Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line has the cool, surgical bluntness of a military historian used to treating morale as a strategic variable. “Revival” sounds organic, even uplifting, but he pins it to an unromantic motor: humiliation. The phrasing assumes religion here is not merely belief or theology; it’s a political and psychological instrument for recovering status after a long century of lost wars, carved borders, and externally managed futures.

The subtext is comparative and asymmetrical: “the West” is cast as the measuring stick, and the Muslim world’s self-understanding is framed as reactive to that yardstick. That’s doing a lot of work. It hints that modern Islamic movements, especially those with a reformist or activist edge, are less about timeless piety than about modernity’s brutal scoreboard - industry, empire, armies, technology, cultural prestige. “How low they’d fallen” is a historian’s compression of a sprawling story: the late Ottoman collapse, European colonial administration, mandates in the Levant, the shock of Palestine, postwar coups, oil politics, and the recurring experience of having sovereignty negotiated elsewhere.

Keegan’s intent is explanatory, but it also carries a risk: it flirts with a one-cause narrative that can flatten diversity into grievance. Still, the line “works” because it refuses comforting abstractions. It points to the emotional infrastructure beneath ideology: when a society experiences repeated public loss, it doesn’t only change governments; it changes the stories people reach for. In that sense, “revival” becomes less a return to the past than a modern attempt to exit a perceived historical humiliation.