The perpetrators of the unconscionable massacre of Charlie Hebdos journalists, and the gratuitous killing of French Jews at a supermarket, were the sort of young men who might have been little more than petty criminals in another era disaffected drifters who are now susceptible to the pied-pipers of jihad. They preen in the costume of the pious for their propaganda videos, and betray easily their very modern brand of criminality. The Paris murderers claimed to be redeeming the honour of the Prophet Muhammad, but they made the most venerated figure in Islam seem like a small-time mafia boss.

Yet many commentators on the attacks have revived the very broad discourse of the clash of civilisations, which was fatefully deployed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to justify the war on terror, and resulted in the latters catastrophic imprecisions. Once again the secular and democratic west, identified with the legacy of the Enlightenment reason, individual autonomy, freedom of speech has been called upon to subdue its perennially backward other: Islam.

Describing the murderers as soldiers in a war against freedom of thought and speech, against tolerance, pluralism, and the right to offend, the New Yorkers George Packer called for higher levels of counter-violence. Salman Rushdie claimed that religion, a medieval form of unreason, deserves our fearless disrespect. However, many other writers have rejected a binary of us-versus-them that elevates a vicious crime into a cosmic war between secular Enlightenment and religious barbarism. There is a specific context to the rise of jihadism in Europe, which involves Muslims from Europes former colonies making an arduous transition to secular modernity, and often colliding with its entrenched intellectual as well as political hierarchies: the opposition, for instance, between secularism and religion which was actually invented in Enlightenment Europe. Writers such as Hari Kunzru, Laila Lalami, and Teju Cole who have ancestral links to Europes former colonies have argued that the simplistic commentary on the attacks is another reminder that we must urgently re-examine these evidently self-sufficient notions from Europes past.

In many ways, it is this intellectual standoff rather than the terrorist attack that reveals a profound clash not between civilisations, or the left and the right, but a clash of old and new visions of the world in the space we call the west, which is increasingly diverse, unequal and volatile. It is not just secular, second-generation immigrant novelists who express unease over the unprecedented, quasi-ideological nature of the consensus glorifying Charlie Hebdos mockery of Islam and Muslims. Some Muslim schoolchildren in France refused to observe the minute-long silence for the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo mandated by French authorities.

It seems worthwhile to reflect, without recourse to the clash of civilisations discourse, on the reasons behind these striking harmonies and discords. Hannah Arendt anticipated them when she wrote that for the first time in history, all peoples on earth have a common present Every country has become the almost immediate neighbour of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe. Indeed, it may be imperative to explore this negative solidarity of mankind a state of global existence in which people from different pasts find themselves thrown together in a common present. For Arendt feared, correctly as it turns out, that this inescapable unity of the world might result in a tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else.

Differences of opinion are particularly stark between people whose lives are marked by Europes still largely unacknowledged past of colonialism and slavery, and those who see metropolitan Europe as the apotheosis of modernity: the place that made the crucial breakthroughs in politics, science, philosophy and the arts. Such divergent experiences have long coexisted but they make for greater public discordance today. Europe no longer confidently produces, as it did for two centuries, the surplus of global history; and the people Europe once dominated now chafe against the norms produced by that history.

For many Anglophones, Paris has long evoked, from Henry Jamess The Ambassadors to a gamine Jean Seberg vending the Herald-Tribune in Godards Breathless, a dream of sensuous pleasure and intellectual freedom. But an indigent immigrant or asylum-seeker in Europe today might find himself echoing the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, whose encounters in the 1930s with Europes antisemitic bourgeoisie provoked him into angry generalisations about the habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average western European. Roths sense of ostracism was echoed by those who came to Europe from its colonies. Jacques Derrida, who grew up poor and Jewish in French Algeria in the 1930s, said that he was exposed at school to a history of France that was a fable and a bible, but a semipermanent indoctrination for the children of my generation: it contained not a word about Algeria. Today, many of those naturalised Europeans who originally arrived in the continent as cheap labour mostly from countries Europe once ruled or dominated still cannot recognise themselves in their host countrys self-image.

Even in 2008, it was possible for the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, to announce in the Senegalese capital of Dakar, that Africans have remained close to nature and never really entered history. Many people so excluded from the history, politics, and economy of the modern world have manufactured their own partial or distorted historical views of Europe and the west. The righteous feeling of humiliation by foreigners has grown especially potent among many Muslims since the counter-violence after 9/11, which resulted in the murder and displacement of millions of people. The denizens of Parisian banlieues and Asian and African shantytowns, the ill-adjusted graduates of technical institutes, as well as the rote-learners of the Quran at madrassas, can now nurture an exalted grudge against the world that denies them dignity.

Globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else

In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. The sense of besiegement by foreigners with hostile values has also intensified in Europe as globalised financial markets restrict nation-states autonomy of action; globalised labour challenges dominant ideas of citizenship, national culture and tradition, and globalised terrorism provokes the curtailment of civil liberties and a draconian regime of surveillance. Economic stagnation not only stokes anti-EU sentiment; it also boosts far-right parties in Europe, some of which, such as the Front National, have repackaged their foundational antisemitism, and now feed on fears of a continent overrun by Muslims. This paranoid fantasy, novelised most recently by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, who was featured on the cover of Charlie Hebdo days before the attack, has found many German believers, who in recent weeks have held massive protests in Dresden against the Islamisation of the west. Demagogues such as the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who has proposed expelling millions of Muslims from Europe, have gone mainstream.

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After Paris: Its time for a new Enlightenment