The Mistaken Identification of “The West” with “Modernity ” John Obert Voll The relationships between Islam and the West are complex. Even the perceptions of those relations have an important impact on the nature of the interactions. If the basic images that are used in discussing “Islam and the West” are themselves ill-defiied or viewed in inconsistent ways, the relationships themselves are affected in sometimes dangerous ways. Inconsistent and contradictory terms of analysis can lead to misunder- standing and conflict. One of the most frequent conceptual mistakes made in discussing Islam and the West in the modem era is the identification of “the West” with “modemity.” This mistake has a significant impact on the way pee ple view the processes of modernization in the Islamic world as well as on the way people interpret the relationships between Islam and the West in the contemporary era. The basic generalizations resulting from the following analysis can be stated simply: 1) “modernity“ is not uniquely “western”; 2) “the West” is not simply “modernity”; and 3) the identifixation of “the West” with “modemity” has important negative consequences for understanding the relationships between Islam and the West. Modernity and the West are two different concepts and historic entities. To use the terms interchange- ably is to invite unnecessary confusion and create possible conflict’and inconsistency. This article will address the problem of definition and the application of the defined terms to interpreting actual experiences and relationships. Understanding the difficulties raised by the identification of the West with modernity involves a broader analysis within the framework of world history and global historical perspectives. In such an analysis, John Obert Voll is professor of history, Georgetown University Center for Muslim- Christian Understanding, Washington, DC. This is an edited version, prepared by the author, of his contribution to the International Institute of Islamic Thought’s seminar on Islam and the West, held in Herndon, Virginia, on 10-12 March 1995. 2 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 13: 1 it becomes essential to reexamine a number of the frequently-used great concepts of macrohistory and then restate the basic world historical nar- rative to provide a new framework for viewing Islam and the West. Such a framework can help us see the relationship between Islam and the West in terms that go beyond simplistic visions of “clashing civilizations” or inevitable conflict between Islam and modernity. Clearly, in a short paper such as this, only a beginning consideration of defining basic terms can be undertaken. However, it is my hope that the broader effect of restating world history will not be lost sight of in the specifics of def- initions. Civilization as a Concept A globally oriented world historical perspective is important for under- standing the dynamics of relations between Islam and the West and the issue of the relationship between the West and modernity. A fundamental term for most discussions of these subjects is “civilization.” Most studies of world history, and of Islam and the West in particular, assume the subject involves relationships between two “civilizations,” which are separate and unitary entities with life-histories, morphologies, pathologies, and that can be identified clearly. The classic studies of world history by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee are clear examples of this approach. According to this approach, civilization involves a basic style of life and society. The definition is relatively simple in broad terms, although scholars argue about details, when one deals with ancient history. Civilization is a distinctive type of society that is distinguished from the societies of hunter-gatherer peoples or from Neolithic agricultural vil- lagers. Most world history textbooks have a clearly defined section that deals with the “rise of civilization.’’ In these discussions, there is a rela- tively clear consensus regarding the fundamental characteristics of a “civ- ilized” society. Civilization “is usually defined in terms of extensive lists of characteristics,” and one study utilizes a helpful set of criteria for the existence of civilization as being the presence of “ceremonial centers,” cities, and writing.’ The specific definition of these characteristics and the nature of the lists vary from scholar to scholar, but the general picture pre- sented reflects a broad agreement on basics. Civilizations involve large concentrations of people organized in cities, intensified production that creates a surplus that makes the emergence of a real division of labor and a hierarchical ordering of power and authority possible, and some form of permanent record-keeping and communication defined as writing. Civilization, in this usual perspective, is a particular way of organiz- ing human lives, groups, and societies. It has a beginning and an evolution in different forms, and it can conceivably also have an end. The term “civ- ilization” has little utility for world historical analysis if it simply means any large grouping of humans that emerged after the establishment of civ- ilization in Sumer. It is conceptually