This post sketches out some of the ways the events of 9/11 altered time-consciousness and temporal rhetoric in the public sphere and follows how the attacks continue to frame the subjective experience of temporality. Beginning with the lexicon of the war on terror—with its temporally overdertemined rhetoric of “the homeland,” “preemption,” “fundamentalism,” and, of course, the name-date “9/11” itself—I consider a few cases of what I call 9/11 chronomania—the obsession with time and temporal disruption that characterizes representations of 9/11 across a variety of media forms. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, by refashioning disaster as chronology, the narrative aims to replace victims with knowers—first, by establishing an authorial subject in command of its perceptual, technological, and temporal fields, and second, by attempting to shape personal and collective understandings of 9/11 by securing events unfolding in multiple locations and witnessed in myriad ways on a single, immanent timeline. The goals of such a narrative are clear: the chronometric novella that begins the 9/11 Commission Report is in part a hook designed to catch a national audience primed by thrillers like the television series 24, but it is also an attempt to incrementalize and disaggregate horrific events into an easily understood linear plot as part of a self-professed attempt to salve the wounds of collective trauma.

From my perspective in literary studies, I am interested in the ways the seminal speeches and policy documents of the post-9/11 era—among them President George W. Bush’s address on September 20, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2001 conducted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002—frame September 11 as a temporal event and cast the problem of understanding or responding to the attacks in terms of the clash between multiple conceptions of time. Many of the early responses to September 11 in the Anglophone media compensated for the collapse of geographic distance that had long separated the United States from its enemies by emphasizing the temporal distance between the “medieval,” “barbarous,” and “fundamentalist” perpetrators of the attacks and the putative modernity of its victims. The dichotomies of the war on terror depend in large part on dualistic notions of cultural conflict between Western modernity and the archaic forces of a fundamentalist Islam, as cultural critics Edward Said, Judith Butler, Bruce Holisnger, and many others have argued. Neomedievalist rhetoric dusts off old Orientalist tactics to police the boundaries between “us” and “them,” in part by denying what anthropologist Johannes Fabian describes as the “coevalness” of the two parties in question. The medievalization of Islam—or, for that matter, of American foreign policy, as with President Bush’s telling use of the term “crusade” as a synonym for the war on terror—is not, however, my subject here. Indeed, the denial of coevalness between “Islam”and “the West” serves in part to obscure the more complex temporal logic of the war on terror. Though a vast quantity of critical ink has been spilt on the laws and policies of the Bush era, much more can be gleaned by examining the temporal logic of the war on terror, in which time is not experienced and narrated as homogeneous, but rather as uneven, saturated, multiple, and neither as secular nor as hegemonic as has previously been maintained.

In his September 20 address to a joint session of Congress, the national public, and beyond it a global audience, President Bush set out to reassure a stricken nation, name its antagonists, and outline the parameters and goals of a militarized response. “Without a story,” Naomi Klein observes in The Shock Doctrine, “we are intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented, and the world begins to make sense.” The narcissistic evasions of the rhetorical question at the heart of President Bush’s September 20 speech (“Why do they hate us? … They hate our freedoms”) and the broader Manichean drama between good and evil that would come to characterize the rhetoric of the war on terror tell a simple, easily weaponized story of precisely the kind Klein had in mind. But despite sustained attempts on September 20 and in other speeches to gloss the events of September 11 within the familiar nationalist topoi of freedom, heroism, and justice, the speeches and policy documents of the Bush-era constitute less of an orienting metafiction than a tangled web of analeptic and proleptic leaps that provoke and maintain a state of crisis rather than prepare the ground for its resolution. While this and other speeches attempt to channel the affective response of a wounded nation, they do so precisely by maximalizing and marshalling traumatic rupture to shatter any preexisting historical order, particularly one based on linear temporality.

