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The Apocalypse and the End of History by Suzanne SchneiderThe Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism
In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the residue from a less enlightened time, nor does it have much in common with its classical or medieval form, but it does bear a striking resemblance to the reactionary political formations and acts of spectacular violence that are upending life in Western democracies. From authoritarian populism to mass shootings, xenophobic nationalism, and the allure of conspiratorial thinking, Schneider argues that modern jihad is not the antithesis of neoliberalism, but rather a dark reflection of its inner logic.
The Apocalypse and the End of History is written with the sensibility of a political theorist and 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. The book explores modern jihad as an image of a potential dark future already heralded by neoliberal modes of life. Surveying ideas of the state, violence, identity, and political community, Schneider argues that modern jihad and neoliberalism are two versions of a politics of failure: the inability to imagine a better life here on earth.
The Apocalypse and the End of History is written with the sensibility of a political theorist and 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. The book explores modern jihad as an image of a potential dark future already heralded by neoliberal modes of life. Surveying ideas of the state, violence, identity, and political community, Schneider argues that modern jihad and neoliberalism are two versions of a politics of failure: the inability to imagine a better life here on earth.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published September 7, 2021
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August 23, 2021
American debates about Islam after 9/11 followed a predictable pattern. Hawks on the right argued that terrorism was something inherent to Islam, a drive to conquer the world by force embedded in Islamic holy texts. Doves on the left countered that Islamist militancy was actually a reaction to colonial violence, the desperate acts of people humiliated by European and U.S. military interventions.
Schneider flips the script entirely in The Apocalypse and the End of History. She argues that the rise of fanatical militant groups in Muslim countries is actually a symptom of the same capitalist modernization happening around the world. In other words, the Islamic State is less a medieval throwback and more a Muslim version of school-shooter ideology.
I read this book alongside American ISIS, a new podcast by Trevor Aaronson. The podcast chronicles the life of Russel Dennison, an American convert to Islam and Islamic State fighter, through a series of WhatsApp notes Dennison sent in the months before his death. It is the story of a child of the End of History who found himself adrift in modernity, finally finding his purpose on the battlefield before his own government obliterated him from the air.
As alien as Dennison’s story is to us, it would also have been alien to most Muslims throughout history.
Military jihad has always been a part of the Islamic tradition, Schneider argues, but it was never the chaotic individualistic violence of modern jihadi groups. Instead, jihad was a moral framework in which Muslims could make sense of state violence, similar to the Catholic tradition of “just war” theory. Islamic theologians had endless debates on what circumstances justified jihad, what tactics were allowed in a jihad, and who had the authority to declare jihad — much like modern American debates on war powers and the Constitution.
The last classical jihad occurred during World War I when the Ottoman Empire put a sacred gloss on its war against the Entente powers. The Ottomans’ allies in Germany had hoped that a declaration of jihad would spark a widespread Muslim uprising against the British and French empires, but nothing like that came to pass.
Traditional Islamic sources of authority subsequently broke down. On one hand, the Ottoman Empire was gradually sliced into a patchwork of colonies, princedoms, and revolutionary states. On the other hand, Muslim modernists argued for a more Protestant approach to religion, casting aside clerics and tradition in favor of individual believers interpreting the holy books for themselves. Modern technology accelerated the process, as Muslims could now self-educate through magazines, tapes, and later the Internet.
American liberals have a strong notion that it is liberating to cast aside organized religion, but this approach to spirituality can have the opposite effect, as individualist believers fall into a purity spiral attempting to apply holy texts to their own lives without any guardrails. After all, the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb said that the goal was to “abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another” as he argued for theocracy and the overthrow of secular government.
The protestantized version of Islam shines through in American ISIS. Dennison was a lapsed Catholic pothead when a stranger gifted him a copy of the Qur’an. He read it fervently, and after going to prison on drug charges, adopted Islam as a new way of life. But after his release, Dennison never felt at home in America’s actually-existing Muslim community, which he felt was not taking its holy texts seriously enough. Nor did he feel comfortable in any Muslim country he visited. Instead, Dennison retreated into an extremely online existence, making a name for himself in the small world of ultra-conservative YouTube missionaries.
