Islam: The Bane of Our Civilization. What Went Wrong Reconsidered!

[duluxe]

No other word in the modern world produces so much noise, yet so little meaning, as Islam.

The Arab weeps at the mosque for the “fall” of Islam—though he would not recognize it if it stood before him. The Westerner panics over the “rise” of Islam—though what rises is not a religion, but a people broken by the absence of one.

Islam today is not feared because it is strong, nor mourned because it is sacred. It is feared because it is present without form, and mourned because it is named without substance. The Islamist raises his fist in its name, while knowing nothing of its faith. The post-Christian European recoils from its sound, while having long abandoned his own.

It has become the sacred placeholder of a faithless world without meaning.

Islam today is a source of anxiety not because it is believed, but because it is no longer believable. Not by its own followers, and certainly not by its critics. What both East and West confront is the specter of a religion that speaks its name, but has no memory of its soul. The Arab imagines Islam as a lost golden age. The Western liberal imagines it as a pre-modern fossil that refuses to die. Both are wrong. What we call “Islam” today is neither threat nor salvation. It is a ruin still giving off heat—a haunted name attached to broken minds, inherited traumas, and dead concepts performing themselves by rote.

The Arab doesn’t want Islam. He wants its glory without its grammar—its pride without its prayer, its honor without its humility. The West doesn’t fear Islam. It fears the reminder that for others, belief is still possible, while for itself, it refuses to commit to anything but disbelief.

Yet honesty demands more than metaphysical diagnosis. It demands an acknowledgment of fact. The Western fears are not mere hallucinations of guilt and lost faith. They are responses to real violence, real radicalism, and real civilizational decay made flesh. There are mosques that preach death. There are many communities that seethe with resentment, that see themselves not as citizens but as avengers. There are men for whom the memory of Islam is not a mirror for introspection, but a weapon for conquest. To speak only of metaphysical confusion without speaking of these realities would be as dishonest as those who imagine that terrorism is a statistical illusion, or that cultural disintegration is an Islamophobic myth. What the West fears is not Islam itself—but the fragments of Islamism: the broken, the weaponized, the post-theological rage that wraps itself in sacred language while carrying out profane acts. It is not Islam that marches through the streets of Europe with knives and slogans. It is the wreckage of Islam, sharpened into a blade.

And it is this wreckage—psychological, political, spiritual—that we must now name, dissect, and understand without euphemism, without apology, and without hope for easy reconciliation.

What Went Wrong Revisited​

Political radicalism in Muslim societies is not an eruption of atavism, nor the natural expression of Islam. It is the downstream effect of a civilizational breakdown—one in which Islam, as a normative order, was first hollowed out, then politicized, then reassembled as an ideological instrument in the vacuum left by failed attempts at Western mimicry.

Modern Arab radicalism is not a return to tradition. It is the reaction of post-traditional societies to the collapse of meaning. The late Ottoman and colonial periods severed the transmission of classical Islamic knowledge and governance. What followed was not reform but rupture. The Arab world entered the modern age not through intellectual evolution but through political humiliation—military defeat, colonial subjugation, and the dismantling of its moral and institutional universe.

The postcolonial Arab state was not a continuation of an Islamic political civilization but its negation. It emerged as a centralized, militarized apparatus modeled on European nation-states, cut off from the historical Islam, allergic to pluralism, and hostile to the remnants of religious authority it could not control. Arab nationalism, Baathism, and other secular ideologies did not fail to modernize—they succeeded in disfiguring their societies beyond recognition. They stripped Islam of its juridical and spiritual complexity and left behind only the shell of an identity, ripe for ideological reconstitution.



It is from this debris that Islamism emerged—not as a recovery of Islamic tradition, but as a post-Islamic phenomenon: a revolutionary theology manufactured in prisons, universities, and the pages of totalizing manifestos. It replaced law with rage, spiritual hierarchy with populist resentment, and jurisprudence with political will. It does not descend from al-Ash‘ari or al-Ghazali, but from Rousseau and Lenin, filtered through an inferiority complex and dressed in scriptural costume.

To ask whether Islam causes radicalism is to misread the order of causality.

Radicalism in the Arab world is not caused by Islam; it is the consequence of Islam’s evacuation—its displacement by the nation-state, its suppression by the military regime, and its reanimation in the form of ideology by those who inherited its ruins but none of its grammar.

In this sense, political Islam is not premodern but hypermodern. It is Islam abstracted, weaponized, and made legible to the postcolonial mind. It emerges not from the continuity of Islamic civilization, but from its mutilation.

​

Political radicalism in the Arab world is not only a sociopolitical phenomenon—it is a psychic formation. It is the product of a soul that has been displaced from its traditional moral cosmos and reconstituted around a singular obsession: vengeance disguised as virtue.

The psychology of post-Islamic radicalism is structured by resentment—not as a passing emotion, but as a metaphysical orientation. It is born from the simultaneous recognition of civilizational decline and the refusal to accept it. (This is the famous thesis of Bernard Lewis.) The radical is not simply angry; he is humiliated. And that humiliation is not processed as tragedy, but as betrayal—by history, by the West, by internal decadence, and above all, by the silent God who no longer seems to answer.