useful to think in terms of “the end of Voll: The Mistaken Identity of ‘The West” with Modernity 3 civilization,” because it makes it possible to clarify what the specific char- acteristics of civilization are. In this context, it is important to distinguish between “the e n d of a par- ticular civilization and the end of civilization as the basic lifestyle for large groupings of humans. Several specific civilizations are said by world his- torians to have ended-for example, the Indus Valley civilization in the second millennium B.C.E. But this did not mean that civilization stopped being an important style for the organization of large-scale human societies. In the modem era, however, it may be that the transformations of human life have been so great that analysts need to think in terms of a con- ceptualization of a human societal lifestyle that does not see present soci- etal order as simply a variant of the way humans lived in Pharaonic Egypt or in ancient Sumer. The contrast between human life in the 1990s and human life in the Egypt of 2500 B.C.E. or in the Tigris-Euphrates valley is surely as great as the contrast between Neolithic agricultural settlements and life in the cities of early Sumer. The latter difference is recognized by designating Sumer as a “civilization.” What the Tofflers call the “Third Wave” is introducing a whole new human lifestyle: Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up? This means the end of civilization as it has been known in past world history. This is an analytical statement and not an announcement of the apocalypse, and I have suggested elsewhere that “the end of civilization is not so bad.”3 Civilization, as conceived in most of the studies and analy- ses of world history, is now a societal lifestyle of the past. It is possible now to view “civilization as a phase of world history.”” In this context of the end of civilization, it is unproductive to view Islam and the West as two somehow anachronistically surviving civiliza- tions that will be clashing during the next century. It may be true that Islam and the West will clash in significant ways, but defining them both as civ- ilizations is not an effective way of understanding the basic dynamics of their interaction. One way that some analysts have attempted, consciously and more often unconsciously, to resolve this fundamental analytical con- tradiction has been to identify the modern transformation with westem civilization. Thus, modernity and the West are seen as the same thing. As a result, the relationships between the West and Islam are conceptualized as the relationships between modernity (the West) and Islamic civilization. Such a conceptualization is weak in both of the conceptualizations involved, and the first aspect of understanding this conceptual weakness is to recognize that civilization is a distinctive historic lifestyle and not a metahistorical truth, However, such a conceptualization also involves a fundamental misunderstanding of modemization. 4 The American Journal of Idamic Social Sciences 13: 1 Modernity as a Phase of World History Modernity is also a phase of world history. "Modern" is the term used to describe the result of the transformations of classical and medieval soci- eties that reached a major climax by the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies. These transformations become visible in many different aspects of human life. In other words, "modernity" is the term used for that set of processes that brought an end to the traditional lifestyles of medieval civi- lizations. There are many dimensions to this process. Although people will debate about when and how the modem world began, all would agree that there is some point in history that is before modernity. Modernity has a beginning and, unless one believes in the infinity of the modem, i t also has, or u.ill have, an end. Modernity is a particular phase of human history. The emergence of modernity involved the transcending and transfor- mation of a number of fundamental patterns of human societal life. For more than two thousand years following the definition of the bacic civi- lizational traditions in the Eastern Hemisphere, there had been significant "interaction among the separate civilizations, and between civilized and barbarian peoples;." but this had never upset what William H. McNeill has called "the original fourfold balance of Old World Cultures that had defined itself 500 years before the birth of Christ."' Between 100 and 1500 c.E.. however, there were several significant challenges to that "fourfold balance" that involved the development of nia,jor power networks reaching far beyond the confines of a single civi- lization. The Mongol conquests created a major hemispheric power that included a11 or significant territories of two of the major regions of civi- liration (China and the Middle East) as well as important areas of Europe and virtua!ly all of the Eurasian steppes. It is impossible to identify the Xlongol empire with any one civilization. An even more significant long-run alteration of the pattern of a four- fold balance came from Islamic expansion. McNeill argues: \ve are s o accustomed to regard history from a European vantage point that the extraordinary