Meanwhile, the End of History had arrived. The Soviet Union was no more, and Third World nationalism was being rolled back. Neoliberal capitalism seemed to have no alternative. Multinational corporations and their globalization became the driving force of history, and the role of the state was reduced to simply manage and protect the market. Politics could no longer offer people a chance to build a better society. They could, however, serve as a fun spectacle. Rather than giving people a chance to build a better society, politics could only offer a big spectacle.
It is easy to see how all of these developments culminated in the jihadist violence of recent decades. Islamist militants blamed liberal democracy for the sorry state of their countries, both because it served as a handmaiden to American capitalism and because it was an evil in itself, an affront to God’s law. Fighting global American hegemony required a new kind of jihad, one led not by emperors and princes, rather by a vanguard of well-read individuals. But jihadists could not offer a real alternative to globalization, only televised violence. Martyrdom became an end in itself. Even though jihadists had no prospect of creating a better world, they could express themselves in a spectacular death.
Dennison was slowly sucked into the jihadist world. Tired of FBI harassment, he bounced from country to country in the Middle East, but ended up spending time in Egyptian and Jordanian jails because his views alarmed local authorities. Finally, Dennison found himself in Lebanon just as the civil war in Syria began to spill over into neighboring countries. He ran off with a group of “real Muslims” to fight the tyrannical Syrian regime, and found himself in the midst of a dizzying array of competing rebel groups.
Enter the Islamic State, whose aim was to bring jihad back under the control of a territorial empire, and ended up creating something entirely new. It held land but viewed the traditional Muslim communities it governed as polluted by heresy and corruption. Instead, the Islamic State drew its power from a “networked diaspora of true believers,” as Schneider puts it. Some of these supporters traveled to Islamic State territory, others created local franchises, and a few committed public acts of violence against their own societies.
The Apocalypse and the End of History does a good job of drawing parallels between developments in American society and the Islamic State’s own attributes. Schneider places Islamic State propaganda side by side with corporate infographics, and jihadists’ hero fantasies side by side with heroic historical dramas like Braveheart. She is not the only one who sees these parallels; in American ISIS, Dennison talks about growing up on cartoons like GI Joe in the 1980s, and even compares his fellow Islamic State fighters to the heroes of X-Men.
Unfortunately, Schneider collapses the distinction between populists and the extreme right. Both the Islamic State and contemporary populist nationalist movements seek “the replacement of an entrenched elite with new and even more autocratic one,” Schneider writes, and offer “authoritarianism filtered through a ‘populist’ sieve, a depoliticized form of governance that serves to shield those who actually wield power.” But the Islamic State and neo-Nazis *do* actually threaten established power structures, albeit for demented nihilist ends. The populists Schneider are describing are more like Donald Trump and the business-friendly wings of the Muslim Brotherhood like Turkey's AK Parti.
The strongest comparison comes through in apocalypticism; Schneider shows that both American and Islamic societies are undergoing an explosion of interest in the End Times. In fact, Americans had a head start. In the 1980s, when apocalyptic beliefs were still fairly unusual in the Muslim world, a certain segment of American Christians were going wild for apocalyptic fiction like the Left Behind series. And for more secular Americans, there was dystopian fiction about zombies and aliens.
The root of the apocalyptic fascination, Schneider argues, is the inability to imagine a different world. Without hope for freedom and dignity on earth, people have retreated into hopes for a world-ending confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Sometimes this worldview manifests itself in antisemitic conspiracy theory tracts and movies about angels fighting demons. Other times, it looks like jihadist carnage.
“This is a sort of strong messianism, defined by the negation of time and human life here on Earth, which ceases to exist after the apocalyptic showdown,” Schneider writes. “It is a true end of history.”
Schneider flips the script entirely in The Apocalypse and the End of History. She argues that the rise of fanatical militant groups in Muslim countries is actually a symptom of the same capitalist modernization happening around the world. In other words, the Islamic State is less a medieval throwback and more a Muslim version of school-shooter ideology.
I read this book alongside American ISIS, a new podcast by Trevor Aaronson. The podcast chronicles the life of Russel Dennison, an American convert to Islam and Islamic State fighter, through a series of WhatsApp notes Dennison sent in the months before his death. It is the story of a child of the End of History who found himself adrift in modernity, finally finding his purpose on the battlefield before his own government obliterated him from the air.
