““Thus, the intellectual cottage industry about Islam and Islamism that is sent into overdrive after every terrorist attack rarely lingers on the fact that it was France’s revolutionary state that first introduced terror into the political realm (the Arabic word irhab for ‘terrorism’ was long understood as state-led terror). Devout Spanish peasants, fighting back against Napoleon’s secular universalist project, were the first irregulars to wage war against a regular modern nation state and army: the predecessors of the lawless guerrillas and terrorists who today race their lawful adversaries to extremes of senseless violence.””