scope and force of this Islamic expan- \ion, which prefigured and overlapped the later expansion of ive\tern Europe. often escapes attention. Yet an intelligent and informed observer of the fifteenth century could hardly have avoided the conclusion that Islam, rather than the remote and still comparatively crude society of the European Far West, was des- tined to dominate the world in the following centuries." The supracivilizational aspect of modernity was, in other words. beginning to be signaled bet'ore the voyages of Columbus and was not zxclujively an aspect of the expansion of the West. By the year 1500. other dimensions of the sociocultural order were alw being transfomied significantly. In ternis of the coercive power of the Voll: The Mistaken Identity of ‘The West” with Modernity 5 state, the situation had been altered by the development of gunpowder’s military implications. Across the Eastern Hemisphere, new “gunpowder empires” emerged with varying degrees of expansive power. In Europe especially the new power changed significantly the power of the state, and the old medieval structures were replaced by the foundations of the “mod- ern state.’” In economics, social institutions, and ideology, similar and sometimes even more profound changes were taking place. Lewis Mumford describes this as the replacement of “Old World culture’’ by “New World culture” in a “radical breakthrough” in which the New World culture “has already displaced the archaic and axial components of Old World culture as ruthlessly as the cities of the ancient river civilizations displaced the village culture of the neolithic period.’“ This new mode of sociocultural organization is the heart of modernity. The transformations of the past five centuries have been recognized by many analysts as being of major world historical significance. The result has been the creation of something dramatically new and different. The Tofflers speak of this as the “Second Wave,” the rise of industrial civiliza- tion, which “revolutionized life in Europe, North America and some other parts of the globe in a few short centuries.’“ Car10 Cipolla, the economic historian, speaks of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, the heart of the emergence of modernity, as one of the two truly major revolu- tions in human life. The Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution “created deep breaches in the continuity of the historical process. With each of these two Revolutions, a ‘new story’ begins, a new story dramatically and completely alien to the previous one.”” Seen from this perspective, modernity represents a new lifestyle significantly different from the civilizational lifestyle that preceded it. Modernity and the West This stress on modernity’s new and revolutionary nature is important in examining the identification of the West with modernity. Clearly, many of the most significant developments in the emergence of modernity occurred in western European societies, although even in the origins of the Industrial Revolution, global rather than simply local forces were crucial. The industrialization process had international ramifications from the first. It resulted in massive changes in world economic rela- tions that had given western Europe access to capital and markets literally around the globe. World historical shifts thus enabled a few societies to pioneer in the new economic and technical forms industrialization entailed.” Western Europe was the pioneering test case for the development of modem industrial societies. It was the region where the transformation of medieval agrarian societies into modem industrial societies first took 6 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 1 3 1 place. In this context, it is possible to assert “that the fmt ‘traditional’ civ- ilization to be destroyed by the processes of modernization was Western Civilization.”’* In other words, to the extext that modernity41 of the changes leading up to and including the Industrial Revolution-represents a whole new social, political, and cultural order, modernity is the end of the Western civilizational tradition that began with classical Greece and Rome and extended through Charlemagne and the era of the Gothic cathe- drals, rather than being identified with it. Modernity and the West thus refer to two different types of concepts and, due to modernity’s origins, the concepts are related closely. Modernity, like civilization, is a phase of world history that represents a relatively spe- cific lifestyle and mode of sociopolitical and cultural institutionalization. Modernity, like civilization, can take several different forms, which will be shaped by the broad cultural traditions of the humans involved. The West is such a broad cultural tradition. It is a particular cumula- tive repertoire of concepts, traditions, cultural memories, and worldviews. This repertoire provides the means for defining and articulating lifestyles and modes of sociopolitical and cultural institutionalization. With these definitions, it is possible to speak of “western civilization” or “western modernity,” terms that would refer to the particular form assumed by the lifestyle of a civilization when shaped by the western cumulative