The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism

Description

In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State and finds that contemporary jihad is a microcosm of global political trends, one that can help us understand the slide toward authoritarianism and nihilist violence worldwide. Most western commentators have assumed the modern jihad is antithetical to western liberalism; Schneider argues the opposite. The jihadist violence of the Islamic State, she finds, has much in common with political life in Europe and the United States, from the spectacular violence of mass shootings to authoritarian populism and the rise of xenophobic nationalism. The Islamic State, in other words, is a dark reflection of western liberalism, rather than its antithesis. Through chapters surveying modern jihadist ideas of the state, violence, identity, and political community, Schneider argues that modern jihad and western capitalism are two versions of a politics of failure: the failure to imagine a better life here on earth. Based on extensive research into a wide range of sources, from Islamic jurisprudence to popular recruitment videos, contemporary apocalyptic literature and the Islamic State's Arabic-language publications, and written with the sensibility of a political theorist, Schneider explores modern jihad as a way to show us a vision of a dark future--one we might still swerve to avoid.

Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Mandatory Separation, and her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, n+1,The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets.

Schneider demolishes the myth that modern jihadi violence is anything other than a product of modernity. -- Rashid Khalidi By attributing Islamic militancy neither to immediately political nor distantly theological causes, Suzanne Schneider's wonderfully lucid and convincing argument allows us to see it in anew as something both familiar and frightening in its ubiquity. The links she draws between the violent, apocalyptic, and nihilistic character of ISIS and the colonial origins of neoliberal practices make for a wholly original approach to the subject. -- Faisal Devji, author of Muslim Zion In her revelatory new book, Suzanne Schneider dismantles all-too-common invocations of jihad as a timeless, essentialized force that defines a monolithic and static version of Islam. Instead, she situates the concept firmly within the context of contemporary geopolitical, economic, and ideological trends. Deftly juxtaposing classical Islamic jurisprudence alongside social media propaganda videos, the polemics of Western politicians alongside the narratives of individual jihadis, the PowerPoint presentations of private military corporations alongside glossy org charts produced by extremist groups, and more, Schneider brilliantly challenges prevailing assumptions about sovereignty, the nation state, the monopoly on violence, and more. Through her erudite analysis, entities like ISIS emerge not as atavistic reincarnations of medieval brutality, but rather as responses to political and economic conditions that implicate and even darkly mirror developments in the imperial core. The result is both a clarifying vision of our contemporary moment and a generative stock of provocative insights into possible futures for the Middle East, the nations that define themselves as making up "the West," and the broader, interconnected world that contains and belies easy distinctions between the two. -- Patrick Blanchfield, author of Gunpower [Schneider's] discussion of the "jihadists," their motivations and rationales most certainly need to be heard by those who would send their military to foreign lands. -- Ron Jacobs * CounterPunch *