In this interview, Georgi Derluguian discusses the reasons for Islamism’s popularity in the context of the collapse of two great projects of the West — liberalism and communism. He pays special attention to an organizational feature of Islam that allows this religion to wage successful wars against powerful empires. People who find this ideology attractive are not “new barbarians”; on the contrary, they are modern, socially active people, whose access to social advancement has been blocked. Islamism allows both men and women to realize strategies that give them a chance to succeed in an environment that no longer provides the opportunities their parents enjoyed. At the end of the interview, Derluguian analyzes the perspectives of the so-called Islamic State, which is banned in Russia and elsewhere: he shows how this organization will inevitably be involved in the dynamics of the contemporary world system.