cultural tradition, or the form that the lifestyle of modernity takes when shaped by that particular western cumulative repertoire. This approach has long been common in understanding civilization and civilizations in world history. In the ancient Near East, the civilized lifestyle emerged in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley in Sumer. Sumerian civilization was distinctive in terms of its specific characteristics. Initially, as societies on the periphery of the Sumerian core society adopted the tech- niques of civilization, they adopted the techniques of Sumerian civilization. In this way, the early spread of civilization could have been described as the “Sumerization” of the Near East. However, as the techniques began to be applied in areas not characterized by the specific conditions of the first core, different formats of the “ceremonial center/city/writing” or civilized lifestyle began to emerge. One then speaks of the spread of “civilization,” rather than the Sumerization of those areas influenced by the civilized soci- eties of the Fertile Crescent. Similar developments can be seen in regions belonging to the other great traditions of civilization. Chinese civilization, for example, is the form that the lifestyle of civilization took when framed by the developing Cumulative cultural tradition of China. One does not insist necessarily that when civilization emerged in East Asia it represent- ed a Sumerization of Chinese neolithic society. The relationship between the West and modernity can be seen in this way. Initially, because the full array of the modem lifestyle developed in the West, it was the western format for modernity that began to expand into the rest of the world. In the first stages of this expansion, and in some ways continuing still to the present time, the adoption of modem tech- Voll: The Mistaken Identity of ‘The West” with Modernity 7 niques meant adopting westem ways of doing things. Self-conscious p m grams of modernization were explicitly programs of utilizing western approaches to modernization and modernity. However, by the end of the twentieth century, modernity had become globalized and the old core areas of western industrial society were no longer the source of all basic initiative. Modernity became a global phenomenon rather than one simply identified with one of the older cumulative traditions. It is important to recognize this distinction between lifestyle and basic cultural repertoire when viewing the dynamics of global relations in the late twentieth century. The West and Islam both represent distinctive repertoires that have interacted in different eras of history. In medieval times, Islam and the West may be seen as two civilizations interacting, but in the modem era it may be essential to reconceputalize the basic frame- work for an analysis of relations between Islam and the West. Just as it is important to define what is meant by modernity and the West, and to dis- tinguish between them, it is also important to define what is meant, in terms of historical analysis, by “Islam.” Islam in World Historical Perspective Islam, in the perspective of world historical analysis but not necessar- ily in terms of theological conviction, is also a cumulative repertoire of concepts, terms, and worldviews that provides the means for defining and articulating lifestyles. People from a wide range of perspectives a f f i that Islam “is not a religion; it is a total way of life.”13 However, this affma- tion does not mean that all details of life are permanently and unchang- ingly set by the revelation. Islam as a way of life, instead, is an affiiation that Islam has guidance for actions in all areas of human life. Islam as a way of life does not mean that Muslims are committed to use only the technologies available to inhabitants of Makkah and Madinah in the time of the Prophet Muhammad. For example Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, when he was president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, inaugurated the pro- duction of Iranian-made personal computers and saw this as an achieve- ment of the Islamic Revolution.“ Hasan al Turabi, leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front (NIF), has written a great deal on the obligation of Muslims in every age to apply the principles of Islam, as present in the Qur’an and Sunnah, to the specific conditions of their own age. This gives great significance to the principles of continuing renewal (tujdid) and crit- ical judgment and interpretation (ijtihad) in the life of Muslims.15 Islam’s repertoire of concepts and principles is more clearly focused than that of the West. The basic core, on which there is real consensus, is the acceptance of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet. This provides an underlying continuity for the cumulative cultural tradition identified by analysts of world history as “Islam.” In this framework, it is possible to see the Islamic repertoire as the fundamental shaping force for a major civi- lization, but this does not mean that Islamic civilization and Islam are the 8 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 13: 1 same thing. Islam provided the basis for a major world community of dis- course