“Islamism can have many faces: it can be liberation theology, bourgeois democracy, dictatorship, or apocalyptic nihilism. It should not be assumed that democracy in the Middle East will resemble liberal Western democracy, which – following the full backing many Western states have given to Israel’s genocide in Gaza – has lost what little credibility it still had.” Understandably, a transitional destroyed Syria, people’s concerns will be daily bread and butter issues. “Seriously, whether Syria is Muslim or secular, I just want a country with electricity, food, reasonable prices, no corruption, unity, safety; a country I can actually be proud of and call home.” Yet Leila Shami limits her argument to political arrangements and the political will of the different actors of the Syrian society; she does not conditions the unity and stability in Syria and the success of secularism or Islamism or their failure to the Syrian political economy: will the new regime and its backers provide ...
“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