ABSTRACT
Long before the event on September 11, 2001 (in fact more than two decades earlier), the frontlines of what was feared to be ‘America’s war against Islam’ were drawn in what then seemed an unlikely political geography. In Iran in the late 1970s, ‘suddenly out of nowhere’ came this massive revolutionary movement in the name of Islam. It ousted the Shah (the staunchest and most loyal ally the United States would ever have in the Muslim Middle East) only to prepare the stage for the face-to-face confrontation of Islam with the ‘Great Satan’ (or rather, the United States with the ‘Axis of Evil’). And the frontlines of a future war were drawn when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announced (after his triumphant return to Iran from exile in 1979 as the leader of the first Islamic revolution of the postcolonial age) that the United States was out to get Islam and that all other conflicts in the world were mere distractions, only to cover up the US’s ultimate goal: the destruction of ‘true Islam’ by all means (military, political, cultural, communicational, etc.), even by creating an ‘American Islam’.
