Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 91

will not be Muslim, as Eusebius’s was Christian. Nor will it be Eurocentric.
Rather it will reflect a global world in which Islam, after long eclipse, once
more moves closer to the heart of things.

significance of the careers of Muhammad and the first caliphs, and his Islamocentric take on everything
else. Nonetheless, in his account of the modern period he acknowledges the existence of a “Western nar-
rative” increasingly impinging on the “Muslim narrative” (318, 351). And his goal is “a single shared his-
tory” (357). Blankinship, American journal of Islamic social sciences 8 (1991) [1:21] 442–51, proposes to
divide world history into before and after Muhammad. Whereas the deployment of this concept in the
title of the present book points to the unity of the First Millennium, Blankinship’s usage of the c. 600
caesura may reinforce the isolation of Islam from the earlier, cumulative development of monotheism.