Beginning with his brief statement on September 11, Bush-era speeches and policy documents enmeshed the terrorist attacks in a discourse of temporal rupture. As the President intoned on September 20, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world.” The binary metaphor of day and night, established here with a keen emphasis on the “fall” that defines their separation, pervades Bush’s lexicon in the aftermath of the attacks. The elegant and formally complex September 20 speech, arguably the most important rhetorical moment in what would become the war on terror, deploys a series of catachrestic claims that underscore the way the attacks both constitute and trigger temporal dislocations: “tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom” because, he argues, “we face new and sudden national challenges” presaged by unprecedented acts of terrorism (my italics). Lending rhetorical force to these claims with a chiasmus that echoes the earlier crossing of day and night, the speech reaches its climax in the moment when Bush declares, “whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”

For its victims and for the billions around the world who watched, paralyzed, as disaster unfolded on television, the coordinated strikes of September 11 came as a cataclysmic shock. Within hours on a beautiful but otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning, four commercial jetliners had been hijacked and the World Trade Center’s signature towers and a large section of the Pentagon, symbols of America’s economic and military might, had been reduced to smoking rubble. It is difficult to think critically about the rhetoric of surprise without seeming to lend support to the ranks of September 11 conspiracy theorists, but for national security experts and administration officials, the idioms of surprise must be weighed against the repeated warnings and public pronouncements of impending terrorist attacks in order to understand its ideological value. Beyond their obvious utility in denying culpability for failing to disrupt terrorist networks prior to the attacks of 2001, claims regarding the epochal nature of September 11, particularly those emphasizing suddenness and rupture, begin to translate the experience of surprise and shock into a politically mobile idea of the attacks as an atemporal event whose force severs the causal and epistemological relationship between the past that came before and the future yet to come. In a carefully argued analysis of the President’s September 20 address, literary critic Donald Pease argues that the speech was “designed to lessen the events’ traumatizing power through the provision of an imaginary response to a disaster that could not otherwise be assimilated to the preexisting order of things.”  It seems to me, however, that something of the opposite is the case; while this and other speeches attempt to channel the affective response of a wounded nation, they do so precisely by maximalizing and marshalling traumatic rupture to shatter any preexisting historical order. A better trope than assimilation would be peripeteia: the sudden reversal from mourning to violence enacted in Bush’s September 20 address (“our grief has turned to anger, our anger to resolution”), which embodies the temporal instabilities of the war on terror.

The Quadrennial Defense Review, the primary public document that outlines national military strategy, published on September 30, 2001, is unsurprisingly devoted to the “new era” of national security inducted on September 11, and it is here that the emergent Bush Doctrine fully articulates the ontology of temporal rupture. By tradition a highly narrative genre, the QDR of 2001 attempts to tell the story of 9/11 and its implications for national security in such a way as to forge consensus, if not actually to blunt the edge of defense policy. One of the most striking aspects of the 2001 QDR conducted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the way the surprise attacks precipitate uncertainty: “A fundamental condition of our circumstances,” Rumsfeld maintains, is that “the United States cannot predict with a high degree of confidence the identity of the countries or the actors that may threaten its interests and security.” If the past can no longer be used to predict the future, the military must “establish a new strategy for America’s defense that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise.” In other words, the disappearance of history at the heart of chronomania denies the narratives that would consider the role played by American policies in creating the material conditions out of which 9/11 arose and substitutes for them dystopian imaginings of greater violence yet to come.

As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued in prepared testimony for the 9/11 Commission, “on September 11th, our world changed … we cannot go back. The world of September 10th is past … we cannot go back to thinking as we did on September 10th. For if we do—if we look at the problems of the 21st century through a 20th century prism—we will come to wrong conclusions and fail the American people.” For Rumsfeld, pre-9/11 epistemologies—forensic evidentiary paradigms based on retrospective analysis—have little place in the altered world of the twenty-first century, a world in which analyzing the past to predict the future will generate, as he opined, the “wrong conclusions.” If the Cold War policies of deterrence and containment operate with a fundamentally reactive logic, the war on terror claims the necessity of preemption. The National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002, the first such document prepared by the White House after September 11 and a radical departure from its predecessors, aggressively consolidates the imperatives of preventative war. The seminal characteristic of the “new thinking” advocated by the White House and Department of Defense in the National Security Strategy and elsewhere is the proleptic temporality that emerges to govern the War on Terror. Because the goal of anticipatory action is to prevent the very terrorist strikes whose execution would have substantiated the need to strike in the first place, the proleptic futurity of the war on terror depends, paradoxically, on the public’s ability to maintain the violence of September 11 in the continuous present. “The hour is coming when America will act,” President Bush avowed messianically on September 20, confident in America’s redemptive agency.

