Abstract
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 marked the end of the Cold War era and generated much optimism among scholars and thinkers. This hope was notably illustrated by Francis Fukuyama's article "The End of History" in which he proclaimed "the end point of Mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western libera l democracy as the final form of human government" (1989: 2). This very optimistic tendency grew up alongside another promising theory known as "The Clash of Civilizations" by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington who argued that the ideological opposition that characterized the Cold War era would be succeeded by new forms of opposition based on cultural and religious lines (1993). The 9/11 attacks partly gave reason to this last approach and brought to light a new threat to the Western world, based on religious and cultural lines, rapidly labeled as "Islamic" terrorism.
This new form of terrorism is widely believed to be based mainly on a political approach of Islam, seen as diametrically opposed to the Western culture; embodied by its liberal mix of democracy and economic capitalism.
This new threat posed to the Western world is best incarnated today by movements such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda which, in the confusion following the 9/11 attacks, have too often been wrongly presented as united through a common vision of Islam, based on the Sharia Law, and a common enemy that is, the Western World, and more precisely its leading power, the USA. However such vision appears to be quiet reductive and does not fully explore the key characteristics of both movements, inherited from their respective historical, cultural and ideological framework.
