Many books published in the aftermath of Sept. 11 investigated the political and historical moments that led up to the formation of Al Qaeda and the greatest attack on American soil. Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism sheds light instead on the ideological foundations of modern Pan-Islamism. Underneath, he finds an orientalized reincarnation of Western totalitarianism, equating Al Qaeda to aspects of Nazism and Italian Fascism.

Berman, himself a liberal, launches a scathing critique of Western liberals, notably Noam Chomsky, who rationalize terrorism as the natural response of a small, embattled society against the oppression of a larger, more advanced foe. Berman calls bullshit on this simplistic interpretation. Instead he tells it like it is: a cataclysmic clash of cultures, one committed to individual liberty and the separation of church and state, the other viciously opposed to those principles.

Berman's scholarly approach unearths the philosopher behind Al Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb, who in the 1940's and 50's constructed the ideological foundations for modern Pan-Islamism. Qutb's analysis of the West was based on what he interpreted to be a "hideous schizophrenia" -- Christianity's fatal division of the physical existence from the spiritual, which results in a society alienated from itself. This rational and intelligent observation becomes perverted over the decades into the dark, irrational cult of violence that Pan-Islamism has become. (See this article on the same subject, also by Berman.)

It's not cosy bedtime reading, but anyone that remembers Sept. 11, 2001,  cannot afford to ignore this book.