At the same time as the logic of preemption and the temporality of trauma were deployed to sever the continuity of cause and effect, the rhetoric of temporal rupture within halts calendrical flow, and in the resultant temporal rift opens new connections between the nation’s mythic past and its present. In his major post-September 11 speeches, the President forged a series of opportunistic contiguities between America’s two great twentieth-century foes, communism and fascism, and its new enemies in the twenty-first century. Bush described al Qaeda on September 20 as “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” insisting that “they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” In his prayer service remarks at the National Cathedral on September 14, a day consecrated to prayer and remembrance, crisis connects the present with a cyclical pattern of heroism: “In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender, and the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.” In the Bush administration’s telling of “history,” one strikingly similar to Francis Fukuyama’s, “the great struggles of the twentieth century ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” With time itself torn asunder by the attacks, temporal instability facilitates analeptic leaps into the nation’s mythic past that conjoin 9/11 with an unlikely array of historical moments in public and political discourse.

By examining narratives of state power, we can begin to see how the war on terror, far from being disabled by chronomania, integrates nonlinear time into the very fabric of the national imaginary and the seminal legislation of the post-9/11 period. In the dominant academic account, modernity conceives of history as unfolding in what Walter Benjamin influentially called homogeneous empty time. Indeed, the idea of modernity is constitutively rooted, as literary critic Matei Călinescu argues, “within the framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards.” In Benedict Anderson’s influential account, “the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.” In this way, modern states can be understood as fundamentally chronopolitical entities. But, as I have been arguing here, after 9/11 we no longer live in this time, if “we” ever did.

I began this essay with a series of observations about how the 9/11 Report asserts temporal mastery over unpredicted events by constructing a timeline, a chronometric form that attempts to move readers away from affective responses surrounding victimhood toward those of agency. At a very basic level, such a process deactivates the kairotic rupture triggered by the war on terror by drawing readers through the time of catastrophe and, figuratively, out the other side. While such a narrative form might seem inherently aligned with state power and the homogeneous empty time of modernity—and thus easily summoned to the service of militarized patriotism—in the context of kairotic governmentality, the stopwatch-driven narrative of the Report can be seen in a different light. When I asked Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and the person most responsible for the Report’s form and tone, about this chronometric approach to history, he described how the cultivation of what he called the Report’s “House Style,” a voice free of polemic and, to the extent possible, of interpretation, was one of the primary goals for the final document he established during his first meeting with Commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice-chair Lee Hamilton. With a “dry, unadorned style designed around a rigorous substructure of time and narrative,” Zelikow aimed to focalize what people knew at particular moments in history and clarify how individuals understood their choices in the moment, rather than succumb to what he termed “the blinding force of hindsight.” The precise temporal measurements characteristic of the Report find their analogue in the operational complexity of al Qaeda’s attacks, which depended on similar, distinctly “modern” temporal logics. In other words, the Report’s chronometric narrative restores the coevalness of terrorism’s victims and perpetrators.

Before championing some kind of return to the secular, however, one must acknowledge the empty formalism of the 9/11 Commission Report’s approach: after all, one gains little useful knowledge in the confidence that the first plane struck at 8:46:40. On a pragmatic level, identifying the kairotic power of September 11 reflects an astute recognition within the Bush administration that the terrorist attacks afforded a unique opportunity for political action—not only in its immediate aftermath but in any of its citational presents. In the new, multidimensional temporality of the war on terror it is not, as Benjamin feared, time deployed as chronos that presages oppression, nor does time’s messianic cessation necessarily constitute the hallmark of revolutionary praxis; instead, in the proleptic and analeptic constellations of September 11, technocapital and state power have subsumed what Charles Taylor—following the apostle Paul, who used the term to denote messianic time—calls the kairotic time of the religious imaginary.