In classical Islam, dignity (karāma) was grounded in submission to divine law. But that law has been politically neutralized and culturally forgotten. In its absence, dignity must now be asserted through power. Not the power of intellectual excellence or moral exemplarity—but the brute power of retaliation. The jihadist does not want to purify society; he wants to punish it. His religion is not a source of transcendent humility, but of absolute self-righteousness. His God does not judge him; his God affirms him.

This inversion is critical: the classical Muslim feared God; the radical invokes Him to sanctify his fury.

Radical Islamism, therefore, is not too Islamic—it is insufficiently so. It lacks the memory, the intellectual patience, and the theological restraint of the tradition it claims to represent. It is the Islam of the orphaned soul, the uprooted ego, the trauma seeking metaphysical resolution through historical bloodletting. Its moral vocabulary is binary: purity and filth, submission and treason, martyrdom and apostasy. There is no room for confusion, ambiguity, or introspection—only the raw certitude of the aggrieved.

And central to this aggrievement is the Jew.

Not because of theological continuity, but because, in the footsteps of the German genius, the Jew becomes the perfect symbolic container for Arab self-contempt projected outward. The Jew, especially the sovereign Israeli Jew, embodies everything the radical cannot reconcile: historical continuity, technological competence, democratic survival, theological confidence. The Jew is not hated as a person, but as a mirror. A mirror that reflects the Arab world’s fall, and thus must be shattered.

This is why antisemitism in Arab radicalism is not a fringe impulse—it is the very theological grammar by which the radical makes sense of his defeat. The destruction of Israel is not just a political goal; it is a sacrament of self-repair.

But of course, it repairs nothing.

The radical’s rage is bottomless, because its true object—the restoration of a meaningful world—cannot be accomplished through destruction. And so the cycle deepens: humiliation, rage, sanctification of rage, violence, more humiliation. A psychic ouroboros fed by borrowed texts and amputated metaphysics.

Until the sources of moral form are reencountered, not mimicked; until the theological grammar of Islam is retrieved, not replaced; until shame is metabolized into reform, not redirected into revenge—this cycle will continue, devouring what remains of Arab and Muslim civilization from within.

​

We must now turn the blade inward—not only toward the object of critique, but toward the conceptual language by which that object is made visible. For the very structure we have described—the psyche of the radical as one marked by humiliation, alienation, and theological silence—is not unique to the Arab world, nor to Islam. It is, in fact, the inherited psychological architecture of modern European revolutionary thought.

The idea that one lives in the shadow of a lost civilizational grandeur; that history has conspired against human dignity; that suffering is not to be endured but rectified through transformative violence—this is not an Islamic consciousness. It is a post-Enlightenment secular theodicy, born of Europe’s own metaphysical crisis.

The Enlightenment promised a rational and liberated order in place of sacred hierarchy. When this failed to materialize—when reason led to Reign of Terror, to the guillotine, to technocratic annihilation—the West produced a new myth: that redemption could be found not in God, but in revolution. Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche—each in his way recoded the Biblical fall into a political mythos. The world is broken not because of sin, but because of power. It must be remade, not through repentance, but through revolt. Evil is no longer metaphysical; it is structural. And it must be destroyed.

It is this modern revolutionary grammar, not classical Islam, that structures the psychic language of contemporary Arab radicalism. What we call “humiliation” is, in this light, a narrative frame inherited from a secularized theology of history. The radical’s belief that his civilization has been betrayed—by Western imperialism, by secular elites, by colonial fragmentation—is not merely an emotion. It is a doctrinal conviction: that there was once unity, purity, moral coherence—and that its loss must be avenged.

This idea—that history owes us satisfaction—is a thoroughly modern fantasy. It is alien to traditional Islamic thought, which recognizes the cyclical nature of history, the inevitability of trial (fitna), and the centrality of divine sovereignty over temporal affairs. The early Muslim response to catastrophe was not revolution but renewal (tajdīd), not rupture but return (rujūʿ). The proper human response to civilizational decline was repentance, introspection, reordering—not ideological insurrection.

That this posture has been replaced by slogans of vengeance—by demands for purity through violence, by accusations of treason against metaphysical traitors—reflects the infiltration of modern revolutionary subjectivity into the postcolonial Muslim imagination. The Islamist is not a throwback to the medieval jurist; he is the mirror of the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, the committed post-Sartrean militant—mobilized by the same myth: that suffering is a cosmic injustice, and that utopia is possible if only enough blood is spilled.

Thus, the radical’s humiliation is not merely personal or cultural. It is scripted. It is the symptom of having absorbed a European eschatology of despair without the metaphysical grounding that once restrained it. The result is a psyche that rages against history as if it were a conscious betrayer, and seeks redemption not through transcendence, but through annihilation.

In this light, the Arab radical is not an expression of authentic Islam. He is the heir to a disenchanted Europe, speaking in Qur'anic idioms but dreaming in revolutionary French.

