What happened? ISIS was not born just yesterday, nor did it start with the civil wars in Iraq and Syria. Much as its methods might meet with disapproval, its ideology, Wahhab­ism, is a movement whose influence extends to the furthest corners of the Islamic world today and which, in the form of Salafism, has become especially attractive to young people in Europe. The fact that the schoolbooks and curricula used by ISIS are 95 percent identical to those used in Saudi Arabia indicate that it’s not only in Iraq and in Syria that the world is starkly divided into “forbidden” and “permitted,” or where humanity is divided into believers and unbelievers. For decades, thanks to billions of dollars of sponsorship from the oil industry, a worldview has been promoted in mosques, in books, and on television that declares all who hold different beliefs to be heretics – reviling, terrorizing, slandering, and insulting them. Once it’s become a habit to systematically denigrate others day after day, it’s only consistent – how well we know this from our own German history! – to end up declaring their lives worthless too. That this religious fascism has even become conceivable, that ISIS finds so many fighters and even more sympathizers, that this organization has been able to overrun entire countries and capture cities of millions with minimal resistance – all this represents not the beginning, but rather the tentative endpoint of a long deterioration, especially a deterioration of the religious imagination.

The Quran is less a book than the score of a song that moves its Arab listeners with its music, onomatopoeia, and melodies.

I became a student of Middle Eastern Studies in 1988; my topics were the Quran and poetry. Any who study this subject in its classical form soon reach a point where they can no longer reconcile the past with the present. And they become hopelessly sentimental. Of course, the past was not only a peaceful and motley rainbow. As a philologist, however, I focused on the writings of mystics, philosophers, rhetoricians, and theologians. Like other students of this literature, I can only marvel at the originality, intellectual scope, aesthetic power, and sheer humanity we find in the spirituality of Ibn Arabi, the poetry of Rumi, the historiography of Ibn Khaldun, the poetic theology of Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, the philosophy of Averroës, the travel reports of Ibn Battuta, and indeed the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, which are worldly – yes, worldly and erotic, and incidentally feminist too – while yet being infused throughout with the spirit and language of the Quran. Admittedly, this great literature is not journalistic reporting, and no doubt the social reality of this advanced civilization, like the reality of any age, was much darker and more violent. Yet these literary witnesses tell us what was once conceivable, even self-evident, within Islam. None of this, nothing at all, is to be found in the religious culture of modern Islam – nothing that is even remotely comparable in depth or power of fascination to the writings I came across during my studies. And this is to say nothing of Islamic architecture, Islamic art, or Islamic musical culture; these no longer exist.

To give an illustration of this loss of creativity and freedom taken from my own field, literature: it was once thinkable, even self-evident, that the Quran should be approached as a poetic text, one to be understood using the tools and methods of poetry scholarship: that is, as a poem. It was thinkable, even self-evident, that to be a Muslim theologian also meant being a literary scholar and a connoisseur of poetry; in many cases, the theologian was himself a poet. Yet in our day my own teacher, Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Cairo, was charged with heresy, fired from his university post, and even forced to divorce his wife because he understood Quranic scholarship as a form of literary scholarship. Thus an approach to the Quran which had long been taken as a given and which, as Nasr Abu Zaid pointed out, was used by the most important scholars of classical Islamic theology, has today been defined as unthinkable. Anyone who approaches the Quran in this undoubtedly traditional way is persecuted, punished, and declared a heretic.

In reality, the Quran is poetry not just because the lines rhyme, but also because it speaks in disturbing and enigmatic images with multiple meanings; it is less a book than a recitation, the score of a song that moves its Arab listeners with its rhythms, onomatopoeia, and melodies. Islamic theology not only used to recognize the Quran’s aesthetic qualities but went even further, declaring its literary beauty to be the authenticating miracle of Islam. By contrast, today we can observe all over the Islamic world what happens when one ignores or fails to understand the linguistic structure of a text. The Quran is degraded to a how-to manual that can be word-searched for this or that catch phrase. The Quran’s literary power thus becomes political dynamite.

It’s often claimed that Islam must pass through the fire of enlightenment or that modernity must win out over tradition. But that seems simplistic considering that Islam’s past is so much more enlightened than its present and its traditional writings often appear more modern than its current theological discourse. After all, Islamic culture fascinated Goethe, Proust, Lessing, and Joyce – hardly an indication of a lack of enlightenment. In Islam’s books and monuments these writers saw something that we, who are so often brutally confronted by Islam’s present state, no longer can easily perceive. Perhaps the problem of Islam is not tradition, but rather the near-total break with tradition – Islam’s loss of cultural memory, its civilizational amnesia.

Modernization as experienced by each of the peoples of the Orient was imposed brutally from above, through colonialism and secular dictatorships. Iranian women, for example, did not let go of the headscarf gradually; instead, in 1936 the Shah sent his soldiers out into the streets to tear it from their heads by force. Unlike in Europe, where people experienced modernity (despite various setbacks and crimes) as a process of emancipation that spanned decades and centuries, in the Middle East modernization was largely an experience of violence. Modernity is thus linked not with freedom, but with exploitation and despotism.

Imagine an Italian president driving a car into Saint Peter’s Basilica, jumping onto the altar with his dirty boots, and striking the Pope in the face with his whip – then you will have a rough idea of what it meant when, in 1928, Reza Shah marched through the holy shrine of Qom, Iran, in his riding boots and responded to the imam’s request to take off his shoes like any other believer by striking him in the face with his whip. You would find comparable events and key moments in other countries across the Middle East, countries that did not detach themselves slowly from the past but rather sought to raze the past and erase it from memory.

Surely, one might have thought, the religious fundamentalists who gained influence throughout the Islamic world after the failure of nationalism would value their own culture. Yet the opposite was the case: by seeking to return to a legendary state of original purity, they not only neglected Islamic tradition but zealously fought against it. ISIS’s acts of iconoclasm will be surprising only to those unaware that in Saudi Arabia there are virtually no ancient relics left. In Mecca, the Wahhabis destroyed the graves and mosques of the Prophet’s closest kin and even his house of birth. The historic mosque of the Prophet in Medina has been replaced with a gigantic new construction, and on the spot where, until a few years ago, the house still stood that was home to Mohammed and his wife Khadija, you will now find public toilets.