Identity, Islam and the Twilight of Liberal Values

Since its publication in 1992, an array of commentators have criticised Francis Fukuyama’s optimism in The End of History and the Last Man for supposing that liberal democracy is the one political model with sufficient moral and practical resilience to endure through the vicissitudes of future historical events. In hindsight, it seems Fukuyama underestimated liberal democracy’s ethno-religious rivals, and religious fundamentalism’s powerfully resistant bulwark against liberal democracy.

This book offers a trenchant analysis of the post-millennial cultural shift away from the defining liberal social values of the post-war and post-colonial global revolutionary movements. It dissects the incoherent reasoning by which the liberal values of racial equality, tolerance, diversity, feminism, and gender have been evacuated of their past meanings and put into the service of a reactionary politics that uses superficially plausible bait to sell the same regressive ideology that religious social conservatives have been peddling for decades.