CHAPTER 1

INCLUDING ISLAM

Although the divide between Islam and Europe will always be deeper than thatbetween the different European peoples, there are two reasons why we simplycannot do without Islam in the construction of European cultural history:namely the unique opportunity to compare its assimilation of the same [antique]heritage, and on account of the abundance of [the two sides'] historicalinteractions.

—C. H. Becker, Islamstudien (1924–32) 1.39 (lecture delivered in 1921)

THE WEST AND THE REST

In this brief programmatic book, I contribute a new angle to the debateabout "the West and the Rest." One party is eager to explain how Europe andeventually North America—the North Atlantic world—left the rest in thedust from about 1500. The other side argues that Asia—China, Japan, andthe Islamic trio of Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans—remained largely freeof European encroachment until the mid-1700s, but then either collapsedfor internal reasons, or else were gradually undermined by colonial powers'superior technological, economic, and military clout. Europe is relativizedand its supposedly exceptional destiny undermined; but it still wins in theend, along with its North American offshoot.

This is all just the latest phase in other long-standing debates about America'sdestiny and Europe's identity, the latter a focus of particular concernnow given the impetus toward European integration—or disintegration—providedby the economic crisis that broke out in 2007. North Atlantic hegemonyis no longer a given—it is more and more shadowed by two great Asianpowers, China and India. It appears that the dominance of the West is on theway to becoming one more historical period, and that future historians willbe as much concerned to explain its loss as its rise.

If Asian economic competition is one cloud on the North Atlantic world'shorizon, another is Islam—both the religion that goes under that name eventhough it has many branches sometimes bitterly hostile to each other, andthe cultural region created by it, the "Islamic world," which has in mostphases of its history included large non-Muslim populations. Asiatic economiccompetition can be faced with some equanimity or at least resignationby societies that have benefited (as well as suffered) for decades nowfrom a deluge of cheap consumer goods. The Islamic world, by contrast, representsnot an economic challenge but something more insidious, a moraland spiritual competitor offering different norms of conduct and a variantvision of man and God unnervingly close—yet at the same time a challenge,as the Qur'an makes explicit—to the values espoused by "Judeo-Christian"civilization. (The ideal reader will forgive essentializing references to "Judaism,""Christianity," and "Islam" for ease of general exposition, be aware thatall three emerged gradually not ready-made as distinct identities, and takedue account of allusions, especially in my later chapters, to "orthodox" and"heretics," Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Armenian strands in Christianity, andSunnis, Shiites, and different traditions of law in Islam.)

My purpose here is not to join this debate directly, but to overhaul itsfoundations, especially as regards the role of Islam and the Islamic world. Indoing this, I hope to contribute to a sounder and more generous understandingof Islam's historical and intellectual contribution. I do not believe thiscan be attained by compiling a balance sheet of what the North Atlantic andIslamic worlds have achieved, or done to each other, since 1500. The sumtotal of what these civilizations are—and may come to be—cannot begrasped only in terms of the last half millennium. Instead we have to go backto the First Millennium, during which Christianity was born and matured,roughly in the middle of which the Prophet Muhammad received or conceivedthe Qur'an, and by the end of which Islam had matured sufficiently tobe compared with patristic Christianity.

In the first place we need to reformulate the history of the First Millenniumin order to fit Islam into it, for the Arabian doctrine is excluded fromthe conventional narrative by historians eager to draw a direct line from lateAntiquity, through the European Middle Ages, to the Renaissance and Modernity.Next we need to ask this: what was the nature of this new Islamicreligion whose features, however debatably fast or slow to emerge, were quitediscernible by 1000 CE? How did it relate to other contemporary civilizations,and those of Antiquity? Viewed from our present-day vantage point,does it make sense that Islam's "classical" moment is excluded from NorthAtlantic educational curricula, while the European Middle Ages, eventhough less taught than they were a generation or so ago, still constitute theindispensable conceptual and historical link between us and the foundationsof a European culture conceived of as Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian—butnothing much to do with Islam? After all, the European Unionnow has a Muslim population that some put at twenty million, around twicethe size of a middling member country such as Portugal or Greece.

As with China and India, an already visible future in which Islam will beincreasingly prominent has to be brought into play if historians are to formulatequestions that elucidate our ongoing quandaries rather than reinforcingEurocentric stereotypes about the past and present. History is engagementwith the past not just as it was then but as it confronts and molds us now.And beyond the historian's contribution to the public debate with its mainlysocial and political parameters, there are intellectual and spiritual benefits tobe had from a contextualized approach to early Islam. It may, for example,uncover fertile dimensions of the tradition forgotten or misapprehendedeven by Muslims themselves, for they too write history selectively. Arabicphilosophy, to take just one example, turns out to have been far from exclusivelyMuslim: there were also Christians and Jews and Mazdeans/Zoroastrianswho philosophized in Arabic. Philosophy both contextualizes...