The Hidden Architecture: Civilization as a Secular Theological Concept​

The modern Arab imagination has internalized “civilization” (ḥaḍāra) as both a self-description and a moral aspiration. Yet few pause to ask what this word signifies, whence it originates, and what invisible assumptions it smuggles into the very heart of Muslim self-understanding.

The concept of “civilization” is a European modern construct, not an ancient or universal term. It emerges in the 18th century, particularly in French and Scottish Enlightenment thought, as a way of narrating the progressive epochal development of humanity from barbarism toward rational, moral, and political refinement. Montesquieu, Ferguson, Condorcet, and others did not merely observe differences between peoples; they constructed a hierarchy of being—one that implicitly justified imperialism, tutelage, and conquest.

Civilization, in this sense, was not descriptive. It was normative. It was the standard by which societies were judged to be legitimate or obsolete, superior or inferior, mature or primitive. Christianity had posited salvation as the telos of history. Enlightenment thought secularized this telos: salvation became civilization. To be civilized was no longer to be redeemed; it was to have conformed to an immanent, historical criterion of progress.

This shift had enormous consequences. History itself became a theological arena, but now without transcendence. It was not God who would judge the nations, but Hegel’s History—the silent tribunal, in German mold, punishing those who failed to evolve. “Progress” became the new eschaton. “Civilization” became the new Eden.

When European empires encountered the Muslim world, they found peoples whose self-understanding was not structured by this category. Classical Islamic thought had no analogue to "civilization" in the Enlightenment sense. Muslims distinguished between belief (īmān) and unbelief (kufr), between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, between just rule and tyranny—but never between “civilized” and “uncivilized” as ontological categories of human worth. The Qur’an speaks of nations (umam) judged by their faithfulness to divine command, not their technological or political sophistication.

The Islamic view of history was moral, not developmental. Victory was not proof of virtue, nor defeat proof of backwardness. God raises and lowers nations according to wisdom hidden from human view. Thus, dignity (karāma) was anchored in submission to the divine will (islām), not in historical achievement.

It is only after military defeat, colonial subjugation, and epistemic disorientation that Arab intellectuals began to adopt the language of “civilization.” Figures like Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and later Muhammad Abduh internalized the European gaze. They sought not to reject it, but to prove that Islam could meet its standards. Thus began the long and catastrophic shift: Islam was no longer the supreme and sufficient framework of human flourishing; it was repositioned as an ingredient within “civilization”—a civilization now implicitly defined by European metrics of science, governance, and historical success, a pathological philosophy of History.

In this transformation, the concept of dīn—a total way of life submitted to God—was quietly replaced by ḥaḍāra—a historical project measured by human progress. Islam ceased to be the criterion of judgment and became itself a judged object.

Thus, the modern Arab Muslim finds himself trapped within a double alienation: he yearns for the dignity of “civilization,” but he seeks it through categories and criteria that already declare him insufficient. His rage at civilizational decline is the rage of a man who has accepted the judgment of an alien tribunal but resents the sentence.

This psychic structure is not Islamic. It is post-Christian and post-Enlightenment.
It is the secularized revenge of history masquerading as moral self-critique.

The tragedy is profound: by accepting “civilization” as the measure, Arab intellectual life guaranteed that it would forever pursue a receding horizon—chasing a redemption whose terms were set by those who first declared it deficient.

Until this architecture is dismantled—until the borrowed metaphysics of “civilization” is cast aside—no true renewal is possible. Only mimicry, resentment, and ideological revolt without end.

 

[duluxe]

The Myth of Decline: A Modern Fetish Disguised as Diagnosis​

The modern Arab imagination, in both secular and religious idioms, is haunted by the specter of decline. From the fall of Granada to the abolition of the caliphate, from colonial conquest to postcolonial fragmentation, the narrative is nearly liturgical: We were once great, and now we are broken. Every Islamist manifesto and nationalist lament is structured by this basic emotional grammar. But where does this grammar come from? And what does it conceal?

The concept of “decline” is not a Quranic category. It is not found in classical Islamic historiography in the way moderns invoke it. Pre-modern Muslim historians chronicled change, corruption, and conquest, yes—but not as signs of civilizational invalidation. They did not presume that history had a single, linear, upward trajectory, nor did they assume that defeat indicated metaphysical failure. Empires rose and fell. Piety waxed and waned. The ummah was tested. These were seen as trials within a moral cosmos, not terminal illnesses in a Darwinian competition between civilizations.

The modern idea of decline, by contrast, is a secular theological concept, the negative imprint of the myth of progress. Once history was reconceived in the Enlightenment as a linear ascent—from superstition to reason, from tradition to freedom—anything that deviated from this trajectory was not simply different. It was deficient. It was falling behind. It had failed to evolve.

In this schema, decline is not a description. It is a judgment. It presumes a universal standard of development, often techno-political in nature, and measures all societies against it. The obsession with Arab “backwardness” (ta’akhkhur) and Islamic “stagnation” (jumūd) is thus not an internal Islamic critique. It is the echo of a European gaze internalized by Arab intellectuals after successive military and cultural defeats.