Ten years after the attacks, the multiple temporalities of the war on terror pose something of a conundrum, particularly for thinkers on the left who believe that to effectively contend with state power and its dominant ideologies, one must begin with a critique of its chronopolitical underpinnings: namely its hegemonic secular temporality. When “destabilization” has long served the critical community as a synonym for subversion, what happens when rupture becomes the status quo?

The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of “Muslim wrath” against the West, fueled by the fate of the Palestinians and by Western encroachments in the Middle East; and if this wrath, which has pervaded the contemporary history of the Middle East, has been cast in Islamic terms, it is because Islam is allegedly the main, if not the only, reference that has shaped Muslim minds and societies since the Prophet. This vertical genealogy obscured all the transversal connections (the fact, for instance, that Al-Qaeda systematized a concept of terrorism that was first developed by the Western European ultra-left of the seventies or the fact that most Al-Qaeda terrorists do not come from traditional Muslim societies but are recruited from among global, uprooted youth, with a huge proportion of converts).

The consequence was that the struggle against terrorism was systematically associated with a religious perspective based on the theory of a clash of civilizations: Islam was at the core of Middle East politics, culture, and identity. This led to two possibilities: either acknowledge the “clash of civilizations” and head toward a global confrontation between the West and Islam or try to mend fences through a “dialogue of civilizations,” enhancing multiculturalism and religious pluralism. Both attitudes shared the same premises: Islam is both a religion and a culture and is at the core of the Arab identity. They differed on one essential point: for the “clashists,” there is no “moderate” Islam; for the “dialogists,” one should favor and support “moderate” Islam, with the recurring question, what is a good Muslim?

Then came, just ten years after 9/11, the Arab Spring, in which Islam did not play a role, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, whose death went almost unnoticed among Muslim public opinion. What about the “Muslim wrath”? Suddenly, the issue of Islam and jihad being at the core of the political mobilization in Muslim societies seemed to become, at least for a time, irrelevant. So what went wrong with the perception of the Western media, leaders, and public opinion? Was the West wrong about the role of Islam in shaping political mobilization in Muslim societies? Yes. The essentialist and culturalist approach, common to both the clash of and dialogue of civilizations theories, missed three elements: society, politics, and more astonishingly . . . religion.

In fact, three paradigms—social, political, and religious—have changed in Muslim societies over the last twenty years:

