Demotix/Roger Milnes. All rights reserved.Toward the end of his searching survey of the social imaginaries that helped create western modernity, in Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor invokes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe as he invites other parts of the world to articulate their own very different imaginaries of modernity.
The objective, to quote Taylor at length, is to "finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm, and that we understand the European model as the first, certainly, as the object of some creative imitation, naturally, but as, at the end of the day, one model among many, a province of the multi-form world we hope…will emerge in order and peace."[1]
The Paris terrorist attacks and the concomitant security lockdown that swept across Europe suggests that ISIS has succeeded in provincialising Europe indeed, but in a diabolical way and for all the wrong reasons. As expected, and much like that lonely moment following the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, many immigrant Arab Muslim communities feel themselves outside history, beleaguered by the venom of those knavish and useless binaries of ‘us’ against ‘them’ and the sordid discourse of the clash of civilisations.
