al-qaeda and the modernist wall:
I shall discuss an approach I have termed the "modernist wall", which seeks to deconstruct the ethical and epistemological structure of jihadist mentality, with an eye to obtaining a better grasp of what shapes it and how it works.
(...) this process of metamorphosis could not have brewed and regenerated itself in the absence of a major ingredient: the West's extremism in posing itself as the ultimate way of life, denigrating all other alternatives and forcing anyone who differs into having to choose either between identifying with it fully, at the cost of his religious and personal persona, or to turn fully and thoroughly against it.
(...) [dawkins fits here] The predicament of positivists, according to Gray, is that they believe that the more science advances, the more people will share the same values and, by extension, the solider will become the embodiment of the ethics of secularism, enlightenment and peace. Al-Qaeda essentially destroyed this hypothesis, not so much because of Al-Qaeda itself but because the persistence in promoting this hypothesis breeds violent organisations bent on destroying it. Such is the case with "end of history" theories, which implicitly put paid to the notion of cultural coexistence. These have become an important source for generating and fuelling "exclusionist" cathartic movements set upon seizing the helm of history and steering it towards "redemption". All jihadist movements in the Islamic world have been motivated by the sense that the West is relentlessly attacking their history and civilisation with the purpose of effacing them and supplanting them with its own. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Islamist revivalist creed perpetuates itself so easily, feeding as it does on the very substance of Western modernism.