“ I remember that, when I taught history and institutions of the Islamic world at Urbino university in the late 1990s, sometimes my classes were literally empty. After 9/11 the classes were filled up of students (I was teaching in Milan at that time), but how much was their interest sincere? Actually, popular interest in Islam is strongly conditioned by contingent outward circumstances and today xenophobic and Islamophobia propaganda does not help to develop the field. Again: Italy is a parochial country. I believe to be a free-thinker, normally antagonist towards consolidate [sic] and mainstream positions, both in thinking and in politics. I am not comfortable with the Western society I live therein because I believe it is grounded on hypocrisy and false prejudices. The main one is the conviction that we Europeans and Americans (mostly white of course, WASP) are depositary of absolute and universal truths, eternal, out of history – we would be indeed the makers of the end of histor
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51