However, the abandoning of ideological conviction – the modern surrogate for religious belief – or us-versus-them thinking won’t be easy. The experts on Islam who opened for business on 9/11 peddle their wares more feverishly after every terrorist attack, helped by clash-of-civilization theorists and other intellectual robots of the Cold War who were programmed to think in binary oppositions (free versus unfree world, the West versus Islam) and to limit their lexicon to words such as ‘ideology’, ‘threat’ and ‘generational struggle’. Predictably, the rash of pseudo-explanations – Islamofascism, Islamic extremism, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic theology, Islamic irrationalism – makes Islam seem more than ever a concept in search of some content while making a spectacularly diverse population of 1.6 billion people look suspect in the eyes of the rest.
In recent years, the mills of Islamophobia have been churned faster by demagogues focusing on Muslims the unfocused fury and frustration of citizens who feel left or pushed behind in highly unequal societies. Many individuals live with a constant dread in a world where all social, political and economic forces determining their lives seem opaque. As globalized and volatile markets restrict nation states’ autonomy of action, and refugees and immigrants challenge dominant ideas of citizenship, national culture and tradition, the swamp of fear and insecurity expands. Seized by a competitive fever, and taunted by the possibility that they are set up to lose, even the relatively affluent become prone to inventing enemies – socialists, liberals, a dark-skinned alien in the White House, Muslims – and then blaming them for their own inner torments.
Islamophobia can only flourish in these circumstances, empowering demagogues just as popular anti-Semitism did during the crises of modernizing Europe. Voltaire, frequently invoked as the apostle of free speech and tolerance, demonstrated a commonplace tendency to project fear and guilt after being caught in illegal financial speculation in Berlin. ‘A Jew,’ he said, anticipating the German and French proto-fascists of the late nineteenth century, ‘belongs to no country other than the one where he makes money.’ The search for a credible scapegoat became more intense after the Jewish Emancipation, amid the political and economic traumas of the middle and lower-middle classes in France and Germany (the word ‘anti-Semitism’ was first used in the 1870s). By the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Herzl, who had watched an ‘enormous majority’ in France call for the blood of Albert Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer falsely accused of treason, was convinced that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen amounted to nothing and that European Jews had to establish a new homeland free of the pathologies of modernizing Europe.
But the fanatical ethno-nationalists in Israel today who accuse their notionally cosmopolitan and liberal fellow citizens of subverting collective unity and purpose manage to echo almost exactly the rhetoric of anti-Semites in mid-twentieth-century Germany and France. Such grim historical ironies and paradoxes clarify that the identity commonly ascribed to the West (progressively modern as opposed to static and barbarous Islam) is neither stable nor coherent.
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Radical Islamists are customarily described as anti-modern and anti-Western fanatics today; but their intellectual forefathers emerged from the modern West, along with those of many Western nationalists, from Hungary to the United States, who demand authentic freedom today from metropolitan elites. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an indignant outsider in Parisian salons, had started to denounce modern commercial society for its moral corruption and inequality even before Adam Smith formulated the classically liberal and modern cosmopolitan vision of self-interested and competitive individuals and nations.
Rousseau, the ‘greatest militant lowbrow in history and guttersnipe of genius’, as Isaiah Berlin memorably described him, was the first to idealize ancient communities for their restraining traditions, militaristic ethic and harsh duties, and to outline another, more meaningful abode for human beings – an aggressively virtuous, if also xenophobic, society. This prickly and awkward Genevan bluntly denied the Enlightenment assumption of continuous progress in human affairs, warning that a civilization built upon endless competition, desire and vanity deforms something valuable in natural man: his simple contentment and unselfconscious self-love.
Mocked by his peers, Rousseau’s powerful and best-selling confessions of discontent and unease found keen readers across Europe: such young provincials in Germany as Herder and Fichte, who simmered with resentment against a largely metropolitan civilization of slick movers and shakers that seemed to deny them a rooted and authentic existence. Rousseau prepared the way, even as he himself withdrew from society altogether, for neo-traditionalist backlashes to the smug bourgeoisie.
A counter-tradition developed in Germany in symbiotic opposition to the liberal universalist ideal of the pursuit of individual interests; it insisted on seeking emotional satisfaction through self-education, community, ritual and commemoration. Fuelled by socio-economic discontent and cultural disorientation, militant nationalism and socialism restored the religious ideal of transcendence, making it seem realizable on earth. The search for individual freedom assumed increasingly desperate forms as the century ended: in philosophies of the will to power and destruction. Responding to international terrorism, governments reintroduced torture, resorted to military courts and created international networks of spies. The First World War finally shattered the nineteenth-century’s facade of development and progress.
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A great euphoria prevailed across Europe in 1914 as war broke out; violence and hatred promised to many a release from the soul-killing venality and boredom of bourgeois society. But then the cult of Napoleon and of belligerent chauvinism had reflected throughout the nineteenth century the malaise borne of a loss of religious faith and an acute crisis of masculinity.
The restless young men of the British Isles seeking heroic deeds or plunder participated in wars of liberation and conquest and built empires of commerce around the world – in India, Java and Australia as well as the Americas. But the man from Corsica most dramatically incarnated, during his attempted world conquest, the human will that has been liberated from traditional constrictions, and adapted to mastery and control. It wasn’t just French writers like Stendhal who missed the beauty and grandeur of life during the Napoleonic Wars, and loathed a grasping bourgeoisie and the tedious rigmarole of legislation. As the Swiss-French writer Madame de Sta?l shrewdly pointed out, Napoleon’s quasi-autistic machismo seduced ‘the minds both of his enemies and of his partisans’.