Michael Howard notes that fundamentalist Muslims feel a much stronger attachment to their tribe or sect than to any nation state. Jihadism, he says, represents a response to ‘the challenge of a secular, urban civilisation that threatens to destroy their traditional values and beliefs’.
It took us, in the West, about three centuries after the Enlightenment — when reason and individualism began to assert themselves in the 17th and 18th centuries — to become comfortable with what we now call cultural freedom.
We cannot expect doctrinaire Muslim societies from the East, which have fomented radicalism throughout the world, to do so in a few years.
‘It is not surprising that a fanatical minority, inspired by a romantic longing to return to the doctrines and practices of a pure Islam, aim at destroying the Western civilisation that they see as debauching the purity of their own culture and beliefs,’ says Howard.
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