xviii INTRODUCTION
Iran, the insurgencies in Algeria, the Philippines, and elsewhere; the hi-
jackings and suicide bombings in the Middle East, the hardening extrem-
ism of political Islam; and now the emergence of the Taliban. Surely, a
close look at history would reveal how on Earth it had come to this.
And gradually, I came to realize how it had come to this. I came to per-
ceive that, unlike the history of France or Malta or South America, the his-
tory of the Islamic lands "over there" was not a subset of some single world
history shared by all. It was more like a whole alternative world history
unto itself, competing with and mirroring the one I had tried to create for
that Texas publisher, or the one published by McDougall-Littell, for which
I had written "the Islam chapters."
The two histories had begun in the same place, between the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers of ancient Iraq, and they had come to the same place,
this global struggle in which the West and the Islamic world seemed to be
the major players. In between, however, they had passed through differ-
ent-and yet strangely parallel!-landscapes.
Yes, strangely parallel: looking back, for example, from within the
Western world-historical framework, one sees a single big empire towering
above all others back there in ancient times: it is Rome, where the dream
of a universal political state was born.
Looking back from anywhere in the Islamic world, one also sees a sin-
gle definitive empire looming back there, embodying the vision of a uni-
versal state, but it isn't Rome. It is the khalifate of early Islam.
In both histories, the great early empire fragments because it simply
grows too big. The decaying empire is then attacked by nomadic barbar-
ians from the north-but in the Islamic world, "the north" refers to the
steppes of Central Asia and in that world the nomadic barbarians are not
the Germans but the Turks. In both, the invaders dismember the big
state into a patchwork of smaller kingdoms permeated throughout by a
single, unifying religious orthodoxy: Catholicism in the West, Sunni
Islam in the East.
World history is always the story of how "we" got to the here and now,
so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by "we"
and what we mean by "here and now." Western world history traditionally
presumes that here and now is democratic industrial (and postindustrial)
civilization. In the United States the further presumption holds that world