XX INTRODUCTION
would be forced to look for the meaning of history in defeat instead of tri-
umph. We would feel conflicted between two impulses: changing our no-
tion of "civilized" to align with the flow of history or fighting the flow of
history to realign it with our notion of "civilized."
If the stunted present experienced by Islamic society is taken as the
here-and-now to be explained by the narrative of world history, then the
story might break down to something like the following stages:
- Ancient Times: Mesopotamia and Persia
- Birth of Islam
- The Khalifate: Quest for Universal Unity
- Fragmentation: Age of the Sultanates
- Catastrophe: Crusaders and Mongols
- Rebirth: The Three-Empires Era
- Permeation of East by West
- The Reform Movements
- Triumph of the Secular Modernists
- The Islamist Reaction
Literary critic Edward Said has argued that over the centuries, the West
has constructed an "Orientalist" fantasy of the Islamic world, in which a
sinister sense of "otherness" is mingled with envious images of decadent
opulence. Well, yes, to the extent that Islam has entered the Western imag-
ination, that has more or less been the depiction.
But more intriguing to me is the relative absence of any depictions at
all. In Shakespeare's day, for example, preeminent world power was cen-
tered in three Islamic empires. Where are all the Muslims in his canon?
Missing. If you didn't know Moors were Muslims, you wouldn't learn it
from Othello.
Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what's remarkable is how
little notice they have taken of each other. If the Western and Islamic
worlds were two individual human beings, we might see symptoms of re-
pression here. We might ask, "What happened between these two? Were
they lovers once? Is there some history of abuse?"
But there is, I think, another less sensational explanation. Throughout
much of history, the West and the core of what is now the Islamic world