This gaze demanded explanation: Why did “we” fall behind? It gave birth to a genre—al-nahda, the “renaissance” literature of modern Arab reformers. But the very use of the word renaissance betrays the logic: we must rise again—but according to whose vision of ascent?



“A 100 Years of [Arab] Enlightenment,” by Salah Anani, Egypt. It is a symbolic retelling of the self-understanding of modern Arab secular intellectuals: the meeting with modern Europe led to the exit from the darkness of religious pre-modernity [on the far right], towards an enlightened world of modern intellectuals and artists.
What followed was not a recovery of Islamic categories of renewal (tajdīd, iṣlāḥ) rooted in divine command. It was the adoption of a tragic Westernized self-perception: that history had abandoned the Muslims, that their fall was an injustice, and that it must be rectified through political engineering, ideological purification, or violent rupture.

This is why every Arab ideological project of the modern period—from pan-Arabism to Islamism—has been structured by a kind of messianic urgency. Not only must decline be arrested, it must be reversed. Not only must collapse be mourned, it must be avenged. But this presumes that “greatness” was once ours in terms defined by modernity: territorial unity, technological supremacy, imperial dominance. The actual content of greatness—as understood classically, as proximity to divine justice, the flourishing of knowledge, and the moral ordering of society—was forgotten.

Thus, the belief in decline is itself a form of subjection. It traps the Arab Muslim within a secularized metaphysics of history, where he is always already behind, always in need of catching up, always guilty for not yet becoming what the other has declared normative. The very act of diagnosing “decline” under these terms guarantees perpetual humiliation.

The irony is sharp: the one who believes he has fallen is already falling. Not because he has lost power, but because he has surrendered the right to define what rising means.

The Fetish of Crisis and the New Prophecy​

If the myth of decline structured the Arab sense of historical failure, it was the fetish of crisis that provided the emotional and intellectual template for imagining redemption. And like “civilization” and “decline,” the concept of “crisis” is not an Islamic category. It is a modern European invention, born of the revolutionary imagination that sees history not as trial or providence, but as the theater of total rupture and imminent salvation.

In its modern form, "crisis" assumes something profound: that history was once whole, coherent, moving naturally forward—until it was interrupted by corruption, oppression, alienation, or decline. Crisis, therefore, is not simply a description of hardship; it is the announcement of an eschatological moment—the moment when the intolerable becomes so total that it forces either collapse or rebirth.

It was the French who perfected this genre. The Jacobins spoke not merely of political reform but of the total end of the ancien régime, as if the natural order itself had been poisoned and could only be purified through terror. Rousseau's disciples saw in every crack of the old world a prophetic sign: now is the time. Robespierre preached virtue through blood. Revolution was not politics. It was the apocalypse weaponized.

Marx inherited this structure wholesale. In his hands, “crisis” became the iron law of capitalist self-destruction. History was not only wounded by exploitation; it was fated to destroy itself, to collapse into terminal contradiction, birthing the messianic age of communism through catastrophic rupture. Crisis was no longer merely probable; it was necessary, salvific.

The postcolonial Arab world, intellectually colonized by this revolutionary structure, absorbed the fetish of crisis like a body absorbing a virus. Every Islamist manifesto begins with it. Every radical speech recites it.

We are on the brink.
This is the final hour.
Either Arabs/Islam returns, or history ends.

Sayyid Qutb, the architect of modern jihadist thought, opens Milestones not with patient theological reasoning but with the scream of terminal diagnosis: that the world is on the brink of disaster and that the Muslim world is sunk in a state of Jāhiliyya—a new, global ignorance even worse than pre-Islamic paganism—and that only total, violent rupture can redeem it. The modern Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafist movements, the Islamist populist parties—all chant the same apocalyptic rhythm. Crisis is no longer a sign to reflect upon. It is the very proof of legitimacy: We are needed because the world is dying.

But this imagination is not Islamic. It is French. It is German. It is Marxist.
The Qur'an speaks of fitna, of trial, of cycles of rise and fall, of repentance and mercy.
It does not speak of final terminal crises redeemed through human bloodshed.

The adoption of the "crisis" fetish by Arab intellectuals marks the final alienation: they do not even know they have replaced the Qur'anic grammar of history with the apocalyptic dreams of Parisian radicals and German atheists.

Thus, the modern Islamist does not offer a new beginning. He repeats, endlessly, the modern revolutionary gesture: the end is near, therefore we must destroy, therefore we shall be saved. And like all such revolutions, his ends not in salvation—but in silence, ashes, and betrayal.

What Went Wrong Reconsidered​

If we are to understand the modern Arab malaise, we must recognize that it is not a crisis of belief, but a collapse of meaning-structures—of the very architecture through which meaning, obligation, and legitimacy are discerned. The transformation is so total that it often escapes notice. The words remain—sharīʿa, nafs, ʿadl, dawla—but their referents have shifted. The Islamists and secularists alike speak in the same vocabulary, but not in the same world.

