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.