The discovery of virulent Muslims in Cairo and elsewhere is nothing new, except for those who do not want to know the real Islam. The Islam that lives in the very countries it dominates, and not in the shade of blooming jasmine as dreamt by Elisabeth Roudinesco and other intellectuals in Paris. 

That these same Muslims have sexually assaulted a CBS reporter (treating Lora Logan as "Jew! Jew!") or that they prevented the star of the new generation, Wael Ghonim , from speaking: all this is part of the real Muslim order of things. It was predictable from the beginning. 

But the insurgency is not of a homogeneous composition, nor of a irreversible direction like the French Revolution in 1792 or the Russian Kerensky Revolution of 1917.  Such situation would inevitably lead to a victory for the Islamists.  While these Islamists are present in the current turmoil, their "solution" has already been experimented with. Not only since the beginning of Islam, but especially since Nasser in 1952, Damascus and Baghdad with the Baath in 1947, 1958 and 1963, Khomeiny in 1979, and in Algeria in 1954 and 1992.  Even when the majority of the peoples in the region still pray islamic, they know that Islam is not the solution, no more than communism.

It is the failure of Islam, not only of Islamism as suggested by Olivier Roy and other experts. 

It is only in the West that Muslim intellectuals of the Ramadan kind and their "post" supporters (postmodern, postmarxist, postfreudian, postsecular) propagate an imaginary Islam, just like others (Alain Badiou, Slavoj Ziezek , Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Olivier Besancenot) are spreading an imaginary communism, and still others (Edgar Morin, Nicolas Hulot) are propagating an imaginary frugal neo-buddhism. But the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East (the people of Europe too...) are crying for the freedom and the democracy that their colonial powers had refused them in the name of the right to difference. Already in 1947, ballot boxes in Algeria were stuffed, a single representative assembly was refused etc.

The recent events in Libya are more complex than they seem. This uprising also has a Berber dimension, even when it looks Islamic. One may also wonder whether this dimension has to be taken into account in Algeria too. As long as we speak of an "Arab revolution", the Berbers will not budge: they have already donated, e.g. when they were promised a pluralistic and democratic Algeria.

So let us beware of mixing historical periods or of believing that we are still in 1945 or in the 1960s. The communist triumph against a background of Western scientism and technicism led to a belief that it was sufficient to create a heavy industry and a purely national-islamic state to solve the "war of the classes". Together with a return to the supposedly authentic roots, the post-1968 generation and their children in France and Germany, from the far left to the far right, are still dreaming of a völkisch movement enriched by their hippie-alternative component.

These various revivals, although still present and virulent, are not up to the game, as something more profound is emerging. It is a desire for truth as well as for freedom, even in the European countries. This despite the individualism, the cynicism and the absence of a spiritual uplift, which prevents the realisation of this truth and freedom. This is probably the reason why the fight against the lowering of the retirement age was not the spark in France. 

Anyway, Islam or socialism, statism, relativism and nihilism are not solutions, they are the hurdle to overcome. They have to be overcome, in order to free ourselves from the errors of the twentieth century, to go to version 3.0 of this world: diverse and united, technical (with multiform robots, holograms of imaginary worlds, virtual immortality), but also idealistic, in a singular and shared quest for the best against the worst, wherever the soil is fertile. Will we have the strength to discover it ...?