Let’s take law (sharīʿa), as a first example. Classically, the sharīʿa was not a “code” imposed by the state, but a divine path discerned through juristic deliberation and communal transmission. It was inseparable from taqwā (God-consciousness), niyya (intention), and the moral cultivation of the soul. Law governed not only action but orientation. It was embedded in a theocentric universe in which obedience was both existential and epistemic.

Modern thought collapses this. Law becomes legislation—a positivist artifact created by sovereign will and enforced by state apparatus. Even Islamists who demand the “application of sharīʿa” often mean its codification, centralization, and militarized enforcement—all categories alien to the premodern Islamic legal tradition. The result is not the return of sharīʿa but its simulation.
In classical Islam, the self (nafs) is a site of struggle (jihad), purification, and submission. It is not autonomous. It does not possess rights by default. Its dignity is derivative of its status as a servant of God. The goal of life is not self-expression, but tahdhīb al-nafs—moral disciplining of the soul through ritual, law, and remembrance.

Modern thought reconfigures the self as a sovereign subject—autonomous, expressive, and inviolable. Everything becomes external. Even in supposedly “Islamic” rhetoric, one now hears calls for dignity (karāma) rooted in identity, authenticity, and victimhood, rather than in spiritual conformity. This is Rousseau’s self in Islamic clothing.

The classical Islamic concept of state, dawla, was never synonymous with a modern totalitarian state. It was a contingent political order, judged by its ability to secure justice, maintain ritual space, and protect the community—not by its total control over law, borders, and economy. It was limited, plural, and embedded in a broader cosmology.

Today, even Islamists imagine the Islamic state as a total unitary sovereign entity in the mold of the European Leviathan: territorial, bureaucratic, and militarized. The caliphate becomes not a spiritual center of legal pluralism but a centralized ideological machine. This is not continuity. It is mutation.

Classical Islamic justice (ʿadl) is teleological and theocentric. It is not equality, but proportionality. Not liberty, but obedience. Justice is that which reflects the divine order. It is discovered, not invented. Its failure is not merely systemic but cosmic—a failure to align with divine wisdom.

In modern discourse, justice becomes distributional, procedural, and secular. It is de-linked from metaphysical ends and tethered instead to historical grievances. This transformation allows for the weaponization of “justice” as revolutionary ressentiment—a mask for power, vengeance, and ideological purification.

No anatomy of the moral mutation would be complete without exposing the reconstruction of jihad—perhaps the most disfigured concept in the entire Islamic vocabulary, turned from an established organized warfare tradition and/or metaphysical discipline of the soul into a totalizing war doctrine modeled on modern revolutionary violence.

In classical Islamic thought, jihad was a juridically bounded, state-sanctioned act—not an individual moral impulse, not a populist uprising, and certainly not a private license for violence. It belonged to the sovereign authority of the legitimate Muslim polity. It was the prerogative of rulers and jurists, conducted under the law of the land, according to conditions, procedures, and ethical constraints outlined by the fuqahā’ (jurists). The idea that any Muslim—or group of Muslims—could spontaneously declare and conduct jihad was alien to the tradition. Jihad was a matter of public law, not private zeal. It was the military doctrine of a particular kind of human society and embedded within a moral cosmology that knew the difference between war and rage.

Modern thought annihilated that distinction. The collapse of Muslim throught, and with it the fragmentation of legal authority, created a vacuum into which ideological actors poured, turning jihad into a voluntary association of resentment—a private act of will disguised as public piety. The modern Islamist no longer waits for legitimate command; he commands himself. He is not subject to the moral order; he is its self-appointed executor. He does not inherit the tradition; he performs its corpse in the theater of revolution.

Jihad was extracted from its legal casing and refashioned as total war in the service of ideological salvation. The modern Islamist speaks of jihad not as an act of law, but as an act of being—a permanent revolution, a holy violence justified not by law but by historical necessity.

In this new paradigm, jihad is no longer a legal category. It is a metaphysical justification for insurgency. It no longer serves the polity; it expresses the pathology of a deracinated ego seeking sacred validation through violence. The Islamist invokes jihad the way modern revolutionaries invoke “resistance”: as a license for purification through destruction. As a matter of fact, there is no distinction between the two, as Hamas has shown us.



In the aggregate, these transformations constitute a conversion of the moral system. The language of Islam remains, but it now functions within a post-Enlightenment framework: man at the center, history as redemption, law as imposition, the state as savior, and justice as liberation from constraint.

The Islamist, whether he knows it or not, has inherited this modern moral apparatus. He wages war against modernity using modern categories. His critique is circular; his resistance, counterfeit. He is the last modern man.

The modern Arab world is not experiencing a crisis of governance or ideology, but something far more radical: the exhaustion of a meaning form, and the substitution of its inner logic with alien metaphysical presuppositions cloaked in familiar language. What appears on the surface as political radicalism, social dysfunction, or cultural regression is in fact the downstream effect of a total disintegration of moral order, and its silent replacement with an imported, incompatible metaphysics.

