Politics & Power Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Habermas is doing what he does best: draining the romance out of grand stories and replacing it with a cooler, more unsettling continuity. The line is a quiet rebuke to the popular script that treats “holy war” as a sudden eruption of medieval fanaticism into a modern world. Instead, he’s pointing to a conversion that’s less Damascus and more administrative: the same energies, grievances, and identity needs migrating from secular nationalism into religious militancy with surprisingly little rewiring.

The phrasing matters. “Drawn into” shifts agency away from pure personal choice and toward recruitment ecosystems, social pressures, and political conditions. “Only a few years before” punctures the idea of a deep spiritual awakening; this is recent, contingent, and therefore political. Habermas’s real target isn’t religion per se but the misdiagnosis that comes from treating religion as an alien force. If you can see “remarkable continuities” in biographies, then the cause isn’t a theology textbook. It’s the persistent infrastructure of belonging: narratives of humiliation, promises of purity, the lure of a total identity, the moral clarity of an enemy.

Contextually, this fits Habermas’s post-9/11 insistence that modernity didn’t “outgrow” religion, and that liberal democracies need better interpretive tools than panic or condescension. The subtext is also a warning to the West: if you reduce Islamist militancy to irrational belief, you absolve yourself of the political histories - failed states, repression, war, stalled nation-building - that make ideological switching so easy. Continuity is accountability.