As alien as Dennison’s story is to us, it would also have been alien to most Muslims throughout history.
Military jihad has always been a part of the Islamic tradition, Schneider argues, but it was never the chaotic individualistic violence of modern jihadi groups. Instead, jihad was a moral framework in which Muslims could make sense of state violence, similar to the Catholic tradition of “just war” theory. Islamic theologians had endless debates on what circumstances justified jihad, what tactics were allowed in a jihad, and who had the authority to declare jihad — much like modern American debates on war powers and the Constitution.
The last classical jihad occurred during World War I when the Ottoman Empire put a sacred gloss on its war against the Entente powers. The Ottomans’ allies in Germany had hoped that a declaration of jihad would spark a widespread Muslim uprising against the British and French empires, but nothing like that came to pass.
Traditional Islamic sources of authority subsequently broke down. On one hand, the Ottoman Empire was gradually sliced into a patchwork of colonies, princedoms, and revolutionary states. On the other hand, Muslim modernists argued for a more Protestant approach to religion, casting aside clerics and tradition in favor of individual believers interpreting the holy books for themselves. Modern technology accelerated the process, as Muslims could now self-educate through magazines, tapes, and later the Internet.
American liberals have a strong notion that it is liberating to cast aside organized religion, but this approach to spirituality can have the opposite effect, as individualist believers fall into a purity spiral attempting to apply holy texts to their own lives without any guardrails. After all, the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb said that the goal was to “abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another” as he argued for theocracy and the overthrow of secular government.
The protestantized version of Islam shines through in American ISIS. Dennison was a lapsed Catholic pothead when a stranger gifted him a copy of the Qur’an. He read it fervently, and after going to prison on drug charges, adopted Islam as a new way of life. But after his release, Dennison never felt at home in America’s actually-existing Muslim community, which he felt was not taking its holy texts seriously enough. Nor did he feel comfortable in any Muslim country he visited. Instead, Dennison retreated into an extremely online existence, making a name for himself in the small world of ultra-conservative YouTube missionaries.
Meanwhile, the End of History had arrived. The Soviet Union was no more, and Third World nationalism was being rolled back. Neoliberal capitalism seemed to have no alternative. Multinational corporations and their globalization became the driving force of history, and the role of the state was reduced to simply manage and protect the market. Politics could no longer offer people a chance to build a better society. They could, however, serve as a fun spectacle. Rather than giving people a chance to build a better society, politics could only offer a big spectacle.
It is easy to see how all of these developments culminated in the jihadist violence of recent decades. Islamist militants blamed liberal democracy for the sorry state of their countries, both because it served as a handmaiden to American capitalism and because it was an evil in itself, an affront to God’s law. Fighting global American hegemony required a new kind of jihad, one led not by emperors and princes, rather by a vanguard of well-read individuals. But jihadists could not offer a real alternative to globalization, only televised violence. Martyrdom became an end in itself. Even though jihadists had no prospect of creating a better world, they could express themselves in a spectacular death.
Dennison was slowly sucked into the jihadist world. Tired of FBI harassment, he bounced from country to country in the Middle East, but ended up spending time in Egyptian and Jordanian jails because his views alarmed local authorities. Finally, Dennison found himself in Lebanon just as the civil war in Syria began to spill over into neighboring countries. He ran off with a group of “real Muslims” to fight the tyrannical Syrian regime, and found himself in the midst of a dizzying array of competing rebel groups.
Enter the Islamic State, whose aim was to bring jihad back under the control of a territorial empire, and ended up creating something entirely new. It held land but viewed the traditional Muslim communities it governed as polluted by heresy and corruption. Instead, the Islamic State drew its power from a “networked diaspora of true believers,” as Schneider puts it. Some of these supporters traveled to Islamic State territory, others created local franchises, and a few committed public acts of violence against their own societies.
The Apocalypse and the End of History does a good job of drawing parallels between developments in American society and the Islamic State’s own attributes. Schneider places Islamic State propaganda side by side with corporate infographics, and jihadists’ hero fantasies side by side with heroic historical dramas like Braveheart. She is not the only one who sees these parallels; in American ISIS, Dennison talks about growing up on cartoons like GI Joe in the 1980s, and even compares his fellow Islamic State fighters to the heroes of X-Men.
