Back in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall collapsed and Eastern and Central Europe broke free of Soviet domination, Francis Fukuyama wrote a now-famous essay querying as to whether the end of history had arrived. By that, Fukuyama did not mean, as some misinterpreted, that wars, famines and strife had ended. Instead, the political scientist asserted the “big” ideological debates seemed to be over. After all, fascism was beaten in 1945 and by 1989 communism was also trumped.

For Fukuyama, that meant the melded troika of capitalism, democracy and Western liberalism (in its classic sense) was the only big idea left standing and triumphant. Fukuyama theorized that because the West’s representative institutions fulfilled man’s desire for recognition, and given how capitalism met our need for goods better than other economic models, the appeal of liberal capitalist democracies superseded the competing societal visions. Thus, from here on in, everything else was just details.

So, while there might be a few clean-up battles—nationalist uprisings here or there, a few communist states yet to collapse (North Korea or Cuba) and a few reactionary religious regimes still kicking around (see Iran)—the seemingly inevitable path for humanity was markets, individual rights and politicians chosen by the masses.

Twenty-two years after that essay and ten years after 9/11, it’s time to revisit Fukuyama’s prediction. This is especially critical as Fukuyama downplayed Islamic-directed states as a competing attraction. He wrote that “In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.”

Fukuyama can’t be faulted for not being a prophet but on political Islam he spectacularly erred. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent decade revealed Fukuyama’s miscalculation on Islamism; it is attractive to at least enough people to cause trouble for the rest of us. Moreover, despite the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, we’re not sure –much as we wish otherwise—that our preference for liberalism, free minds and free markets is as widely shared as we hope and as Fukuyama predicted.

The recent attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo is a case in point: An autocrat was replaced by an army that promises Egyptians free and fair elections. Impatient or just irascible, some Egyptians just used their newly-won freedom to engage in tribalism against Israel. Revealingly, they did so vis-à-vis a country with whom it is in Egypt’s financial and security interest to remain on good terms.

So what explains this? A hint comes courtesy of another observation from Fukuyama’s 1989 essay and unwittingly hints at the inadequacy of his own theory. In a discussion of why communist regimes hadn’t lost power much earlier, he makes this point: “Failure to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature.” He also pointed out it mattered what those with power believed inside their heads.

In other words, just as few understood why communism survived as long as it did (the power of an idea combined with arms), not many in 1989, Fukuyama included, recognized the attraction of political Islam. They failed to grasp how an idea appeals over and above material concerns.

In the minds of Soviet leaders, it wasn’t until the idea of communism and security was replaced by the idea of wealth and risk that the Marxist vision imploded. For the longest time, the utopian ideal mattered more than the material reality that people could easily see—the poverty communism produced—on the ground.

Regrettably, it’s far from clear that the idea and attraction of a new Islamic Caliphate suffers from any similar preliminary disappointment in the minds of those who cling to that vision. If anything, the opposite seems true and has grown over the past decade. Thus, we are nowhere near the end of history. Western liberalism still, and once again, has a significant competitor for the hearts, minds and souls of men.