and thereby created what might be called a discourse-based world system.I6 This goes beyond the limits of medieval civilization to the mul- ticivilizational world of Islam of the modem world. As a rival repertoire of sociocultural organizational principles and concepts, Islam posed a challenge to the West. This has been recognized most frequently in the context of the medieval era and the rivalry between Islam and the West as civilizations. However, viewed in this world histor- ical perspective, it is possible to speculate on the nature of an Islamically initiated modernity. In his important edition of the writings of Marshall Hodgson, Edmund Burke I11 notes that Hodgson makes some important suggestions on this subject: If modernity had first emerged in Islamdom, Hodgson suggests, the egalitarian and cosmopolitan tendencies of modem society would have been heightened. But instead of occurring within the chrysalis of the nation-state (a form tied to the Western experience), the modem world would be characterized by an egalitarian universal state under the aegis of a super-ulama and a super-shariah.” What Hodgson, Burke, and others suggest is that there were other pos- sible alternative modes of modernity that were preempted by the success of the West. This perspective places the subject of “Islam and the West” in a sig- nificantly different context from the normal discussions of this topic. The interaction of the West with Islam does not represent simply the interac- tion of clashing civilizations or two civilizations that borrow from each other during different periods of world history. Instead, this analysis sug- gests that “Islam” and “The West” are two different and competing but historically and conceptually related repertoires of concepts, images, and worldviews, or possibly discourse-based world systems. In the modem era, it is important to recognize that “modem” is not simply a synonym for “westem,” but that it is a broader concept reflecting the transformation of the civilizational lifestyle, and that postcivilization options can be defined in different ways. However, the phase of “postcivilization,” which is now called “modernity,” is itself being transcended, creating a new postmoder- nity context for Islam and the West. Conclusion: Islam, the West, and Postmodernity The basic situation of postmodernity goes beyond the old issues of def- inition, because the transformation currently being experienced by humans as individuals and groups is taking place on a global scale. In the past there has been some significant correlation between geographic place and the great cumulative repertoires or discourse-based world systems. However, this was already breaking down with the end of the civilizational balance in Voll: The Mistaken Identity of “The West” with Modernity 9 the early modem era. By the end of the twentieth century, there is a sigmf- icant interpenetration of long-established discourse traditions. In the case of the relations between Islam and the West, this is most visible with the development of important communities of Muslims in western societies and the popularity of western modes of modernity in Muslim societies. Such interpenetration reflects the sigtllficant globalization of life that is characteristic of what some choose to call the “postmodern” world. In the modem world, as it developed with the breakdown of the four- fold balance of Old World civilizations, the emerging industrial society of modernity took different forms. Initially, before the Industrial Revolution, the “gunpowder empires” saw a successful Muslim mode with the power of the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century. However, western formats of modernity, especially as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, emerged as the most powerful. A variety of forms of Industrial Society developed, most within the framework of western Europe. However, the Japanese variant showed that the western European repertoire was not the only possible one for a modem industrial society. One can see the past two centuries as an era of competing models of modernity, with different cumu- lative cultural traditions (some relatively recent and others quite ancient) providing the mode of articulation for the developing styles of modem industrial society. During the second half of the twentieth century, this configuration of major societies and traditions experienced a significant transformation. Analysts began to speak of “postindustrial” society and the dawning of a “technotronic era.”” A major feature of this emerging situation is that time and space have become so compressed that global politics manifest a tendency toward larger, more interwoven forms of cooperation as well as toward the dissolution of established insti- tutional and ideological loyalties. Humanity is becoming more integral and intimate even as the differences in the condition of the separate societies are widening.” This observation was made almost two decades before the realties of the Internet and FAX and the dissolution of boundaries. And, the conflict- ual integration processes have only intensified over the succeeding years. The postindustrial/postmodernity context is one of globalization of virtually all