The Myth of the Muslim World

In the postcolonial world and particularly in the 21st century, the racialized European imperialist discourse of the 19th century has become transmuted into Islamophobia, while the Pan-Islamism of the same era has been succeeded by political Islam or Islamism. The assumed fault lines between the West and Islam have become only more entrenched in these new, acrimonious discourses, which, as the author shows, are in many ways the mirror image of each other: Islamophobes and radical Islamists equally embrace the narrative of civilizational difference and conflict that makes their exclusivist worldviews credible.