Wit & Attitude Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Brzezinski’s bluntness here is the tell: he’s not doing interfaith philosophy, he’s doing strategic triage. By calling the idea of a unified Western “global policy” toward Islam “stupid,” he’s puncturing a post-9/11 habit of talking about 1.8 billion people as if they were a single actor with one command center and one set of motives. The jab lands because it targets a bureaucratic reflex: policy-makers love tidy categories, and “Islam” became a catch-all file folder for everything from insurgency to immigration to oil.

“There isn’t a global Islam” works as an argument against civilizational thinking-the seductive, headline-friendly frame that turns geopolitics into an eternal cage match. Brzezinski is warning that treating Islam as monolithic doesn’t just offend; it misleads. It tempts states into one-size-fits-all responses, and those responses reliably misfire: you end up strengthening hardliners, alienating potential partners, and turning local conflicts into grand narratives of Western hostility.

The subtext is classic Brzezinski realpolitik: map the factions, not the faith. Islam as lived reality is fractured by nation-states, sects, class, language, and rival political projects. If you ignore that, you end up fighting an abstraction-and abstractions never surrender. In an era when “global” rhetoric was doing a lot of work, his point is that strategy starts with specificity, or it isn’t strategy at all.