Unfortunately, Schneider collapses the distinction between populists and the extreme right. Both the Islamic State and contemporary populist nationalist movements seek “the replacement of an entrenched elite with new and even more autocratic one,” Schneider writes, and offer “authoritarianism filtered through a ‘populist’ sieve, a depoliticized form of governance that serves to shield those who actually wield power.” But the Islamic State and neo-Nazis *do* actually threaten established power structures, albeit for demented nihilist ends. The populists Schneider are describing are more like Donald Trump and the business-friendly wings of the Muslim Brotherhood like Turkey's AK Parti.
The strongest comparison comes through in apocalypticism; Schneider shows that both American and Islamic societies are undergoing an explosion of interest in the End Times. In fact, Americans had a head start. In the 1980s, when apocalyptic beliefs were still fairly unusual in the Muslim world, a certain segment of American Christians were going wild for apocalyptic fiction like the Left Behind series. And for more secular Americans, there was dystopian fiction about zombies and aliens.
The root of the apocalyptic fascination, Schneider argues, is the inability to imagine a different world. Without hope for freedom and dignity on earth, people have retreated into hopes for a world-ending confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Sometimes this worldview manifests itself in antisemitic conspiracy theory tracts and movies about angels fighting demons. Other times, it looks like jihadist carnage.
“This is a sort of strong messianism, defined by the negation of time and human life here on Earth, which ceases to exist after the apocalyptic showdown,” Schneider writes. “It is a true end of history.”
February 24, 2022
One of the rhetorical claims often made in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and its successor politics is that the struggle against ‘jihad’ is a struggle against a mediaeval ideology and call to war, yet as Suzanne Schneider shows convincingly in this compelling analysis, there is nothing mediaeval about contemporary jihad. Her case, centred closely on analysis of the rhetoric and practice of the Islamic State – ISIS or Da’esh and its associated forces – is better seen as a sign of a wider set of global political shifts that are individualising and privatising war, conflict and security. In this she links the tactics and practices of ISIS to mass shootings in the USA and elsewhere, including by White supremacists and so called ‘lone wolves’. She goes a step further to argue firstly that calls to and the conduct of war in Muslim majority states parallel those in Europe in the mediaeval and modern eras, and secondly that the ISIS-model of jihad may well be the future form of military conflict, not its past.
She opens with a rich analysis of contemporary violence and conflict as privatised and privatising, where we see states contracting out their wars – consider the place, number and roles of ‘private security contractors’ in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan during (and in Iraq after) US- and associated states’ military occupations. This may seem obvious but she also points to the rise in private security services in gated communities, body guards and other services in minority world capitalist states where in places such as the UK private security services can out number police forces by anything up to 20 to 1. In effect she is saying that the late-capitalist or neo-liberal eras have seen the privatisation of the state’s monopoly on violence – to invoke, as she does, Max Weber’s definition of the state.
That is to say, she grounds her analysis of ISIS and related tactics not in some fanciful invocation of selected scriptures and interpretations (as so often happens in non-Muslim, and some ‘fundamentalist’, positions/interpretations), noting that we can all cherry pick foundational texts to justify our political analyses, but sees them as based in exactly the same social, political and cultural shifts that we see elsewhere in the world. In this analysis a key part of her case is that this ISIS model of jihad is not mediaeval but is decidedly modern if not postmodern in its privatisation through its separation from the state, from the established institutions of government and governance. She sees in ISIS and related rhetoric a populist discourse not dissimilar to that we saw with Trump, and continue to see with Johnson, Bolsanaro, Orbán, Erdoğan (this is my list, not hers) and others where discontent is stoked against existing holders of power in an effort to install new anti-democratic regimes. Here she suggests, just we see with other late modern/neo-liberal populists a rhetorical invocation of a critique of democracy’s shortcomings to effect a further anti-democratic shift.
