trauma, from politics to identity—and increasingly into nihilism. It, too, has watched moral vocabulary drift into incoherence, and public rituals deteriorate into spectacles. We, too, speak the language of authenticity, of grievance, and of purification; our universities, too, are overtaken by a history-transforming political mission. Western leftists cheer on Hamas, Hizballah, Houthis, Iran, and our own homegrown assassins in the name of progress and justice. The Western radical professor who admires a Hamas fighter might be indeed a “useful idiot,” but give him his due: he understands rightly that they share something in common.

To study this history, then, is not to gaze across civilizations, but to look into our own condition. The ideologies that once organized modern life—nationalism, Marxism, Islamism, liberalism—have not as much been refuted as exhausted. Their conceptual machinery has broken down. And yet, we continue to live in their ruins, thinking in these concepts without believing them.

The modern Arab intellectual, like his Western counterpart, is now neither prophet nor builder. He is the janitor of decay, curating the archive of dead ideas, polishing the slogans of vanished revolutions, and sweeping the dust of meaning.

This is what it means to live after Babel. The towers of ideology have fallen, but the languages they scattered remain. Even religion, which once promised transcendence, now arrives all too frequently not as revelation but as performance—like the so-called “trad” Christians who live out their embrace of an imagined traditional piety on Instagram. Thus, even the call to return—to turath, to Islam, to the ummah—has become the very essence of the selfsame modernity it claims to resist. Today’s Islamism promises not recoveries but reenactments that are postmodern in form, postcolonial in posture, and pretend to retrieve the sacred through the techniques of the profane.

We must then hope that some brave people in the West, as well as some brave people in the Middle East will start to rebuild. To stand as Abraham did in the midrash, in the ruins of his father’s idols, not to destroy for destruction’s sake, but to discern what must be broken in order to preserve what is eternal. If there is hope, it lies in the recovery of a language that does not merely describe the world but binds it to a higher order. After Babel, there is no going back. But there may yet be a way forward.