Modernity Strikes Again

What drove the men who attacked Mumbai? Guy Sorman writes that the massacre “wasn’t some desperate move to make a statement. It was a carefully planned operation, under the command of sophisticated leadership . . . in order to achieve a strategic, indeed worldwide, goal.”

This goal is nothing less than the the construction of an exemplary Islamic state in Pakistan as a prelude to a global caliphate. This strategy, Gorman says, “owes more to classic Leninist thinking than to the Qur’an.” As outlandish as the terrorists’ vision may seem, there are real reasons that they think pursuing it feasible. Recent decades have seen the rise of an extremist and “internationalist” Islam that militates against syncretism and creates unprecedented alienation between many Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors.

Intriguingly, then, it is the localist syncretism and tolerance that are “traditional” and the internationalist rigorism that is “modern.” File that away in the cabinet full of evidence against whiggish narratives of progress.