This was the time when Western modernity had already entered the stage of crisis...

This was the time when Western modernity had already entered the stage of crisis, and when many Western thinkers had begun to realize the dimension of this crisis and impasse. (See Introduction to the Deconstruction of the Secular Discourse , 4 vols., Cairo, December 1997). The bearers of the new Islamic discourse realized, from the very beginning, the darker aspects of Western modernity.

It had embroiled the entire world in two Western wars, called “world wars” because the whole world was dragged into the arena of conflict. In the time of “peace,” the world was caught in a frenzied arms race. The centralized nation-state, growing stronger and more authoritarian, expanded and reached the most private aspects of man’s life, and, through its sophisticated security and educational apparati , tried to “guide” its citizens!

The media, another by-product of Western modernity, extensively invaded the private lives of citizens, accelerating the process of standardization and escalating the consumerist fever. In the meantime, the pleasure sector became so powerful as to control people’s dreams, selling them erotic utopias and outright pornography. The family as a social institution could not sustain the pressures and therefore divorce rates rocketed, reaching levels rarely witnessed before.

The crisis of meaning, the epistemological crisis, anomie, alienation, and reification became more pronounced. While the liberal capitalist project ceased to be the smashing success story it used to be, the socialist experiment collapsed and lost any vestige of credibility. Anti-humanist intellectual trends such as Fascism, Nazism, Zionism, and Structuralism emerged and reached a climax in post-modernist thought.

By the mid-1960s, the critical Western discourse on modernity had crystallized and the works of the Frankfurt School thinkers had become widely available and popular. Many studies, critical of the age of the Enlightenment, were published.

Writing about the standardization that resulted from Western modernity and about its one-dimensional man, Herbert Marcuse sought to demonstrate the existence of a structural defect that lies at the very heart of modern Western civilization in its totality, a defect that goes beyond the traditional division of this civilization into a socialist and a capitalist camp.