At the core of this condition is the internalized trauma of “decline.” But decline, as shown, is not an Islamic category—it is the child of Enlightenment historiography, which secularized Christian eschatology into a narrative of linear progress. Within that framework, Arabs were rendered failures, not only politically, but ontologically: people outside of time, behind history, in need of catching up. This narrative, born in Europe and imposed by empire, was absorbed wholesale by Arab intellectuals who accepted its judgment but sought to reverse its verdict.

The result was the birth of the postcolonial revolutionary subject: a being forged in ressentiment, obsessed with restoring a dignity it could no longer define, using tools it did not create, chasing a future shaped by enemies it both envied and hated. This subject seeks redemption not through repentance but through rupture; not through submission but through assertion. And because he has lost his own tradition’s metaphysical grammar, he sacralizes historical rage as a substitute for divine justice.

This subject then builds his world on four broken pillars:

1. Civilization replaces dīn as the horizon of aspiration. Islam is no longer the totality of truth, but a resource for national authenticity within a civilizational race. The Muslim seeks to prove his worth by mirroring his rival, not transcending him.
2. Decline replaces fitna as the structure of meaning. History is no longer trial, but failure. Defeat is not read as divine test, but as political humiliation. Theology becomes therapy.
3. Revolution replaces tajdīd as the mode of renewal. The past is not returned to, but burned. Renewal becomes negation.
4. Justice becomes vengeance. Not God’s justice, but man’s compensation for injury. Not proportion, but purification.

The total consequence is the production of a self that is alienated, incoherent, and enraged, but convinced of his own authenticity. He borrows the forms of modernity and the symbols of Islam, but has access to neither the soul of the former nor the structure of the latter. He is armed with slogans, bereft of meaning. His moral instincts are post-Christian, his psychology post-Marxist, his theology reactionary, and his politics an endless repetition of failed redemptive dramas.

This is the true condition of modern Muslim radicalism: it is not Islamic. It is post-Islamic, post-European, and metaphysically homeless.

 

[duluxe]

The Fear of Our Own Reflection​

But the tragedy does not end with the Islamist. It continues—and deepens—when we turn our gaze onto the West itself, onto the intellectual and political class that has attempted to explain, categorize, and domesticate this radicalism.

The Western account of Islamist radicalism—whether produced by liberal theorists, security experts, or postmodern sociologists—is not an act of clear-sighted diagnosis. It is a myth folded upon a myth: a projection born of its own metaphysical homelessness.

Having long since exiled transcendence from its own worldview, the modern West cannot recognize genuine theological dislocation when it sees it. It can only understand belief as pathology, religion as irrational force, and spiritual yearning as political resentment. Thus, when confronted with Islamist radicalism, it cannot comprehend it within its own Islamic grammar—because it has already lost the ability to comprehend any grammar not rooted in immanent history, material grievance, or psychological dysfunction.

Western analysts describe Islamist violence through categories borrowed from their own disillusionment:

• They see it as “alienation” because they themselves are alienated.
• They see it as “radicalization” because they themselves yearn for radicalism.
• They see it as “identity crisis” because identity is all that remains for those who have abandoned all meaning.

In doing so, they do not explain the Islamist; they merely narrate their own secular despair through him.
They misrecognize his sickness because it rhymes with their own.

Even the vocabulary is revealing: extremism, fundamentalism, radicalism—all terms that presuppose a secular norm from which one deviates. But what if the secular norm itself is the deviation? What if the world they have built—the disenchanted, desacralized, deracinated world—is the true rupture, and what they call "radicalism" is merely the scream of those unable to survive in it?

At yet another remove stands the geopolitical expert: the strategist, the security scholar, the counterterrorism bureaucrat. For him, Islamist radicalism is not a symptom of the historical process of collapse of meaning led by the heavily funded Western university. It is simply a strategic threat—a target to be contained, disrupted, or eliminated. His language is clean, clinical: instability, extremism, asymmetric threat, radical networks. No literature, no ambiguity, no meaning—only “risk management” and “security policy.”

But this too is a mythology, and a self-serving one. To identify Islamist radicalism as an irrational hatred of the West, an innate hostility to democracy, or an archaic cultural pathology is to make it legible within the existing machinery of geopolitical management. It absolves us of the need to confront the West’s own metaphysical exhaustion. It reduces the issue to a technical problem—something that can be solved with better border controls, smarter surveillance, and more agile counter-narratives.

Thus, the Western mythology of Islamist radicalism is a second-order myth, layered atop the first.
The Islamist mythologizes his own rage as sacred jihad.
The Westerner mythologizes the Islamist’s rage as a hatred for a deified self.

Both are illusions.
Both conceal a deeper collapse: the collapse of meaning itself.

The modern world speaks of “understanding” radicalism, “countering” extremism, “deconstructing” narratives.
But it does not understand.
It cannot counter.
It cannot deconstruct.
Because it stands on the same metaphysical groundlessness that gave birth to these pathologies in the first place.

