The elites of capitalism are faced with the task of how managing local discontent deflected from the actual relationships of power onto religious groups.
One solution could be the most perverse rendering of the question: 'Islam and the West: is a clash of civilizations coming?'
As promises of better times begin to falter for the majority, elites -whether in Islam or the West- must persuasively claim local loyalty even as they continue to pursue their own gain in global competition. The practical way to accomplish this goal is disguising self-interests by means of a vigorous display of religious identification with one's own kind.
Constructing religiously correct objects of threat - Christians in Egypt, Muslims in Bosnia, Western secularists in Malaysia - becomes a strategy of maintaining privilege and power. It tames exploited domestic majorities by redirecting their mutual anger away from local elites.
That reality looks like an offense to the historical heritage that Christians share with Muslims and Jews. Thus, the emerging religious correctness deserves some kind of self-criticism in order to recognize the shared moral insights of both Islam and the West.
Countering the politics of social difference, each side has a certain hermeneutics of subversive knowledge internal to itself. Such a history of unauthorized histories determines each other's different struggles of resistance.
In this way, the history of the other can become, not a terrain to overwrite with Western history, but a historical presence within which the West can retrieve in a new way (for example, the colonial power.)
In the arising battle for justice, we need each other as the other by whom we can be taught. Such concern should give us a perspective upon our own standpoint, a way to step beyond the Looking Glass.
It is not I who resist the system; it is the other (Søren Kierkegaard)