ABSTRACT
Over the last 200 years, until the threshold of the twenty-first century, Mus-
lims around the world have been engaged in a vital confrontation first with European colonialism and after the demise of that calamity with the rise of
the US empire. This fateful confrontation has meant a systematic corrosion
of the innate cosmopolitanism of Islamic cultures and its gradual mutation
into a singular site of ideological resistance to foreign domination – in both
political and cultural terms. The rise of Islamic ideologies worldwide corro-
borated the centrality of European capitalist modernity in which its colonial
edges were categorically denigrated and denied agency – a reality against
which a series of anti-colonial ideologies and movements took shape, among them both Christian and Islamic liberation theologies. In this chapter I
intend to give an account of the outdated bipolarity between ‘‘Islam and the
West’’ that for two centuries defined the terms of domination and resistance
in the entire Muslim world. My intention here ultimately is to argue that the
amorphous nature of capital in its current stage has generated an equally
amorphous empire, and the dialectic of these two historical forces will per-
force generate a succession of different and differing modes of resistance to it
by people inevitably disenfranchised by its operation and devastated by its ravages. My ultimate intention in this book is to see in what particular terms
might militant Islamic movements, beyond and above the current vicious
cycle one can call the Bush-Bin Laden syndrome, have a share in this legit-
imate resistance to a predatory empire.
