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1973 and presented to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) at its tenth anniversary, they put forth a radically different perspective on the history of Sudan, one that distinguished its cultural from its political history. The fact that the power that came to rule Sudan after the fifteenth century defined itself as “Arab” was no reason to identify the culture of the period as “Arab.” Those who did so assumed that the Sudanese culture was a result of a one-sided assimilation and deracination of native Sudanese to foreign Arab. Instead, the authors argued that the complexity of this culture could best be understood as the outcome of a many-sided “integration” of its multiple and different ingredients:
Afro-Arab integration in the North tended to be referred to as Arabization. To the extent that Arab symbols of identification, especially their language and religion, have been highlighted over and above their African equivalents, this characterization may be justified, but the process involved more give-and-take than the term “Arabization” would adequately reflect. A significant degree of Africanization of the Arab element also took place.
    The point is that even if political identities are singular, cultural identities tend to be cumulative.
    Identities shift and histories get rewritten as a result of changing political agendas. The aftermath of civil conflicts often presents us with conflicting histories, each representing the point of view of a contending power in an unstable political context. Wherever adversaries resolve to live together in a single political community—as did Arab and African in 1972 Sudan, Hutu and Tutsi in postgenocide Rwanda, or black and white in postapartheid South Africa—an acute need for a new history is felt. Not surprisingly, none of these places has such a readily available history.
    The history of “the West” also underwent a fundamental revision in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In post-Holocaust history Judaism has been recast and the Jewish people have gone from being a prominent other who lived inside Europe to being an integral part of Europe. Contrast the post-Holocaust notion of “Judeo-Christian” civilization with pre-Holocaust notions, equally entrenched, about a Christian civilization that had excluded European Jews. This, for example, is how the nineteenth-century French philologist Ernest Renan distinguished Semites from Caucasians:
One sees that in all things the Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity. This race—if I dare use the analogy—is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility. Like those individuals who possess so little fecundity that, after a gracious childhood, they attain only the most mediocre virility, the Semitic nations experienced their fullest flowering in their first age and have never been able to achieve true maturity.
    The shift of perspective after the Second World War that relocated Judaism and Jews to the heart of Western history and Western civilization signifies no less than a sea change in consciousness. The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism. In the same way, I propose to distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam, which are political identities formed through direct engagement with modern forms of power.
    Modernity, Fundamentalism, and Political Islam
    “Fundamentalism” is, in fact, a term invented in 1920s Protestant circles in the United States. Like conservatism, fundamentalism is a latecomer on the scene. Just as conservatism was a political response to the French Revolution and not a throwback to premodern times, fundamentalism, too, was a reaction within religion to its