Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror Read Online Free PDF Page B

Asia—prepartition India and Southeast Asia—Europe is called a continent, whereas India is but a subcontinent, and Southeast Asia is not even accorded that status; at the same time, the area most drastically reduced in the Mercator projection is Africa.
    The civilizational history of “the West” came to a triumphant climax in the nineteenth century, along with European imperialism. Written from the vantage point of a modern power that had exploded into global dominance in the centuries following the Renaissance, civilizational history gave “the West” an identity that marched through time unscathed. From this point of view, “the West” occupied the center of the global stage, and “the Orient” was its periphery. Not surprisingly, initial criticism of Eurocentric history came from scholars whose main focus was the “non-West.”
    In the traditional story, as recounted by the University of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson, “history began in the ‘East,’ “and “the torch was then passed successively to Greece and Rome and finally to Christians of northwestern Europe, where medieval and modern life developed.”
    Hodgson should have added that the division of the world into “the West” and “the East,” “Europe and Asia” left out a third part—in the words of the Yale historian Christopher Miller, “a blank darkness”—that was said to lack history or civilization because it lacked either great texts or great monuments. This blank darkness comprised Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, and the lands of the Pacific, excepting, of course, Egypt and Ethiopia—which for this purpose were classified as belonging to Asia. In other words, the notion of “the West” went alongside two peripheries: whereas “the Orient” was visible, Africa and the others were simply blanked out into a historical darkness.
    Marshall Hodgson made it a lifelong project to counter the West-centered studies of Islam. He began his classic three-volume study, The Venture of Islam , by showing how, throughout history, the notion of “the West” had changed at least three times. “The West” referred “originally and properly to the western or Latin-using half of the Roman empire; that is, to the west Mediterranean lands.” After the first change, the term came to refer to “the west European lands generally.” But this was not a simple extension, for it excluded “those west Mediterranean lands which turned Muslim.” The second shift was from West European lands to peoples, thus incorporating their overseas settlements. Then, there was the third shift as the definition of “the West” was further stretched to include “all European Christendom.” Whereas the second shift referred to a global western Europe, the third extension referred to a global Europe, western and eastern. Thus did the notion of “the West” develop from a geographical location to a racialized notionreferring to all peoples of European origin, no matter where they lived and for how long.
    Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? Historians have been chipping away at this claim in a number of fields, ranging from the development of science to that of society. Hodgson had earlier remarked that the equation of “the West” with “science” had given rise to an absurdity whereby it was presumed that Arabic-writing scientists in the classical age of Islam were simply marking time. Rather than making any original contribution to science, they were presumed simply to be holding up the torch for centuries—until it could be passed on to “the West.” The notion that the main role of Arabic-writing scientists was to preserve classical Greek science and pass it on to Renaissance Europe was fortified by Thomas Kuhn’s claim that Renaissance science represented a paradigmatic break with medieval science and a reconnection with the science of antiquity. Whereas Kuhn associated the paradigmatic break with the work of