Her case for the postmodernity of ISIS and its tactics is powerful, in her characterisation of Muslim-majority states as being as conservative as any other kind of state, where governments acts to minimise change in the law and where only states and recognised legitimate governments could commit to war. This analysis of the state and of the law applies to both the kinds of legal imperatives we’re used in European and other states in the post-Roman order (as we’ve seen emerge as nation-states since the 18th century) as well as to Muslim-majority states where the law is a site of dispute and debate, interpretation and analysis – how badly many misunderstand the notion and form of shari’a. This analysis of the weakening of the state as a site of authority and constraint is then linked to the ISIS case that these Muslim-majority states are illegitimate (here is part of the Taliban case against ISIS), separating jihad from established states, making it both apart from the establishment but also individualising – a development that has become more obvious in the wake of the Islamic State territorial collapse in Iraq & Syria since late 2019.
There are two further aspects to the analysis that sees ISIS-jihad as in line with if not leading contemporary, late/post-modern trends in warfare. The first is the collapse of worldly alternatives, as a parallel to the claims we saw after the collapse of communist states as flawed options but at least an attempt at difference that coincided with claims to the end of history and the logical dominance of liberal capitalism as the ultimate social order. In this context, political violence of the kind we see in contemporary jihad is a tactic without an end – the means becomes all there is – and here we see most obviously the parallel with the rise in right wing extremism and neo-fascism of the kind marking white supremacist armed attacks in the USA and elsewhere – she cites the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand as close to the apotheosis of this phenomenon.
In one sense, then, her argument is reassuring in that she presents ISIS-jihad as a parallel to other kinds of individualistic and privatised violence in other versions of extremism – ‘Jihadi John’ and the Christchurch shooter as cousins, if not one in the same. On the other hand, her analysis is alarming (note this is not alarmist!) where she points to the global trend towards the privatisation of warfare, putting ISIS-jihad in the same trajectory as Blackwater and other private ‘security’ forces.
This is all to say that Schneider’s case that there is nothing mediaeval about contemporary jihad and that claims for it to be such are both Orientalist/Islamophobic and grounded in a profound misunderstanding, or perhaps misrepresentation, of contemporary warfare and tendencies in state organisation is compelling. This is an important engagement in contemporary global politics by a scholar whose engagement with West Asian (or Middle Eastern, if you prefer that Eurocentric label) is rich and deep. Highly recommended.
She opens with a rich analysis of contemporary violence and conflict as privatised and privatising, where we see states contracting out their wars – consider the place, number and roles of ‘private security contractors’ in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan during (and in Iraq after) US- and associated states’ military occupations. This may seem obvious but she also points to the rise in private security services in gated communities, body guards and other services in minority world capitalist states where in places such as the UK private security services can out number police forces by anything up to 20 to 1. In effect she is saying that the late-capitalist or neo-liberal eras have seen the privatisation of the state’s monopoly on violence – to invoke, as she does, Max Weber’s definition of the state.
That is to say, she grounds her analysis of ISIS and related tactics not in some fanciful invocation of selected scriptures and interpretations (as so often happens in non-Muslim, and some ‘fundamentalist’, positions/interpretations), noting that we can all cherry pick foundational texts to justify our political analyses, but sees them as based in exactly the same social, political and cultural shifts that we see elsewhere in the world. In this analysis a key part of her case is that this ISIS model of jihad is not mediaeval but is decidedly modern if not postmodern in its privatisation through its separation from the state, from the established institutions of government and governance. She sees in ISIS and related rhetoric a populist discourse not dissimilar to that we saw with Trump, and continue to see with Johnson, Bolsanaro, Orbán, Erdoğan (this is my list, not hers) and others where discontent is stoked against existing holders of power in an effort to install new anti-democratic regimes. Here she suggests, just we see with other late modern/neo-liberal populists a rhetorical invocation of a critique of democracy’s shortcomings to effect a further anti-democratic shift.
Her case for the postmodernity of ISIS and its tactics is powerful, in her characterisation of Muslim-majority states as being as conservative as any other kind of state, where governments acts to minimise change in the law and where only states and recognised legitimate governments could commit to war. This analysis of the state and of the law applies to both the kinds of legal imperatives we’re used in European and other states in the post-Roman order (as we’ve seen emerge as nation-states since the 18th century) as well as to Muslim-majority states where the law is a site of dispute and debate, interpretation and analysis – how badly many misunderstand the notion and form of shari’a. This analysis of the weakening of the state as a site of authority and constraint is then linked to the ISIS case that these Muslim-majority states are illegitimate (here is part of the Taliban case against ISIS), separating jihad from established states, making it both apart from the establishment but also individualising – a development that has become more obvious in the wake of the Islamic State territorial collapse in Iraq & Syria since late 2019.
