AFTERWORD
Although history is not over, the period since 9/11 has not mulched down
enough to enter history yet: it still belongs to journalists. It is not too soon,
however, to reflect on this period as a manifestation of two great, out-of-
sync narratives intersecting.
In the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks in New York City
and Washington, D.C., President Bush rallied the United States for mili-
tary action with rhetoric that evoked long-standing themes of American
and Western history. He said the terrorists were out to destroy freedom
and democracy and that these values must be defended with blood and
treasure, the same rallying cry raised against Nazism in the thirties and
communism in the fifties. Since then, the United States and a coalition of
largely unwilling allies have poured a great many troops into Iraq to fight
a war cast rhetorically in much the same terms as the Cold War, and the
twentieth century world wars, and so on back into earlier chapters of the
Western world historical narrative.
But did the perpetrators of9/11 really see themselves as striking a blow
against freedom and democracy? Is hatred of freedom the passion that
drives militantly political Islamist extremists today? If so, you won't find it
in jihadist discourse, which typically focuses, not on freedom and its op-
posite, nor on democracy and its opposite, but on discipline versus deca-
dence, on moral purity versus moral corruption, terms that come out of
centuries ofWestern dominance in Islamic societies and the corresponding
fragmentation of communities and families there, the erosion of Islamic
social values, the proliferation of liquor, the replacement of religion with
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