ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the 1967 war Egyptian radicals felt a heightened despair about the vitality of Islamic societies and demanded the radical transformation of these societies into icons of Islamic social order. Modernity intensifies the hatreds that separate the East from West, but it is apocalyptic beliefs that solidify the enmity between the Islamic and the Christian worlds into passions that are enduring, intractable, and above all hell-bent on a bloody finale. However, modernity and the colonial experience have intensified apocalyptic yearnings in Islam, as they also have in Western Christianity. In the fifth century invaders introduced Rome to the shock of violent and immediate social change, the modern, as they have the residents of places like Cairo and Baghdad at the turn of recent millennium. It was not only defeat in the Vietnam War but the sudden victory of Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001 that introduced Americans to the shock of a new and therefore modern, age.
