Israel
Richard Landes on Jihad and the Apocalyptic Mind
A medievalist on apocalyptic movements, shame–honour cultures, and why he believes the Western press has spent twenty-five years reporting jihad backwards.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the historian Richard Landes argues that the West still cannot describe what happened to it.
Landes trained as a medievalist and spent two decades studying apocalyptic movements and shame–honour cultures. He came to the subject of jihad through that work, and it shapes how he reads it.
He talks to Pamela Paresky about the argument of his book Can "The Whole World" Be Wrong?: that Western journalists, academics, and NGO researchers adopted what he calls a dhimmi posture, declining to name the ideology that had declared them its enemy.
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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