There are two further aspects to the analysis that sees ISIS-jihad as in line with if not leading contemporary, late/post-modern trends in warfare. The first is the collapse of worldly alternatives, as a parallel to the claims we saw after the collapse of communist states as flawed options but at least an attempt at difference that coincided with claims to the end of history and the logical dominance of liberal capitalism as the ultimate social order. In this context, political violence of the kind we see in contemporary jihad is a tactic without an end – the means becomes all there is – and here we see most obviously the parallel with the rise in right wing extremism and neo-fascism of the kind marking white supremacist armed attacks in the USA and elsewhere – she cites the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand as close to the apotheosis of this phenomenon.
In one sense, then, her argument is reassuring in that she presents ISIS-jihad as a parallel to other kinds of individualistic and privatised violence in other versions of extremism – ‘Jihadi John’ and the Christchurch shooter as cousins, if not one in the same. On the other hand, her analysis is alarming (note this is not alarmist!) where she points to the global trend towards the privatisation of warfare, putting ISIS-jihad in the same trajectory as Blackwater and other private ‘security’ forces.
This is all to say that Schneider’s case that there is nothing mediaeval about contemporary jihad and that claims for it to be such are both Orientalist/Islamophobic and grounded in a profound misunderstanding, or perhaps misrepresentation, of contemporary warfare and tendencies in state organisation is compelling. This is an important engagement in contemporary global politics by a scholar whose engagement with West Asian (or Middle Eastern, if you prefer that Eurocentric label) is rich and deep. Highly recommended.
April 26, 2022
This is a coherent perspective. It exposes the reactionary chain inherent in decision making in all facets of society. Distinguishes between politics, cultures, religion, old Islam and “new” Islam, mostly the weaponization of Jihad by extremists and its origination or influences. Neoliberalism is discussed as a trigger and supported well.
December 7, 2024
Insightful is the only real word to describe this one. The author expertly traces and demonstrates the shift in the nature of Jihad from a historically state driven obligation to an individual obligation furthered by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. While simultaneously identifying where the modern Jihad movement is connected to Neoliberalism and Nihilistic outlooks that flourish in the west.
I don't claim to be an expert at all on Islam. (I'm a white man raised in a somewhat Christian household) And this book fundamentally changed my understanding of Jihad and the existence of groups like IS (this isn't to say I believed any of the garbage shit bags like Bill Maher vomited out of their faces).
I don't claim to be an expert at all on Islam. (I'm a white man raised in a somewhat Christian household) And this book fundamentally changed my understanding of Jihad and the existence of groups like IS (this isn't to say I believed any of the garbage shit bags like Bill Maher vomited out of their faces).
December 30, 2021
I am proposing something quite different... global in scope: that neoliberalismitself was prefigured - if not actively constructed - in the colonial world... Within this framework, the Global South is not the secondary market for Western politics but a key site of their emergence, which is why - however counterintuitive is might seem - the recent history of Islamic militancy speaks also to social and political trends in the West. The colony preceded the metropole, and grappling with the crises of neoliberal governance is consequantly enriched by linking it to the "peripheral" histories that have helped pave the way.
In essence, that is the main argument of Suzanne Schneider's fascinating analysis, an incredibly interesting (and persuasive) line of thinking which this book approaches from multiple angles. By considerately evaluating the emergence, words, actions, and histories of modern jihad groups, Schneider dismantles smug, racist arguments about the "medieval" and inherantly violent nature of Islam and more thoughtfully place them in their throughly modern context. Indeed, the book highlights how the closest relatives to groups such as the Taliban is found not in historic caliphates, but in American-style mass shooters (who are typically white nationalists, and thus considered normal rather than terrorists), apocalyptic white Christian movements, and the Western neoliberal parties who intentionally de-legitimise the state.
