Paul Berman calls Sayyid Qutb " (pronounced KUH-tahb) "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror

As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity's influence, began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for knowledge of the physical universe. The church against science; the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity, over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.

Europe's scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ''hideous schizophrenia'' on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery -- the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe's leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well....

In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds.

Speak for yourself, Paulie. I'd agree that many people, particularly many Americans, feel a split, hence their excessive religiosity. Ironically, the religious nature of many Americans is reflected in that of the terrorists. Well, I guess we all have our fundamentalists. As far as I'm concerned, they can live their lives as they like, but that's not good enough for Qutb, who believed

people with liberal ideas were mounting a gigantic campaign against Islam -- ''an effort to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function.''

So for Paulie, this is an ideological battle:

...it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries....There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

Maybe so. But as ambivalent as I feel about Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disneyland and other cultural crap, my fellow humans seem to gravitate towards those, so aren't they a good ideological argument, since they've thrived under liberalism?

Update
What I mean to say is that Paulie seems to find Qutb's rantings oddly attractive, and unable to come up with a good liberal argument against them, wants someone else to do it. But for me, the American lifestyle is its own best argument, even though it is often tasteless.