AFTERWORD 357and Medina fourteen centuries ago. The story includes many characters
who are not Muslim and many events that are not religious. Jews and
Christians and Hindus are part of this story. Industrialization is an element
of the plot, and so is the steam engine and the discovery of oil. When you
look at it this way, Islam is a vast complex of communal purposes moving
through time, driven by its own internally coherent assumptions.
And so is the West.
So which is the real history of the world? The philosopher Leibniz once
posited the idea that the universe consists of"monads," each monad being
the whole universe understood from a particular point of view, and each
monad containing all the others. World history is like that: the whole story
of humankind from a particular point of view, each history containing all
the others, with all actual events situated somewhere with respect to a cen-
tral narrative, even if that "somewhere" is in the background as part of the
white noise against which the meaningful line stands out. They're all the
real history of the world. The work lies in the never-ending task of com-
piling them in the quest to build a universal human community situated
within a single shared history.