Islamist rage and Western incomprehension are two faces of the same ruin.

The Islamist Reconsidered: The Revolutionary Heir of a Broken Theology​

With all that has now been laid bare—the colonized categories, the mythologies of decline and civilization, the psychic structure of post-religious rage, and the mutation of the moral lexicon—we may now return to the figure of the Islamist, not as the West imagines him, nor as he imagines himself, but as he is: a late modern creature, disfigured by history and animated by a counterfeit inheritance.

The Islamist is not the descendant of the ulama’. He is the spiritual grandson of the Jacobin and the Bolshevik, baptized in Qur’anic language but formed by Western teleology. He seeks to restore the ummah, yes—but by means foreign to the ummah’s metaphysics. His vision of sharīʿa is not that of the jurist but of the commissar. His notion of dawla is not the caliphate of classical Islamic diversity but the centralized police state of Hegelian postcolonial paranoia. His understanding of justice is not rooted in divine command but in historical grievance. He no longer asks, “What does God want?” but “What must be destroyed to feel whole?”

He is not an archaism. He is a hybrid modern—a mirror of the very West he claims to resist.
His demand for “authenticity” conceals a hollow interior.
His call for renewal (tajdīd) masks a revolutionary will to power.
His rhetoric of prophecy conceals an unspoken metaphysical despair.

What he cannot admit is that the tradition he claims to restore no longer exists in the moral grammar he uses to think. His tools have been shaped by the very forces he condemns. His “return to Islam” is not a return, but a reaction. A reaction not to secularism alone, but to the death of meaning that secularism left in its wake.

In this light, the Islamist does not oppose modernity. He is its symptom. He is modernity turned inward, self-hating, dressed in sacred rage. He is Rousseau’s noble savage, now called the mujāhid. He is Hegel’s world-historical actor, not on a horseback but on a pick-up truck, and praying in Arabic. He is Nietzsche’s resentful slave, convinced God is still on his side.

He wants God, but cannot hear Him.
He wants order, but cannot obey.
He wants power, but calls it purity.

This is why his revolutions always end in fire: the fire of state collapse, of theological shallowness, of moral exhaustion. What he builds is not Islam revived, but Islam exhausted—squeezed into the molds of modernity until it breaks.

And so the tragedy deepens. Because his enemies, too—liberal secularists, nationalist autocrats, Western intellectuals—misread him. They think him ancient. They think him an echo of a medieval past. But the truth is more disturbing: the Islamist is us. He is the modern condition in its most desperate, sacralized form. He is what happens when we lose tradition, then try to resurrect it through the language of rupture.

If there is to be a renewal of Islam, it will not come from the Islamist.
It will come after him—after his exhaustion, after his burning, after his myth fails.

Then, and only then, might we hear again the ancient voice: not of revolution, but of submission.
Not of ressentiment, but of repentance.
Not of history redeemed, but of man reminded.

(The Iranian case is the natural next movement of this symphony of death. It is a richer, darker specimen: where the exhaustion of Islamic metaphysics did not lead to nihilistic collapse alone, but to a necromantic resurrection; a political-theological zombie that drapes itself in sacred language while animated by pure resentment.

If Islam in the Arab world today is a ruin without memory, in Iran it has been embalmed—ritualized, preserved, and paraded like a sacred corpse whose rotting flesh must be endlessly perfumed with revolutionary slogans.

The Islamic Republic is not the continuation of an Islam. It is the weaponization of its corpse. A metaphysical emptiness governs Iran—not the humility of divine submission, but the intoxication of divine vengeance. Its clerics speak in the language of Revelation, but what they enact is the brutal secularization of the sacred: politics not as stewardship under God, but as an unceasing theater of hatred, fear, and counterfeit transcendence.

And at the center of this theater stands the Jew; not the Jew as a neighbor or covenantal brother, the People of the Book, but the Jew as metaphysical scapegoat, the necessary negative through which a dead faith seeks to simulate life.

The Ayatollahs do not truly believe in Islam as the submission of the self to God. They believe in Islam as the submission of the world to their resentments. In this, they mirror what they claim to despise: a hollowed modernity that, having killed its God, must invent idols out of its hatreds.

Iran's regime does not fear apostasy of belief. It fears apostasy of hatred. Were the Jew to disappear tomorrow, the entire edifice would crumble, exposed for what it is: a citadel built not on faith, but on the sacred preservation of rage.)

A Final Whisper​

And so we arrive at the end—not of history, but of its illusions. The wreckage has been mapped. The impostors unmasked. The sacred words examined, and their meanings found wanting. What remains?

Perhaps the only thing left to say is this:

The Islamist must convert to Islam.

Not to its slogans, its flags, its televised chants.
But to Islam—the way of din, of God over man, of law as submission, not projection; of self as servant, not sovereign; of justice as divine order, not personal reparation.

He must abandon his worship of civilization.
He must renounce his theology of decline.
He must be reborn not as the subject of history, but as its questioner.