aspects of human life. Under these conditions, there is a major reduction in the possibility of maintaining separate and “pure” cultural repertoires as a basis for traditions of discourse or separate discourse- based world systems. Increasingly, the western repertoire is being fiiled with new images and concepts or ones from other global repertoires, and similar processes can be seen in the other great repertoires, like that of the Islamic tradition. In the fundamentally globalized context of societies in the final years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a new, broadly cosmopolitan cumulative cultural repertoire. This does not mean that there 10 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 13:l is agreement or emerging consensus; it simply means that the terms of conflict are more global and cosmopolitan than they were in the age of modernity or the era of civilization. This attitude opens new possibilities for cooperation as well as con- flict in the relations between Islam and the West. However, the common mistake of assuming that the West is the same as the modern becomes especially problematic in the postmodemity era. “Modern” is a phase of world history and, if modem and western are identical, then the repertoire and tradition of the West essentially become irrelevant to the issues of the postmodemity era. However, even though the sharp boundaries of all of the old repertoires are disappearing in the emerging cosmopolitan cumu- lative tradition, older traditions remain vital to emerging new visions. In the face of new global conditions, religious leaders in many tradi- tions recognize the importance of coordination and cooperation in respond- ing to the stark challenges to human existence. At the beginning of 1995, for example, Ayatollah Mehdi Rouhani, leader of an important European Muslim community, suggested holding a “world congress uniting mono- theists to work out a charter for peace, reconciliation, and mutual under- standing.”” Hasan al Turabi called for the establishment of a “united front” for “People of the Book” to counter growing corruption and lawlessness in the world?’ Pope John Paul 11 spoke of the need for Roman Catholics, when dealing with the great traditions of Asia, to “trace a common path against the backdrop of the needs of the contemporary world.”22 Such calls for working together reflect the magnitude of the challenges and opportunities of the new global context. However, when such calls come from major leaders in the traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, they also indicate an often forgotten commonality of symbols and concepts in their cumulative traditions. All of these faith-traditions are part of the broader cumulative tradition of prophetic monotheism that arose in the Middle East, and all share the same basic vision and perspective. In medieval times, when one could identify distinctive Islamic and western Christian modes of civilization, there were profound interactions and shared elements of discourse and faith. The connections and commonalities among some of the greatest thinkers of that time show a “medieval climate far more open to interfaith and intercultural exchange than our stereotypes have presumed it to be.’”’ A call for a common effort has real precedents in the history of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. There are intellectual and historical foundations for a recognition of the “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” heritage as a force in the emerging world of postmodernity. One of the important conceptual obstacles to effective cooperation and recognition of this shared heritage is the mistaken identification of the West with modernity. This is part of the continuing tradition of an inter- pretation of world history that relies upon a civilizational narrative of world history. In this vision, Islam is conceived of as a civilization that has long been in conflict with another civilization: the West. The narrative insists that the West represents modernity and that Islam, if it is to survive, ‘Voll: The Mistaken Identity of “The West” with Modernity 11 must modernize. But in this narrative, that means to become identical with the West. Such an insistence makes effective cooperation impossible, for it demands the end of the cumulative tradition of Islam. It is possible that key aspects of this narrative are wrong: Islam is some- thing other than a civilization and the West is not identical with modernity. Insistence that only the West represents modernity makes any format for large-scale human society, other than that imposed by the West, impossi- ble. If the civilizational narrative is correct, then the future is one of endless clashes among great civilizations. However, such a civilizational approach “cherishes the idea of culture as an autonomous and indigenous process of unfolding norms and values, grounded in the unity of language, society and territory,’’ and it is unable to explain the highly interactive, syncretistic, and conflictual situation of the emerging world of po~tmodernity.2~ If one can go beyond the mistaken identity of the West with moder- nity, it is possible to see the West and Islam as interacting repertoires of concepts and