Introduction (Religious Traditions in the Face of the Crisis of the Liberal System: The Case of Islam // Special Issue for the 50th Anniversary of the Department of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Milan)

One phenomenon that distinguishes our time is the so-called ‘return of the sacred’ to public space, therefore no longer relegated to the private sphere and variously connected to great and ancient traditions. It is undeniable that Islām has played a leading role in this context. Violent Islamic militant groups who had chosen armed struggle, or even terrorism, had already existed since the last decades of the last century; moreover the traumatic attacks of 11 September 2001 were perceived as the fulfillment of the already formulated theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’, opposed to the theory of the so-called ‘end of history’, after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the apparent victory of the liberal-democratic system over its possible alternatives.