I've had to teach histories of terrorism and Afghanistan to classes before, and my lessons would have been hugely improved by such analsysis and frames of reference. In light of this, and of the vital counterbalance the book provides to the inane ramblings of far-right commentators, I can recommend this book quite heartily.
November 7, 2023
Has an interesting thesis that I mostly agree with, however I think the author needed to include more historical context about jihad.
September 13, 2025
On New Year's Eve 2024 two men, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, and Matthew Livelsberger launched two separate and unrelated attacks in the United States. Jabbar was a Muslim convert who had grown increasingly conservative over recent years and pledged allegiance to ISIS. Livelsberger was a Trump supporter who believed America was both declining as a nation, and becoming more effeminate amongst other things. To many commentators, the two attackers would be considered total opposites to each other ideologically but this is not the case with Suzanne Schneider of whom I had the pleasure of reading her excellent book The Apocalypse and the End of History.
Schneider argues persuasively that groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda should not be considered as some throwback to the middle ages which requires a reformation, but instead products of the modern, neoliberal era in which we live in. Indeed, Islam has in fact gone through several reformations, with the Wahabism expressed by ISIS fighters having a lot more in common with modern Protestantism than medieval Islam as it has tossed aside all religious authority in favour of individualistic, fundamentalist interpretations of the original text. Even Jihad, which was once purely a matter of the state is now an individualistic affair of which every Muslim is duty bound, to interpret as they so desire. Some further connections between ISIS and other right wing movements around the world include them as responses to the malaise that the modern world is going through, that they are simultaneously nihilistic, but also a means of their followers to join a community to derive meaning from, as well as believing in the same apocalypticism that the rest of the world has taken on. In another vein, these groups tend to reject (or at least, attempt to project a rejection) of established authority and expertise. When 122 prominent Muslim scholars skewered Baghdadi and ISIS for how they deviate from Islam it “Landed like report by climate scientists at a Trump rally.” So to can populist movements around the world be compared here both in climate change and in matters like the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, ISIS sees itself not just being at war with the non-Muslim world, but also all Muslims who they believe have strayed from the path. Jabbar for example was not a part of the wider Muslim community, and in fact stated that "the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad's followers [...] is a sign of the end times." In a similar vein, many of so called "ex-Muslims" acted befuddled when one of their own murdered six people at a Magdeburg Christmas market because he thought the German government was insufficiently Islamophobic. "Why did he not attack a Mosque" they crowed, not realizing of course that the vast majority of victims of "Jihadism" are other Muslims.
Even the tactics that these sorts have used have inspired each other. Jihadists in the 1980s for example mainly made use of bombs and organized themselves into terrorist cells, while more recently their attacks more so resemble a mass shooting where a "lone wolf" radicalized in a niche far right online community launches an attack seemingly out of nowhere. This has happened in reverse amongst white extremists as well, with several car ramming attacks and even suicide bombings (see the rather pathetic Brazilian suicide bomber, as well as Livelsberger himself). In a world between the fall of the Soviet Union - and in turn any alternative to the neoliberal, capitalistic system - and climate disaster, we are left with disaffected people - mainly men - who commit horrific violence seemingly for the sake of it with no real end goal in mind which distinguishes them from previous liberation movements, who committed terrorism for very specific end goals in mind.
Bringing sound analysis of this topic to a world dominated by the ignorant (your Harris', Mahers, Hirsi Alis etc.) I found this book to not only be interesting, but frankly cathartic. This is helped by Schneider 's style, which while neither particularly academic, or literary nonetheless is an easy, satisfying, funny, with an almost blogging style of writing which makes the book easy to understand while going into depth on topics that I am not to aware of, as of yet. The book suffers somewhat that while I think she is cooking on some areas, there are some points that fall a bit flat like her comparison between ISIS and international corporations. Another weakness is that there is frankly no ISIS equivalent in the West, although I am happy to say that she does not state that "Trump is ISIS" but rather that these movements are arising for interconnected reasons, in the same worldwide context as each other. I enjoyed this book greatly, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.