1. A new global generation — As Philippe Fargues showed some time ago, there has been a profound demographic change in the Arab world: the fertility rate has fallen dramatically (in Tunisia, it fell below the French rate after 2000), women have entered universities and the job market, young people marry later, there is more equality in couples (in terms of age and education), they have fewer children and are better educated than their parents, and nuclear families are replacing extended households. Cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet have allowed these new generations to connect and debate on a “peer” basis rather than through a top-down authoritarian system of knowledge transmission. The younger generation is a peer generation and does not want to be strongly bound to a patriarchal society that has been unable to cope with the challenges of contemporary Middle Eastern societies.
2. A shift in the political culture — Being more individualistic, the members of this new generation are less attracted to holistic ideologies, whether Islamist or nationalist, and there is a sharp decline of interest in the patriarchal model embodied by charismatic leaders. The failure of political Islam that I pointed to twenty years ago is obvious; it does not mean that Islamist parties are no longer present on the political field—to the contrary—but that their Utopian conception of an “Islamic state” has lost credibility. The Islamist ideology is challenged either by a call for democracy, which rejects the claim of any party or ideology to have a monopoly on power, or by the “neo-fundamentalists,” or Salafis, who claim that only a strict personal return to the true tenets of religious practices could help to establish an “Islamic society.” Even among the Muslim Brotherhood, young members reject blind obedience to the leadership. The new generation calls for debate, freedom, democracy, and good governance. They are more patriotic than nationalist, and while the Palestinian issue still has an emotional impact, it is no longer at the core of political mobilization (a fact, by the way, that undermines the well-established cliché stating that, as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsettled, there will be no peace or democracy in the Middle East). The appeal of democracy is not a consequence of the exportation of the concept of Western democracy, as fancied by the supporters of the US military intervention in Iraq. It is the political consequence of a process of social and cultural changes in Arab societies, which, of course, is part of the globalization process. It is precisely because the Arab Spring is a succession of indigenous upheavals, centered on the nation and unlinked from Western encroachments (which, when they happen, come after and not before the movement, as in Libya), that democracy is seen as both acceptable and desirable. Consequently, the ritual anti-imperialist mottos and chants have disappeared from demonstrations (including the usual condemnation of Zionism as the source of all the problems of the Arab world). This explains why Al-Qaeda is out of the picture: the uprooted global jihadist is no longer a model and fails to germinate when he comes to enlist local militants for the global cause (Al-Qaeda has been expelled from Iraq by the local fighters), with the exception of the geographic fringes of the Arab world (Sahel, Somalia, Yemen). Al-Qaeda was part and parcel of the old anti-imperialist Middle East political culture: fighting the West first and never caring about real societies. It disappears with the dictators because they are two sides of the same coin.
3. A new religiosity — This is probably the least understood mutation. There were two recurrent premises underlying the debate on Islam: that democratization is linked with secularization and that this secularization process should go with a rise of a “liberal Islam.” So began the search for reformers, liberals, not to speak of a Muslim Martin Luther (the people who advocate a reformation of Islam in order to free it from fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and gender prejudices apparently never read Luther). The visible re-Islamization of Muslim societies during the last thirty years (spreading of the veil, growing mosque attendance, Islamization of daily life, and so forth) seemed at odds with this supposed prerequisite, but in fact, it is far more congruent with a process of democratization than expected. Why? This wave of re-Islamization hides a very important fact: it has contributed to the diversification and the individualization of the religious field. Religion (theological corpus) did not change, but religiosity (the way the believer experiences his or her faith) did, and this new religiosity, liberal or not, is compatible with democratization because it unlinks personal faith from collective identity, traditions, and external authority. The usual religious authorities (ulema, or Islamist leaders) have largely lost their legitimacy in favor of self-appointed, and often self-taught, religious entrepreneurs. Young born-agains have found their own way by surfing on the Internet or joining local groups of peers: very critical of the cultural Islam of their parents, they have tried to construct their own brand of Islam. Religion has become more and more a matter of personal choice, ranging from Salafism to any sort of syncretism, not to mention conversions to other religions (see, for instance, the growth of an evangelical Protestant church among former Muslims in Morocco and Algeria). This individualization and diversification has had the unexpected consequence of disconnecting religion from daily politics, of bringing it back to the private, and of excluding it from the sphere of government management. As I tried to show in Holy Ignorance, fundamentalism, by disconnecting religion from culture and by defining a faith community through believing and not just belonging, is in fact contributing to the secularization of society (hence the bitter belief of any fundamentalist, from born-again Christian evangelicals to Salafi Muslims, that true believers are a minority, even if the surrounding society is nominally sharing the same religion).

All these changes gave way to what I called “post-Islamism” (the expression was first used by Asef Bayat)—it does not mean that the Islamists disappeared, but that their Utopia did not block social, political, or even geo-strategic realities. They have no blueprint for an “Islamic economy,” and although they run many charities in deprived neighborhoods, they tend to become socially conservative, opposing strikes and approving of the rescinding of agrarian reform in Egypt; they have never been able to articulate a coherent supranational program of mobilizing the “ummah” (the Islamic world), leaving the concept in the bloody hands of Al-Qaeda and standing in the Middle East in an uneasy status quo between the strategic ambitions of a supposedly Islamic, but Shia, Iran and Arab dictators (from Saddam Hussein to the Saudis) who claim to protect the Sunnis from the “Shia threat.” They favor elections because they do not support armed struggle even when unable to strike a deal with authoritarian regimes, but they are uneasy about sharing power with non-Islamic groups and turning their “brotherhood” kind of an organization into a modern political party. They have not given up formal support for sharia (except in Tunisia and Morocco) but are unable to define a concrete ruling program that would go beyond banning alcohol and promoting the veil or some other petty forms of shariatization.

