Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Islamic Civilization And (Western) Modernity, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

Much historiography of the last three decades has undermined the sway of Eurocentrism. Though unabashedly Eurocentric histories still become bestsellers,¹ revisionists have shown that the ideas and developments that spawned modernity hardly sprang sui generis from European soil. In their historic re-awakening starting at the end of the Middle Ages that ushered in the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, Europeans borrowed and augmented a vast array of ideas, institutions, and practices particularly from Islamic, but also Indian and Chinese, civilization.²

This article contends that such revisionism, itself now putative, does not probe searchingly enough the inter-civilizational encounter …