ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that mythical and historical narratives are not necessarily the same thing, but that they tend to converge in contemporary societies. In a global society of the spectacle, references to "traditions" tend to assume mythical connotations. The chapter proceeds in three steps: it first explains constitutes a mythical narrative and a political myth in particular and then moves on to explain how political myth relates to historical narratives and concludes with an analysis of the recent success of the myth about a clash between Islam and the West. The myth of the clash of civilizations is fed by an equally misleading representation of the West circulating in many Arab and Middle Eastern sources. This points to the existence of a form of Occidentalism-any reductive representation of the West that takes the East as its starting point. The specific way through which myth fights the indifference of the world is by inserting it into a narrative of events.
