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special effects), which are in many ways elements of ‘‘belief in the making.’’ Indeed, they,
more than anything else, are the wonders and miracles—sometimes the ‘‘shock and
awe’’—of the contemporary world.
The very shrinkage and evaporation of the doctrinal substance of historical religion
may propel the remainder of its believers into rhetorical overdrive—a whistling in the
dark that becomes shriller as fewer and fewer give heed—just as the staunch defense
of self-proclaimed Western Enlightenment values (whether in the name of a ‘‘clash of
civilizations,’’laı ̈cite ́, tolerance, militant humanism, or political liberalism; the difference
matters little) may find itself adopting a no less troublingly devout and often even ‘‘apoca-
lyptic tone’’ (irrespective of its professed atheism, humanism, materialism, naturalism,
skepticism, or immanentism).^15 In a latest twist of the dialectic of Enlightenment, of the
paradox of universalism, secularism might find itself to have become sacral—and, as ‘‘sec-
ular fundamentalism,’’ even parochial—while the so-called religious fundamentalisms of
the world continue to express and further the very disenchantment of the modern world
against whose vehicles (global markets, media, hegemonic political models, economic
liberalization, and cultural liberties) they believe they protest. Religion, in its most dra-
matic and terrifying, even terrorist forms could thus be seen as the flipside of modernity,
not just in the ‘‘age of extremes,’’ but, in this century, in the hyperbolic effects of exponen-
tial growth, the expansion and displacement of populations, the movement of capital and
ideas, the spread of democratic ideals—in short, of openings and closures alike.
Olivier Roy sees one consequence of ‘‘deterritorialization’’ as being a paradoxical
‘‘congruence between contemporary Islam and Christianity,’’ which lose nothing of their
potential for conflict and confrontation even as they disarticulate and reconstellate them-
selves in the same geographical spaces, becoming contemporaries and cohabitants in a
increasingly global realm.^16 On the contrary, he writes, even as they ‘‘become closer’’ they
‘‘become more antagonistic, precisely because they are no longer separated by linguistic
and territorial borders.’’^17 In other words, ‘‘globalization does not necessarily imply mod-
eration.’’^18 Where we are all more or less the same, the need to manufacture differences,
to create and stigmatize ‘‘others,’’ may become a temptation, one easily susceptible to
political exploitation. The psycho-sociological, possibly even biological mechanisms of
mimetic rivalry, aggression, and a death drive, visible in larger groups and nations, may
well first emerge in small disaffected factions and cells that can seem to constitute them-
selves out of the blue, parting ways with the familial, parental, and religious-cultural
environments into which they had heretofore blended, gray on gray.
A case in point is violent jihadism, which, as international investigations and polls
repeatedly demonstrate,^19 finds little overall support among Muslim populations in pre-
dominantly Muslim countries and entertains a complicated relationship with the internal
colonies of immigrant communities in the West. The special report ‘‘Muslim Extremism
in Europe,’’ published in the aftermath of the July 7, 2005, London attacks, which killed
fifty-two victims (and the four bombers) and which, while not unexpected, struck the

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