After the Arab Spring, which started outside their ranks, the Islamists have choices to make. The first option would be the “Turkish model” (the AK Party): turning the “brotherhood” into a true modern political party, trying to rally a larger constituency than hard-core devout Muslims, recasting religious norms as more vague conservative values (family, property, work ethic, honesty), adopting a neoliberal approach to the economy, and endorsing a constitution, a parliament, and regular elections. Another option would be to ally with “counterrevolution” forces for fear of a real democracy that they are not sure to control, but they thereby risk losing their remaining legitimacy, as in Egypt, where they might be instrumentalized by the army. They may also side with the Salafis by calling for an Islamization that would center on certain isolated issues (veil, family law), the same way Christian conservatives in the West are focusing on abortion and gay marriage while ignoring other social and economic issues.

Whatever the political ups and downs, the diversity of the national cases, the foreseeable fragmentation of both “democrats” and “Islamists” into various trends and parties, the main issue will be to redefine the role of, and the reference to, Islam in politics. The de facto autonomization of the religious field from political and ideological control does not mean, once again, that secularism is necessarily gaining ground. What is at stake is the reformulation of religious reference in the public sphere. There is large agreement on inscribing in constitutions the “Muslim” identity of society and of the state; there is also large agreement on the fact that sharia is not an autonomous practical system of law that could be implemented from above and replace “secular” law.

As I’ve described, modern forms of religiosity tend to stress individual faith and choices over conformity to any sort of institutionalized Islam. The old motto “in Islam, no separation between religion (din) and worldly issues (dunya)” already turned a long time ago from an academic statement to mere wishful thinking, but it has been definitively undermined by the Arab Spring. What we see, more than secularization, is a deconstruction of Islam, torn between some sort of a cultural identity (there could be, in this sense, “atheist Muslims”), a faith that could be shared only by born-again believers (Salafis) in the confines of self-centered faith communities, or a “horizon of meaning” where references to sharia are more virtual than real.

The recasting of religious norms as values helps also to promote an interfaith coalition of religious conservatives that could unite around specific causes—opposition to same-sex marriage, for instance. It is interesting to see how, in Western Europe, for example, secular populists tend to stress more and more the Christian identity of Europe, while many Muslim conservatives try to forge an alliance of believers to defend shared values. In so doing, many of them tend to adopt an evangelical Protestant agenda, fighting abortion and Darwinism, both issues that have never been relevant in traditional Islamic debates. In this sense, modern neo-fundamentalists are trying to recast Islam as a kind of Western-compatible religious conservatism, a fact that is obvious in Turkey, where, in 2004, the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, tried to promote an anti-adultery law that defined adultery not in terms of sharia but by reference to the modern Western family (a monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with equal rights and duties, thus making the custom of polygamy, not uncommon among traditional AK local cadres, although illegal since 1926, more clearly a crime). Islam is thus part of the recasting of a religious global market disconnected from local cultures.

