Caliph or terrorist? Who or what lies behind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of Isis, defined by Time as the ‘world’s most dangerous man’? Are we facing another massive clash between the Islamic and Western worlds? The Caliph and the West pierces the veil of conformism in our media and uses new investigative tools to trace the real roots and historical reasons for what is happening today.

August 2014. More than 1300 years have passed since the birth of the first caliphate in 632 after the death of the Prophet. The caliph – guide of the umma, the Muslim community – enjoyed executive and legal powers. And another hundred years have passed since the last khalîfa ruled, at the end of the First World War. Yet again today the caliph is a subject of conversation, dominating the front pages of global media thanks to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the black caliph of the Islamic state, leader of thousands of Jihadists who are wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria. But what is the objective of this new caliphate? And what are the geographical boundaries of its action? Is this really the continuation of the fitna, the civil war between the Sunnis and Sciites, but with different methods and protagonists? Or does this confessional war conceal economic and geopolitical interests, financed by the emirs of the Gulf and supported ‘unwittingly’ by the West that appears to be both the victim and target of Jihadi violence?

Using the tools of a first-rate historian, Franco Cardini examines this ‘third wave of the Muslim attack’ on the West, providing his own personal interpretation of events. His conclusion is that the clash of civilizations is a myth, exploited by sketchy minorities, and concealing very specific interests. In the pay of this myth is an unsteady and fickle international diplomacy and an alarmist international press that appears to value self-serving consensus above truth.