Something similar can be said about the man suspected of trying to kill the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard with an axe, Muhudin Mohamed Geele. Geele came to Denmark as a teen, where he got a good education and was even hired by the Red Cross. He was married and had three children, but began to become increasingly isolated, despite being fairly well integrated into Danish society, taking trips to Eastern Africa and, according to the Kenyan police, getting involved in an attempted attack on a hotel in Nairobi where Hillary Clinton was staying.

One can certainly wonder what it is about Islamic extremist movements that seems so appealing to these young men. And one can ask oneself in what way courses in Western culture, for instance, might change something in their development. There does not seem to be a lack of insight into Western culture that compelled them to want to bomb the world that they and their parents once moved to and where they themselves received their intellectual training.

The hit movie Avatar provides one explanation that is not entirely unreasonable. Western civilisation is presented as a waste land that makes reality in T S Eliot’s famous poem sound like a carnival. Pitted against the ruthless exploitation of capitalism and the objectification and relativisation of the life and value of humans is an existence of connection, profound religiosity and contact with the traditions of one’s ancestors. It seems totally logical that the main character chooses the latter existence in all its primitiveness and despite all the promises of future benefits in the modern world.

But to return to the Islamic terrorists, one can also wonder to what extent it was on the basis of, rather than in spite of, their being educated in the Western world that they developed as they did. The idea has certainly crossed my mind that Western identity politics may have been of critical importance to the radicalisation of highly educated Western Muslims.

During my years as a lecturer at various Swedish universities, I have frequently experienced the destructiveness of students seeing themselves as members of a collective that is discriminated against rather than as individuals. I noticed how differently students chose to confront the types of problems that are almost always encountered in pursuing an education – like low self-esteem in writing essays. For ambitious male students with a middle class Swedish background, it was obvious that in situations like this, it was necessary to take individual action to come to grips with the problems. It could mean taking a course in stylistics, changing their focus of studies or simply seeking psychological help. However, women who took feminist ideology to heart responded radically differently.

They viewed their problems as stemming from structural disparities. With that kind of explanatory model, the problems an individual woman has in dealing with a university course are seen as a natural consequence of a patriarchal gender power order that systematically favours men. For instance, working out a writer’s block on an individual basis, from this perspective, seems completely futile. It is much more effective to fight for change in the basic structures of society, to take an active part in the feminist struggle.

Paradoxically, identity politics thus does a disservice to individuals from disadvantaged groups. Identity politics exists precisely because those who belong to a marginalised group are many times in a weak position, which is also further reinforced when they embrace an ideology that does not want to see problems as being individual but rather as collective. The winners in a situation like this, however, are Western men, who cannot put the blame on being disadvantaged but whose privileged position as a group means their own individual problems never come across as something other than simply individual in nature.

Similarly, now widespread notions of Islamophobia provide a simplistic, black and white explanatory model according to which Western society is viewed as pervaded by structural discrimination against people from Arab and Persian cultures. When people from these cultures encounter the same kinds of problems that we all have faced at different times, it is thus handy to find the root of the problems in the fact that one is, for instance, a Muslim, just as it is handy to think that the only way to come to grips with the problems in question is to change the structural disparities in society in general, which is readily done by joining in the struggle against Islamophobia and racist Western culture.