Modern jihad erupted in full force with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 in both the Shiite and the Sunni world. It was a reflection, a result, and a concentrate of all the main political pathologies of the twentieth century, led by the parade of motley totalitarian ideologies, but transformed by its absorption into the Islamic cultural matrix.

What a striking historical paradox this was: The world of Islam was falling behind the fast-paced progress made by the modern world and those areas of the world that had taken up the challenges of modernity. It was falling behind not only because it did not invent modernity or espouse it, but because it actively rejected it. On the other hand, it avidly absorbed the dark shadow of modernity, its evil side – the totalitarian ideologies that sprung up as the corruption of modernity, Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism, postmodernism.

Some parts of the world of Islam accepted at least components of modernity – Turkey in the first place, and others to lesser degrees. These all occurred in “hybrid” civilizational areas outside the Arab core of Islam where those in power accepted to borrow other, more constructive creations of the West. Those who did not went shopping in Europe for nihilism, the destructive hatred and the self-destructive passions that neo-Gnosticism had loosed on the continent.