modes of action that are sometimes in conflict and some- times complementary. Neither are tied to the specific conditions of the civilizational lifestyle, nor are they dependent for their continuing valid- ity upon the conditions of “the modern.” Both are, in fact, showing remarkable strength in the emerging world of postmodernity, but as the calls issued by major religious thinkers suggest, neither exists in separate and clearly distinguishable units. The interactive global cosmopolitanism of the twenty-first century creates distinctive challenges. A specialist on the impact of new commu- nications media on human life notes that we need to consider the possibility that there is something emerg- ing that could be called a ‘global culture,’ and that there are now ‘global experiences’ that supersede national and local experiences . . . . In effect, we have a physical restructuring of our world.25 In the electronic “village” of the contemporary world, global commu- nications create relationships in which distance and geographic location are less important than participation in the media, with events, transmis- sions, and responses all becoming an interactive whole in which “action and reaction collapse into a co-constructed reality once possible only in face-to-face communication.”*6 Islam and the West are no longer simply two rival and clashing civi- lizations or even two differing modes of modernity. They are now interac- tive partners, sometimes fighting and sometimes cooperating, involved in the co-constructed reality of the contemporary world. The misidentification of the West with modernity adds dimensions of that co-constructed reality to the conflict. However, Islam and the West have a special contribution, especially if they join together with Judaism, that can bring the inspiration of the Abrahamic traditions to the task of positively co-constructing the emerging global cosmopolitan reality. 12 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 13:l Endnotes 1. Michael Mann, A History of Powerfiom the Beginning to A.D. 1760, vol. 1 of The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 73-74. Mann utilizes the analysis of Colin Renfrew in this presentation. 2. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave (Atlanta: Turner, 1994). 19. 3. John Obert Voll, “The End of Civilization is Not so Bad: 1993 MESA Presidential Address,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 28, no. 1 (July 1994): 1-8. 4. Robert Erwin, “Civilization as a Phase of World History,” American Historical Review 81, no. 4 (July 1966): 1181-98. 5. William H. McNeill, A History of the Human Community, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 163. 6. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 485. 7. A useful discussion of this transformation in the context of the development of military technology is William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). especially chapters 3 and 4. 8. Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 94-95. 9. Toffler and Toffler, Creating, 19.22. 10. Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, 6th ed. (Baltimore: 1 1 . Peter N. Steams, The Industrial Revolution in World History (Boulder, C O 12. Voll, “End of Civilization,” 5. 13. Examples can be cited ranging from a widely used American textbook, Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr., A Concise History of the Middle East, 3d ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 50, to the work of Egyptian radical Islamist Sayed Qutb, Milestones (Cedar Rapids, IA: Unity Publishing, n.dJ.77. 14. “Khamene’i on Production of First Computer,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service, FBIS-NES-88-084 (2 May 1988). 15. See, for example, his analysis in Hasan al Turabi, Tajdfd a1 Fikr a1 Islcjmi (Jeddah: Di4r al Sa‘tidiyah, 1407/1998). 16. My analysis for reaching this conclusion can be found in John Obert Voll, “Islam as a Special World-System,”Journal of World History 5 , no. 2 (1994): 213-26. 17. Edmund Burke 111, “Introduction: Marshall G. S. Hodgson and World History,” in Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History. ed. Edmund Burke, I11 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xix. 18. John P. Rasmussen, ed., The New American Revolution: The Dawning of the Technotronic Era (New York John Wiley, 1972) and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970). Penguin, 1974). 33. Westview Press, 1993), 1 . 19. Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 3. 20. Reuters report printed in the Boston Sunahy Globe, 1 January 1995. 21. S&n Focus 1 , no. 9 ( 1 5 November 1994): 3. 22. John Paul 11, “Why So Many Religions,” New York Times, 17 October 1994. This 23. David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas 24. Michael Geyer, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of General Education,” Critical 25. Joshua Meyrowitz, “Myths and Realities of the Global Village” (The Lindberg 26. Ibid. was an excerpt from the book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. (Norte Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), ix. Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 529. Lecture, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, 1993), 9.