From Manhattan to Baghdad

The book’s place within the atlas

This is a dialogue book that places Arkoun before the questions of the contemporary world: violence, politics, the relationship with the West, and mutual misunderstanding. It links Arkoun’s ideas to a global event and to the transformations that followed 11 September, making the political present part of a broader reading of Arkoun’s project.

What distinguishes this book

This book adds a direct presence of the political present within Arkoun’s project. It does not stop at theoretical reflection; rather, it enters into questions of confrontation, justice, the limits of power, and how the understanding of Islam changes after major global transformations.

Main axes

• Global violence and 11 September
• Legitimacy and democracy
• Understanding the West and modernity
• Responding to terrorism
• Islam and politics in a globalized world
• Cognitive and religious reform

The book’s image in the layers of claims

The book’s material is distributed across three interconnected layers:

• atoms: the partial units that capture the nuances of meaning and their details
• structure: the paths that organize the argument and connect its parts
• clusters: the broader fields that gather atoms and structure into composite theses

The overarching thesis

• From Manhattan to Baghdad links the violence of September and the war on it to a crisis of knowledge, legitimacy, and modernization

Core clusters

• The crisis of the Arab-Islamic world stems from the breakdown of legitimacy, critique, and institutions
• Discourses of the enemy, jihad, and al-Qaeda produce a transnational sacred violence
• September reshapes the political imagination and the logic of global conflict
• Understanding violence and Islamic modernization requires comparative history and contextual differentiation
• Arkoun’s approach deconstructs truth and discourse and lays the groundwork for cognitive and religious reform
• Critique of the war on terror rejects totalizing power and calls for calibrated global justice

Core structure

• 11 September rebuilt global conflict against the globalized world
• The events of September opened a new global phase for American power
• Arkoun calls for renewing the understanding of Islam through modern knowledge and Mediterranean openness
• Arkoun rejects linear explanation and replaces it with anthropological and critical analysis
• Afghanistan must be understood within a political network, not as an isolated target

Atoms

• atoms

Relations between the layers

The atoms reveal details such as 11 September, al-Qaeda, Bin Laden, legitimacy, and modernity. The structure then gathers them into clearer interpretive paths: global conflict, American power, religious reform, and understanding Afghanistan within a broader political network. The clusters, in turn, connect these paths to one another to show that the book is not about a single event, but about a crisis of meaning, legitimacy, and modernization that extends from politics to knowledge.

What should I read now?

• Fundamentalism, violence, and politics
• Power and knowledge
• Power and knowledge
• Modernity

Editorial note

This page is not a copy of the book, nor a substitute summary for it, but rather a reading map of its concepts, arguments, and trajectories. It is recommended to return to the original text in order to grasp the full context.