A provocative essay and provides new perspectives on the bases and the paradoxes of the conflict between the West and Islam, addressing thorny issues such as the terrorist attacks in Paris or the role of women in the two cultures.

Now, when we are all in shock after the killings in Paris, it is the right time to gather the courage to think. According to Žižek, the passionate expressions generated by these facts imply in the background a partnership approach to the forces of order and control. "The terrorist threat and succeeded to achieve the impossible: to reconcile the revolutionaries of 68 with his worst enemy, with the people offering himself for surveillance." Now, he asks Zizek how did we get to this point ? What overshadowing such events?

Žižek is in this essay thorny issues such as religious fundamentalism and the modern West, freedom and tolerance, the role of women in Islam and the West, using, as usual in his essays, of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for analysis of international politics and identity of religious communities.