At Philobiblon: There’s nothing new about al-Qa’ida – an essential lesson of history, a review and recommendation of Buruma & Margalit’s Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism.

And this sort of extremist thinking tends to come from places lacking in freedom, where ideas cannot be played out and kicked around in the intellectual marketplace, but must be nurtured in secret, in hiding, and get their power from their very forbiddenness. So it was in Germany under Napoleon and Russia under the Tsars. The Germans “contrasted their own deep inner life of the spirit, the poetry of their national soul, the simplicity and nobility of their character, to the empty, heartless sophistication of the French”. For Dostoyevsky, “even the most boorish peasant … is better than the most sophisticated intellectual. For at least the God-fearing peasant knows whom to ask for forgiveness.” So too does al-Qa’ida’s ideology emerge from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, from those repressive regimes that the West continues to fund.