This conversion will not be televised. It will not happen in the chambers of power, on social media, or in the squares of protest. It will happen in the ruins—where the slogans have failed, where the blood has dried, where the soul, finally stripped of illusion, falls silent enough to hear again.

He must return not to the caliphate of his fantasies, but to the God who has never left.
He must forget the books he quoted to become “authentic.”
He must re-learn the Qur'an not as a manifesto, but as mercy.

He must weep.

Then perhaps—perhaps—Islam can return. Not in triumph, but in truth.
Not to reclaim the world, but to reorder the soul.

We are not here to revive. We are here to believe.

Only then might we speak again of civilization, if we wish to retain such a word—not as a race to be won, but as a life rightly ordered.



Afterword:

This short article leans heavily into my theological language rather than my diagnostic, critical-historical style out of reverence for the subject at hand and my wish to deal strictly with the religious and the spiritual. Otherwise, I insist on a serious analytical and precise historical reconstruction of the issue that takes into account social and political factors.

Moreover, in the essay, I stage a deliberate sequence of conceptual engagement. At the outset, I invoke the familiar language of "civilizational breakdown"—meeting the reader within the epistemic frameworks inherited from modern historical consciousness. In doing so, the essay establishes a shared ground: the familiar language of collapse, progress, and historical drama that late-modern thought reflexively trusts and with which much of the scholarship about Islam has been written.

This opening move is tactical and deliberate, not substantive.

Later in the essay, the very concept of "civilization" becomes the object of metacritique. It is revealed as a secularized construct, a term loaded with ideological presuppositions alien to the moral grammar it presumes to describe. Rather than a neutral category, "civilization" emerges as a conceptual relic of modernity’s attempts to narrate meaning in a disenchanted world.

The tension between these two moments in my essay is deliberate.
It is not a flaw but a pedagogical device in the form of sequential placement:

First, to build preliminary trust by speaking in recognizable terms.

Second, to gently destabilize the explanatory comfort those terms provide.

Third, to expose the deeper betrayal embedded in our secular conceptual order itself.

In this sense, the essay does not merely present an argument; it tries to enact an experience. It stages for the reader a controlled epistemic disorientation—a microcosm of the larger dislocation that modern thought has inflicted upon our consciousness. The aim is not to abandon meaning, but to drive the reader toward abandoning false visions of the false ones: a shattering of the idols.

Thus, the engagement with "civilization" is itself performative and models the intellectual liberation it seeks to inspire:

• the recognition that our modern conceptual language, used uncritically but our most trusted authorities, is not innocent,
• the refusal to remain prisoners of categories inherited without critique,
• and the painful but necessary awakening to the world as it is.

By leading the reader through this sequence, I was hoping not merely to inform, but to awaken: to offer, in miniature, the very act of metacritical self-overcoming that any genuine awakening of thought from its deep slumber must begin with.

Thus, the tension some readers might perceive is not a contradiction, but a pedagogical mirror: an invitation to experience, in miniature, the journey from intellectual magical spells to emancipated vision. I’m not sure if I will succeed but I won’t stop trying.

 

[syed putra]

Too bad the indigenous population of America North and south did not have the chance to voice out their grievance.

 

[GOD IS MY DOG]

if only the Black Death plague had taken place in Middle East................it would have done wonders for Mankind................maybe can wipe out most of the Jews too............

 

[k1976]

When a religion is deeply engrossed in killing and struggling, it is most likely trapped in a violent self inflicting damage vicious cycle.

U look at the Golden Age of Islam vs Now is a good example

Worse is the religion focus of resolving justice thru violence and hijacked by gangster or armed bandits…that is what happen since 1970

 

[superpower]

Any religion that has to resort to violence to make its adherents toe the line and ensure its survival has lost its way and deviated from the path of truth and righteousness.

 

[Narong Wongwan]

vilest of the vile
The world would be a better place once this scourge is eradicated

 

[KingFook Sr]

As my days are numbered ..... really numbered.
There was a time in the past .... when Islam was a peaceful, compassionate .... religion.
Things began to unravel with the forced formation of the jewish state ... Israel.
Forced by the Christian West .... against Islam.
That to me was the tipping point ... for fairness, peace.
The rest is history.

 

[syed putra]

It did not start as a religion. It was a liberation movement. That's why early arab armies had Christian and Jews in its ranks. Anyone can join in a liberation movement. And spread quickly all Over middle east and Spain.
It got complicated when it turned into a religion.

 

[Narong Wongwan]

Let’s have the crusades back so we can kick some mozzie ass

 

[True Believer]

if only the Black Death plague had taken place in Middle East................it would have done wonders for Mankind................maybe can wipe out most of the Jews too............

 

[True Believer]

Let’s have the crusades back so we can kick some mozzie ass

 

[True Believer]

It did not start as a religion. It was a liberation movement. That's why early arab armies had Christian and Jews in its ranks. Anyone can join in a liberation movement. And spread quickly all Over middle east and Spain. It got complicated when it turned into a religion.

So Israel is containing Islamic extremism in the Middle East.