Is There An Islamic Problem?

The essays in this book explore the underground history of September 11. They tell the history of our times, reported from the trenches (so to speak), from Palestinian camps under the siege of Israeli tanks, from the ruins of Iraq's civilian infrastructure mangled by American cruise missiles, from the Twin Towers taken down by 19 Arab hijackers. They connect the present to the past, the dispossessed Palestinians to the history of their dispossession, the destruction of Iraq to American empire and the Zionist project, the disequilibrium in Islamicate societies to the history of their dismemberment, the Islamicate resistance to the human instinct for self-preservation. In other words, these essays are about the malformations and misadventures of global capitalism in one vital sector of the world - the Islamicate societies, now nearing a quarter of the world's population. These essays also explain why this sector now leads the struggle against Western hegemony - as the East Asians did in the twentieth century.