Author’s Note (2025)

This essay was written in April 2007, at a time when the discourse around global conflict, terrorism, and identity was shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq War. I’m publishing it now not because I still hold every word to be true, but because it reflects a moment in time — and a phase in my own thinking. Rereading it nearly two decades later, I see both its limits and its sincere attempt to push against the fear-driven narratives of that era.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day future historians described our era with the simple phrase: “the age of Great Fear.” Not that fear as a highly effective tool for controlling and manipulating the masses is an invention of our time. What seems to set us apart from earlier, less tech-savvy eras is the loudness.

The tightly woven combination of large-scale, media-dominant political and business interests that runs the global economy and politics has long since morphed into a kind of politico-media complex, a successor to the former military-industrial one. And the formula that best explains how this new complex functions is found in the old newsroom cliché: “Good news isn’t news.” Cold wars have been replaced by global warming, evil empires by bearded fundamentalists strapped with dynamite vests. What doesn’t change is the message: Be afraid – and you’ll be happy! That’s the formula offered to us from all sides – and whether due to some evolutionary (if perversely warped) drive to adapt, or simply to a herd instinct, we gladly comply, turning fear into a modus operandi, a kind of grey eminence silently governing our daily existence.

Against this backdrop, the metaphor of a “clash of civilizations,” popularised by the eponymous book by American political scientist Samuel Huntington, turns out to be extraordinarily fruitful – and profitable. Its explanatory and suggestive power seems almost inexhaustible. Wherever you turn, you’re confronted by the same media-simplified civilizational giants, locked in either silent or not-so-silent struggle for survival and dominance – above all, the three biggest: Christian, Islamic, and Confucian civilizations.

The events of 11 September 2001 abruptly shifted the focus of global attention, pushing back the supposed threat from China and far-off Asia (a lucky break for that region, if you ask me). And Islam – until then more or less ignored, if not openly scorned as economically and culturally backward – suddenly became Enemy Number One, without whom the West – or at least the part of the West served by the aforementioned politico-media complex – apparently cannot exist.

In that sense, the description of radical Islam by conservative American intellectual Charles Krauthammer appears more than representative:

To dismiss the appeal of radical Islam is a form of secular arrogance. Radical Islam is every bit as fanatical and irrepressible in its anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, and anti-modernism as anything we’ve ever known. But it has the distinct advantage of growing out of a venerable religion with more than a billion adherents – adherents who not only provide a steady supply of new recruits, trained and conditioned in mosques and madrasas far more effective, independent, and widespread than any Hitler Youth or Komsomol camp – but who can also draw on a long and deep tradition of religious fervour, prophetic expectation, and the cult of martyrdom. Hitler and Stalin had to invent these qualities from scratch. Mussolini’s version was a parody. Islamic radicalism flies under a banner of far deeper historical weight and emotional resonance than the ersatz religions of the swastika or the hammer and sickle, which proved historically weak and illusory.

But is it really so?

In the following parts of this essay, I will attempt to show that an entirely different interpretation of some of the latest political and cultural developments and conflicts of our time is possible — one that is far more optimistic and peace-oriented than the idea of a “clash of civilizations.” My main theses are as follows:

1.   Islam, even in its more radical modern forms, is not necessarily a threat to the West and its civilization. However, it can become such a threat — especially if the West continues with the politics of radical confrontaation, recently adopted by some of its leaders as the most appropriate course of action.

2.   Terrorism, as practiced by Al-Qaeda and other revolutionary Islamist groups, is linked not so much to the Islamic religion as to a new revolutionary ideology disguised under a religious mask.

3.   The global “clash,” if we can speak of one at all, is not a clash between civilizations, but between ideologies — just like the clash that defined the second half of the last century. In this sense, we are not witnessing a new, qualitatively deeper development of global conflicts. In principle, the conflict remains the same old clash between liberal-democratic and revolutionary-anti-democratic ideas that we already know — only with new actors and participants.

1.

Supporters of the notion that Christianity represents a “higher” stage of religious development than Islam usually defend their view by arguing that Christianity, unlike Islam, has already undergone an internal process of “purification” (the Reformation) — which therefore makes it more rational, more reasonable, and generally more humane of the two. Whether this is true or not remains a controversial question — and likely one that can only be reasonably discussed within each of the two religions, but not in dialogue between them.

What stands out, however, is the West’s general unwillingness to see anything in the latest developments of Islam except the strengthening of its supposedly expansionist and aggressive tendencies — in other words, a threat to the West and its own values. Moreover, there is a clearly expressed tendency — especially among certain independent intellectuals such as the late Oriana Fallaci — to make little or no distinction between classical Islam and its modern (read: “terror-infected”) offshoots. Even respected authors like Huntington speak of “the bloody borders of Islam” and its inherent inclination toward violence and aggression.

On the other hand, some scholars of Islam — such as the French researcher Olivier Roy — present well-argued studies in support of the thesis that what Islam is undergoing today is nothing other than its own equivalent of the Christian Reformation. In particular, modern Islamists, like the early Protestant reformers, are uprooting Islam from its traditional political and cultural matrices, while simultaneously giving it a purer and more universally religious form.

Whereas traditional Islam was predominantly practiced in specific local or national contexts — inseparable from local customs, saints, and practices — its modern version is increasingly becoming a matter of personal commitment and morality, much like Protestantism. In this way, it essentially lays the groundwork for a modern individualism, where religious identity is no longer a matter of family or communal traditions and obligations, but rather of personal choice.

