Night of Philosophy, February 2, 2019 Good evening. The theme of tonight’s programming is “Facing the Present,” which can seem like a particularly daunting task, especially for a historian like myself who is used to dwelling in more distant temporal quarters. One way to apprehend the significance of this idea is through a study in contrasts. On one hand, we regularly hear about the necessity of—and challenges involved with—facing the past. This usually connotes dealing with uncomfortable histories, sins of a former age, and recognizing their legacy in our own lives. From American slavery to the Holocaust and countless other examples the world over, facing the past is envisioned as something that requires moral courage. Moreover, facing the past is rightly understood as an activity that is profoundly future-oriented, a form of reckoning that must be performed before a better future can be built. Similarly, we are no doubt familiar with calls to “face the future” head-on, a directive that conjures up daring adventure of the sort needed to colonize Mars. Facing the future can in fact suggest many positions: from sturdy resolve to deal now with pressing ecological dangers so that our grandchildren might continue life on this planet, to fear of an assortment of dystopian possibilities – from nuclear Armageddon to the robot takeover. Yet facing the future can also suggest possibilities not yet imagined – for instance, optimism about a future of automation and equitable resource distribution, in which humans can finally fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. But the present? We of course live in the present and are directed to savor it – but what does it mean to face it? While tonight there will be a multiplicity of ideas put forth in response to this question, I would like to explore one interpretation that is quite a bit darker. Drawing on my ongoing work about contemporary religious violence and political nihilism, I find that facing the present is meaningful for what it seems to preclude: either reckoning with the past or building for the future. One of the more noteworthy phenomena in the recent history of the Middle East and South Asia has been the proliferation, since the early 1980s, of Islamic militant groups. While the decades immediately following the Second World War featured anti-colonial fighters and guerillas under umbrellas like the PLO and the Baluchistan Liberation Front, these gave way to literally dozens of groups that appealed to religious concepts, terminology, and forms of identity: from Egyptian Islamic Jihad to Hizbollah and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami in Pakistan, and of course al Qaeda and ISIS most recently. The talking heads who opine on this trend have often, because of their rather tenuous grasp of history, failed to note that it is in fact a trend, one that began rather recently. They are quick to point to certain verses from the Qur’an by way of explanation, yet this leaves us with a question: well then why now? The Qur’an has been widely known and available for about 1400 years, and while there have been rebel groups in past centuries or calls to jihad by rulers, the rapid proliferation of so many groups in so many places is unprecedented. Similarly, the purposeful targeting of civilians and seeking out of suicide mission represent novel phenomena, not timeless ones. Why is this the case? And why, given this empirical data, do