Schneider argues persuasively that groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda should not be considered as some throwback to the middle ages which requires a reformation, but instead products of the modern, neoliberal era in which we live in. Indeed, Islam has in fact gone through several reformations, with the Wahabism expressed by ISIS fighters having a lot more in common with modern Protestantism than medieval Islam as it has tossed aside all religious authority in favour of individualistic, fundamentalist interpretations of the original text. Even Jihad, which was once purely a matter of the state is now an individualistic affair of which every Muslim is duty bound, to interpret as they so desire. Some further connections between ISIS and other right wing movements around the world include them as responses to the malaise that the modern world is going through, that they are simultaneously nihilistic, but also a means of their followers to join a community to derive meaning from, as well as believing in the same apocalypticism that the rest of the world has taken on. In another vein, these groups tend to reject (or at least, attempt to project a rejection) of established authority and expertise. When 122 prominent Muslim scholars skewered Baghdadi and ISIS for how they deviate from Islam it “Landed like report by climate scientists at a Trump rally.” So to can populist movements around the world be compared here both in climate change and in matters like the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, ISIS sees itself not just being at war with the non-Muslim world, but also all Muslims who they believe have strayed from the path. Jabbar for example was not a part of the wider Muslim community, and in fact stated that "the voice of Satan spreading among Prophet Muhammad's followers [...] is a sign of the end times." In a similar vein, many of so called "ex-Muslims" acted befuddled when one of their own murdered six people at a Magdeburg Christmas market because he thought the German government was insufficiently Islamophobic. "Why did he not attack a Mosque" they crowed, not realizing of course that the vast majority of victims of "Jihadism" are other Muslims.
Even the tactics that these sorts have used have inspired each other. Jihadists in the 1980s for example mainly made use of bombs and organized themselves into terrorist cells, while more recently their attacks more so resemble a mass shooting where a "lone wolf" radicalized in a niche far right online community launches an attack seemingly out of nowhere. This has happened in reverse amongst white extremists as well, with several car ramming attacks and even suicide bombings (see the rather pathetic Brazilian suicide bomber, as well as Livelsberger himself). In a world between the fall of the Soviet Union - and in turn any alternative to the neoliberal, capitalistic system - and climate disaster, we are left with disaffected people - mainly men - who commit horrific violence seemingly for the sake of it with no real end goal in mind which distinguishes them from previous liberation movements, who committed terrorism for very specific end goals in mind.
Bringing sound analysis of this topic to a world dominated by the ignorant (your Harris', Mahers, Hirsi Alis etc.) I found this book to not only be interesting, but frankly cathartic. This is helped by Schneider 's style, which while neither particularly academic, or literary nonetheless is an easy, satisfying, funny, with an almost blogging style of writing which makes the book easy to understand while going into depth on topics that I am not to aware of, as of yet. The book suffers somewhat that while I think she is cooking on some areas, there are some points that fall a bit flat like her comparison between ISIS and international corporations. Another weakness is that there is frankly no ISIS equivalent in the West, although I am happy to say that she does not state that "Trump is ISIS" but rather that these movements are arising for interconnected reasons, in the same worldwide context as each other. I enjoyed this book greatly, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.
February 27, 2024
As critics of America's endless wars have noted, the issue of body counts raises the question as to whose bodies count; the careful tallying of "our" losses stands in stark contrast to the imprecise figures - the very conservative estimate is between 244,124 and 266,427 civilians killed as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - that characterize "their" deaths. The retail version of Western humanism remains remarkably untroubled by the suggestion that certain groups are less than human. In this sense, ISIS execution videos that "challenge Western rules of 'taste and decency'... simultaneously mirror back and expose Western practices of death at war that largely remain invisible to its publics.
June 10, 2024
I found this book to be very densely packed with interesting information but at times it felt repetitive and hard to get through. The central message and idea has given me plenty of food for thought, and towards the end of the book as the logic started pulling together it became a lot more enjoyable to read
February 12, 2023
nuanced and complex arguments without feeling too dense. bold thesis approached with restraint. the kind of book that makes you say: before we have this conversation, read this book, then get back to me. seminal.
September 8, 2021
Highly recommend.
March 28, 2022
v interesting. takes a while to wander around to the point but gets tied off really well. she managed to work the titular line in there not once but twice which i do appreciate
January 5, 2024
este libro devoró
March 1, 2024
As clear a guide to our political life as you are ever going to get. Recommending this one to everyone forever.
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