Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History

Marshall Hodgson was a scholar of rigorous and detailed precision. He gave no easy answers. In fact, he argued that in the science of history, above all other sciences, there can be no easy answers. What was necessary of historians was a total and unrelenting commitment to uncovering every possible detail on top of every possible detail in the study of earlier ages.....and even then, the historian would be truly lacking, but the effort MUST go on.It is for this reason that I must respectfully disagree with an earlier reviewer. Hodgson's writing is not dreamy poetry....this is true. But every one of his sentances is jam packed with information. It only takes effort from the reader ( a reader truly interested in LEARNING) to decipher the incredibly important message Hodgson is trying to convey. Part of this message is that there is only one global history, not an "Eastern" or "Western" history ... not a history that sets one history up to put another history down. Efforts to reinforce these generalizations are manipulative and, under closer scrutiny, factually incorrect. In this book, you will find a truly fascinating philosophy of history as told through modernity and the Islamicate.

Hodgson was the pre-eminent Western historian of Islamic societies, as set forth in "The Venture of Islam." In "Rethinking," Hodgson's widow has seen to the publication of a series of broader essays on the philosophy of history as applied to the world at large. Part 1 tries to get outside Euro-centrism as best as an Occidental can. Part 2 considers Islam in a global context, and Part 3 discusses commonalities and differences that make for meaningful comparison, decompositions, and aggregations in regional and global history.The most interesting chapter is entitled "Modernity and the Islamic Heritage." Here Hodgson inquires whether it is possible for a society to be Modern yet not Western, given that the presuppositions of Modernity reach deep into the Medieval Occident. For example, "with an effort of the imagination, one can guess what the institutions of Modernity might look have been like if it had developed, for instance, in Islamic society... The nation-state, with its constitutionalism, its particularist characters of rights and responsibilities, stems from the corporate conceptions of Medieval Western society. From the very different legal conceptions of Medieval Islamic society, with their abstract egalitarian universalism, there might well have developed, instead of the nation-state, some international corps of super-ulama, regulating an industrial society on the basis of some super-sharia code." This tension between Western-ness and Modernity is palpable in the West, but elsewhere it is a defining issue running through politics, economics, and warfare. It is especially evident in the violent Islamist organizations, where Modernity is used to combat Westernization.The successful resolution of those tensions, in the Islamic world as elsewhere on Earth, will be the only way that civilization of any kind can continue at all.