It is important to emphasize this early enthusiasm for modernity, because too many Westerners regard Islam as inherently fundamentalist, atavistically opposed to democracy and freedom, and chronically addicted to violence. But Islam was the last of the three monotheisms to develop a fundamentalist strain; it did not do so until the late 1960s, after the Arabs’ catastrophic defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, when the Western ideologies of nationalism and socialism, which had little grassroots support, appeared to have failed. Religion seemed a way of returning to the precolonial roots
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