Seen in this light, the latest developments in Islam not only do not pose a threat to the West — they may in fact represent an internal transformation that brings the two major religions closer, not further apart. Of course, it is very difficult to predict where this transformation will lead the Islamic world, and whether it will ultimately result in destabilization and chaos — as European history has shown it sometimes can.

At this point, it’s important to emphasise that the purpose of this essay is in no way to offer an apologetic for some kind of “harmless” or “benign” Islam. All I am trying to say is that we ourselves need not intensify the processes of destabilisation that inevitably accompany such a large-scale internal transformation. By attacking it, we only radicalise it further. By banning Islamic headscarves, we merely transform them from symbols of women’s subjugation into symbols of their freedom.

2.

Authors such as Olivier Roy (mentioned earlier) or Francis Fukuyama offer serious, well-founded analyses supporting the thesis that the current threat to the West does not come from the religion of Islam or its adherents, but from a new radical ideology that finds supporters only within certain narrow Muslim circles. (Following Fukuyama, I will refer to this ideology from here on as jihadism, to distinguish it from broader and vaguer terms like radical Islamism.)

According to these analyses — which I fully endorse — the roots of jihadism are not to be found in distortions of traditionally practiced Islam (which has always been a local, community-oriented form of religion), but in what they call “deterritorialisation”: the severing of individuals or groups from their traditional roots and environments, resulting in their frequent positioning as alienated minorities, cut off from community life, within non-Muslim countries. This, for example, explains why so many jihadists were born in the Middle East but grew up in Western Europe (such as Mohamed Atta, one of the main perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks).

Viewed this way, jihadism is not so much an attempt to restore a pure, earlier form of Islam, but rather an attempt to create a new, politically charged and universally applicable doctrine — one whose main function is to provide identity for those who have become disconnected from community, often living in marginal or illegal conditions, and doing so within the very context of multicultural, modern, and globalised societies.

Moreover, certain scholars — such as historians Ladan and Roya Boroumand — point out that many of jihadism’s key ideas have Western rather than Islamic origins.

“If one examines the ideological predecessors of jihadism — such as Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb from the Muslim Brotherhood, Maulana Maududi of the Jamaat-e-Islami movement in Pakistan, or Ayatollah Khomeini — one finds a syncretic doctrine that blends Islamic and Western concepts. The Western elements are mostly borrowed from the radical left and right of twentieth-century Europe. Concepts such as ‘revolution’, ‘civil society’, ‘the state’, and the aestheticisation of violence do not originate in Islam, but in fascism and Marxism-Leninism...”

“Therefore, it is a mistake to identify Islamism as an authentic or inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity — although it clearly has the capacity to amplify religious identity and incite religious hatred.”

3.

If we follow the logic of this argument, then the conclusion becomes inescapable: the conflict currently occupying global attention is not a “clash of civilizations” at some unprecedented level of intensity or scale, but rather something far more familiar — especially when viewed in light of the twentieth century.

The threat to the West does not come from devout, traditional Muslims living in close-knit, community-based societies in the Middle East — or in the West itself. It comes from alienated young people, uprooted and disconnected from any tradition, often living in Western Europe. If they hadn’t found identity through some form of radical Islamism (jihadism), they might just as well have turned to fascism or radical communism. All of the best-known jihadist attacks — from the assault on the World Trade Center to the Madrid bombings (March 2004), the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam (November 2004), and the London bombings (July 2005) — were carried out by such individuals.

In other words, jihadism is not the product of Islamic traditionalism. It is more accurately understood as a residual byproduct of globalisation and modernity — the very world we all inhabit.

This perspective also suggests that mechanically transplanting Western solutions into the Muslim world is unlikely to succeed. Multiparty elections under the watch of international peacekeepers do not automatically produce liberal democracy. Likewise, attempts to impose behavioural norms that are perceived as alien to Islamic religious and moral frameworks — even within European societies — may not facilitate integration at all. On the contrary, they may delay it, or even derail it entirely.

In some cases — Bulgaria, for example — such efforts might risk dismantling existing models of multicultural coexistence, models that have proven resilient and viable, painstakingly built over centuries.

Obvious as it may seem, it still needs to be said: Efforts to demonise Muslims as inherently backward or instinctively authoritarian — as people who “by definition” oppose Western values — are deeply destructive.
Surveys show that Muslim communities do not hate the West or its values in themselves. What they oppose are specific foreign policies enacted by certain Western governments. Many see America’s unconditional support for Israel — in direct opposition to Palestinian interests — as a deliberate insult and humiliation.
At the same time, many young, educated Muslims view American backing of authoritarian regimes — such as Saudi Arabia’s royal family or Hosni Mubarak’s government in Egypt — as the key factor enabling those regimes to survive, and as a direct affront to their own democratic aspirations.

From their perspective, it is precisely the American presence in the region that delays normalisation and democratisation — radicalising local populations and making them more susceptible to authoritarian, theocratic propaganda.

I’ll close with a familiar saying: history tends to repeat itself — especially when no lessons have been learned from it.
And Bulgaria, now striving to move beyond its authoritarian past, would do well not to forget that only two decades ago, it witnessed one of the most shameful episodes in its recent history: the forced renaming of its ethnic Turkish citizens.

Whether we like it or not, the world we inhabit must be shared with other human beings.
And that includes — especially — those who do not share our cultural, religious, or political beliefs.

In this matter — as in geometry — there is no royal road.

April 2007