When Israel attacked the Arabs, it really attacked only this current; and when it crushed Nasser, it damaged only this Westernizing, modernizing, secular, nationalist tendency, and not even every expression of that. With Nasser’s fall, down went “Nasserism,” that odd mélange of secular modernism and Islamic socialism. Into the power vacuum left by its demise flowed other, more dangerous forces, some of them more primal, more irrational.
