Islam and the West… for a better world @
in relations between any other regions of the world, first, because of the geographical proximity between the peoples of these two regions, and second, because of the ever-persistent and extensive activities of war, trade, and transfer of ideas, religious and otherwise, between them. Even if we assume that the world of Islam and the modern West constitute two homogenous units, an assumption which is clearly misleading, the rising tension between Islam and the West has little to do with civilizational differences. The reasons behind this tension have to be located elsewhere, in the political, strategic and economic realms of our world. This paper will attempt to demonstrate the validity of these assumptions by briefly discussing relations between Islam and the West during three important periods: the classical Islamic age, the later period of Islamic Spain, and the age of modernization in the Muslim world. The Classical Period of Islam In an important work that was published first in the 1940s, the eminent French scholar Fernand Braudel reconstructed the history of the Mediterranean during the fourteenth century, showing a great degree of economic and cultural exchange between peoples on all sides of the great sea, European and non-European. 1 Later, Marshall Hodgson, relying on the contributions of the Chicago school of world history, was perhaps the first to suggest the existence of one civilizational continuum that linked the ancient world from China to the Atlantic Ocean. 2 Hodgson’s vision is comprehensive and inclusive. History had largely been understood in European and American circles as European history. But by reconstructing the human past, Hodgson presents the history of Islam as a crucial episode in world history. He further argues that civilizations not only borrow from 1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , trans. Sian Reynolds (London: HarperCollins, 1992). 2 See, for example, Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 8- 28.
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