Terror and Liberalism
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| Author | Paul Berman |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Islamism, liberal internationalism, totalitarianism |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Terror and Liberalism is a non-fiction book by American political philosopher and writer Paul Berman. He published the work through W. W. Norton & Company in April 2003. Berman asserts that modern Islamist groups such as al Qaeda share fundamental ideological elements with fascism and other 20th-century Western totalitarian movements, and he defends an assertive approach to root out this extremist thinking across the world. He details the appeal of violent terror, going back to Albert Camus' work The Rebel, first published in 1951. Berman hypothesizes that the spread of democracy in the Arab world, while highly difficult and involving a long struggle, is a fundamentally just cause, and he writes in support of the George W. Bush administration's foreign policies while also faulting President Bush for credibility problems and incompetence.
The book received a wide variety of reviews. Salon.com ran a review that described the work as "an important entry in the debate over the meaning of 9/11 and after". Author Sam Harris praised the work in Harris' own book The End of Faith, which also discussed jihadist terrorism.Washington Monthly journalist Joshua Micah Marshall particularly remarked that "Berman's book is by turns penetrating, insightful, honest, sloppy, erudite, superficial, hot-blooded, serious, and florid."
Berman begins the book with a discussion of the September 11 attacks of 2001. He then details the ideology of Sayyid Qutb, an influential figure behind the development of Islamism, before moving on to a general overview of suicidal Islamic extremist violence that preceded the World Trade Center attacks. Berman argues against the two popular views that the success of groups such as al Qaeda are either, first, the lashing out of the socially oppressed or, second, an alien, distant product of a Muslim people with fundamentally anti-Western religious beliefs and values.
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