The character of anti-Western sentiment has changed strikingly in recent decades. There is a long history of anti-imperialist movements stretching from the Haitian revolution of the 1790s to the independence movements of the 1960s and ’70s in Africa and Asia. While these challenged Western power and often used violent means, they were rarely “anti-Western” in an essential sense. Indeed, their leaders often embraced revolutionary ideas that came out of the West, self-consciously locating themselves in the tradition of the European Enlightenment.

Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born Algerian nationalist, was one of the most important anticolonial theorists. The aim, he suggested, was not to reject Western ideas, but to reclaim them.

“All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought,” he wrote. “But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them.”

Anti-imperialists of the past saw themselves as part of a wider political project that sought to modernize the non-Western world, politically and economically. Today, however, that wider political project is itself seen as the problem. There is considerable disenchantment with many aspects of modernity, from individualism to globalization, from the breakdown of traditional cultures to the fragmentation of societies, from the blurring of moral boundaries to the seeming soullessness of the contemporary world.

In the past, racists often viewed modernity as the property of the West and regarded the non-Western world as incapable of modernizing. Today, it is radicals who often regard modernity as a Western product, and reject both it and the West as tainted goods.

The consequence has been the transformation of anti-Western sentiment from a political challenge to imperialist policy to an inchoate rage against modernity. Many strands of contemporary thought, including those embraced by “deep greens” and the far left, express aspects of such discontent. But it is radical Islam that has become the lightning rod for this fury.

There are many forms of Islamism, from the Taliban to Hamas, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Boko Haram. What they have in common is a capacity to fuse hostility toward the West with hatred for modernity and, seemingly, to provide an alternative to both. Islamists marry political militancy with a conservative social sensibility, a hostility to globalization with the embrace of a global ummah (the worldwide community of Muslim believers). In so doing, they turn the contradictory aspects of their rage against modernity into a strength.