Such an evolution is completely inconsistent with the image of Islam that is constructed and spread by populist movements in the West. In fact, as far as the West is concerned, the main legacy of 9/11, which will survive the “War on Terror” and the death of Bin Laden, is the rooting of Islamophobic populist movements in Western Europe and the United States. These movements have fully borrowed and legitimized the clashist theory: Islam is construed as the enemy of an otherwise elusive “Western” identity. Even populist movements born of a different set of grievances (Lega Nord in Italy, the Tea Party in the United States, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium) have endorsed Islamophobia as one of their main battle cries. It is no surprise that they all dismissed the Arab Spring as irrelevant and don’t acknowledge the way Muslims, both in their native societies and in the West, are recasting their faith into global forms of religiosity. Interestingly, the debate on Islam in the West raised the same questions as in the Middle East: Is religion first a faith or first an identity? Is the crucifix in Italian classrooms just a cultural symbol of national identity or the symbol of the sacrifice of Christ for sinners? The debate about the role of religion in the public sphere should be conducted beyond the clichés of Orientalist essentialism by acknowledging the transversal dimension that connects all the great world religions in their endeavor to find a balance between faith and identity, religion and culture, individual quest and collective belonging, and territorialization and globalization. In this sense, there is neither an Arab nor an Islamic exceptionalism.

So I began to think about the suffix “ism” more generally. On the one hand, it is clear that what those who deploy the word Islamist in their polemics intend to convey is a link to the dark twentieth-century “isms,” namely, fascism and communism. In fact, the more rabid voices in these debates have helpfully spelled out this sub-text in the rancid term “Islamo-fascism.” On the other hand, at least four of the great world religions are conventionally called Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Judaism. The major exceptions are Islam and Christianity, which do not end with the same sound. So this seems to be a mere matter of linguistic bad luck.

But let us look a little more closely. The real utility of the term “Islamism” is that it allows for the use of the adjectival form “Islamist,” which can be applied to any person, position, value, or policy that one wishes to smear as vaguely fascist or fundamentalist. Thus, I propose a general expansion of this usage with words such as Christianist, Hinduist, Buddha-ist (since Buddhist will not do the job), and the like. In the case of Confucius, one would have to invent something ugly like Confucius-ist, to contrast with the normal Confucian-ist. The point is to insist on a democracy of adjectives so that all religions, even when they are not Islam, can be described as having fascist or racist potentials. Here I converge with the Andrew Sullivan’s use of the term “Christianist,” though my larger position may or may not converge with his.

So now let us return to the United States and to Ground Zero. The mad pastor from Florida is clearly a Christianist. And although many distinguished Jewish individuals and organizations, especially in New York City, have come out in favor of the Cultural Center, others have been markedly Judaist in their reactions.

This program of debate raises one question. What is new about an open debate about the pernicious effects of Christianist and Judaist forces in American society? Do we not have the term “fundamentalism” to handle extremist trends among Christians and Jews? In other words, does my proposal not amount to one more plea for a comparative discussion of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalisms?

I think not, because the use of the term “Christianist” and “Judaist” have a sharper edge than the idea of Christian or Jewish fundamentalists could ever have. That is why the word “Islamist” today has such toxic force. It is more than a short form that collapses the need for the two words “Islamic” and “fundamentalist.” It suggests that, in fact, Islam is, if you wish, “fundamentally” fundamentalist, or has become so. By having a public debate organized around the words “Christianist” and “Judaist”, we might be able to ask whether some such pernicious thing is happening to Christianity and Judaism as well. Let the self-examination begin. . .

I would like to make a plea for a frontal confrontation, starting in the United States, with the new varieties of Christianist and Judaist among us. Some questions that such a public debate could address are:

• Do Christianists and Judaists really represent Christianity and Judaism?
• Should Christianist and Judaist elements be expunged from the Old and New Testaments (as has been proposed in reference to similar elements in the Qur’an)?
• Are Christianist proposals, such as the recent Florida proposal to burn the Qur’an, straightforward examples of “incitement to violence” that deserve prompt legal action against their users rather than protection under the free speech provisions of the Constitution?
• Can the remarkable degree of support in the United States for Israel’s aggressive policies in regard to Palestine be seen as examples of the defeat of genuinely liberal Judaic values in American legislative and policy circles by Judaist agendas?
• Can there ever be a safe and secure Middle East when Islamic sentiments are constantly portrayed as Islamist by what are clearly Christianist and Judaist forces in the United States and Israel?

Those of us who treasure the Judaeo-Christian tradition should welcome such an effort to save it from the jaws of Judaist-Christianism.