[...] The second consequence is our awareness of how, in accusations about
"fundamentalism," the Evil often resides in the very gaze which perceives
the fundamentalist Evil -- this holds especially in the case of Muslim
fundamentalism. The great eight-century Muslim intellectual Abu Hanita
wrote: "Difference of opinion in the community is a token of Divine mercy."
That this attitude was actually a guiding principle of Muslim communities
until their encounter with European modernity is aptly demonstrated when we
ask a simple question: when did the Balkans (a geographical region of
southeastern Europe) become "Balkan" (what this term designates in the
European ideological imaginery)? The answer is: in the middle of the 19th
century, that is to say, at the very moment when the Balkans were fully
exposed to the (political, economic, military, ideological) effects of
European modernization. The gap between earlier Wester European perceptions
of the Balkans and the image of "Balkan" over the last 150 years is
absolutely breathtaking: in the 16th century, Pierre Belon, a French natural
scientist, noted how "the Turks force nobody to live according to the
Turkish way" -- no wonder that, after Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the
Jews from Spain in 1492, most of them were given asylum (and the freedom to
practice their religion) in Muslim countries, so that, in a supreme twist of
irony, many Western travelers were disturbed by the public presence of Jews
in big Turkish cities. [...]

Where, then, do the features which we, Westerners, usually associate with
the word "Balkan" (the spirit of intolerance, ethnic violence, obsession
with historical traumas, and so on) come from? There is only one answer:
from Western Europe itself. In a nice case of what Hegel called "reflexive
determination," what Western Europeans observe and condescendingly deplore
in the Balkans is what they themselves introduced there: what they fight in
the Balkans is their own historical legacy run amok. Let us not forget that
the two great ethnic crimes imputed to the Turks in the 20th century, the
Armenian genocide and the oppression of the Kurds, were not executed by the
traditionalist Muslim political forces, but precisely by the military
modernizers who wanted to liberate Turkey from its traditional ballast and
change it into a European nation-state. [...]

Slavoj Žižek
"The Parallax View", 2006