Trump’s Middle East tour in May last year felt like the end of an era. Here was the former al-Qaeda commander, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now leader of Syria, shaking hands with a vulgar American Commander-in-Chief, who resembles the caricature of a US president we might find in an al-Qaeda cartoon. Yet the War on Terror’s two leading men, the President and the Jihadi, having ended the last act at each other’s throats, have returned to the stage arm-in-arm to take a bow.

Al-Sharaa has trimmed his beard, put on a suit, replaced Bashar al-Assad as president and begun welcoming western investors to help him rebuild his country after a decade and a half of civil war. Trump has dropped the showy religiosity and moral posturing of his predecessors. Before the Iran ceasefire, Trump had told us openly that his motives for starting the war were straightforwardly material: “To be honest with you, my favorite thing is to take the oil.” Now, in part to snub Israel, he is asking al-Sharaa to take the fight to Hezbollah in Lebanon, something the Syrian leader has rejected. But that request is itself a sign of how much the relationship between the West and the Middle-East has changed.

The received wisdom from our intellectuals when it comes to political Islam leaves little room for him

The received wisdom from our intellectuals when it comes to political Islam leaves little room for him

If al-Sharaa has remained somewhat of an enigma to commentators in the West, it is in part because the received wisdom from our intellectuals when it comes to political Islam leaves little room for him. According to the view put forward by the documentary maker Adam Curtis and the popular left-wing philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Islamism, of the Salafist type that al-Sharaa belongs to, was born of a Middle East “exposed to western modernization abruptly, without a proper time to ‘work through’ the trauma of its impact.” Political Islam then emerges as a kind of group neurosis, in response to various abstractions such as “atomization” and “individualism.” We hear a lot of the phrase: “crisis of identity.”

Perhaps that says less about Islam than it does about us, perhaps it is really a projection of the western psyche, since this is exactly the worldview shared by virtually everyone in our own politics, from J.D. Vance through to Keir Starmer: that modernity is inherently “traumatic,” a........

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