Today's Jihadism Uses Ancient Vocabulary, but Its Ideas Are Modern

Professor Kramer describes my essay as “hypnotic”—a colorful characterization that, while perhaps intended as a stylistic compliment, risks framing the argument as a work of enchantment rather than analysis. My purpose is not to cast a spell, but to trace a genealogy. Nor does my essay offer a “meta-theory” or a “unifying explanation for all Arab intellectual and political failure,” as he suggests. Its aim is more specific and, I believe, more defensible: to provide an intellectual history of the modern revolutionary ideas that came to dominate Arab political culture and to diagnose the process by which they were absorbed.