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Historical Reflections on Islam and the Occident

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2012

R.C. Van Caenegem
R.C. Van Caenegem
Affiliation:
Universiteitstraat 4, B 9000 Gent, Belgium. Email: karin.pensaert@ugent.be
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Abstract

The media and political scientists create the impression that the world of Islam and the Occident are two totally different civilizations. The author shows, on the contrary, that life in the 14 centuries of the Christian Middle Ages and the Ancien Régime – Old Europe – was in many ways similar to that of the area's Muslim neighbours, and only moved into the modern world with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The author also examines the chances of an Arab spring heralding, after 14 centuries of Old Islam, the entry into the modern democratic world. He argues that the two civilizations are not fundamentally dissimilar, but that they move through comparable stages of development at different moments in time: a difference in chronology rather than in essence.

Type
Focus: Knowledge Management in Contemporary Europe
Information
European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , 30 March 2012 , pp. 203 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2012

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References

Reference and Notes

1.Huntington, S.P. et al. (1996) S.P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York: Foreign Affairs), p. 9.Google Scholar
2. The terms ‘ascending and descending theme of government and law’ were introduced by the late Professor Ullmann. In the ascending conception, original power was located in the people. By contrast, the descending theory held that original power descended from God, who distributed the laws to mankind through the medium of kings. See Ullmann, W. (1965) A History of Political Thought: the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar
3.Huntington, S. P. et al. (1996) S.P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York:), p. 37.Google Scholar
4. For full references of their works see the Recommended Bibliography at the end of this article.Google Scholar
5. I borrow the name das ältere europäische Zeitalter (used for the period from the twelfth to the eighteenth century) from the Zeitschrift für historische Forschung: Halbjahrschrift zur Erforschung des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit.Google Scholar
6. I refer to the imperial rescript of Theodosius the Great of AD 380.Google Scholar
7.Pollock, F. and Maitland, F.W. (1968) The History of English Law, II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 548.Google Scholar
8.Baker, J.A. (2002) An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths), p. 245.Google Scholar
9.Sen, A. (1999) Democracy as a universal value. Journal of Democracy, 10, pp. 3–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10. Jeremy Waldron reviewing Lewis, A. (2008) Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, in The New York Review of Books, 20 May 2008, p. 40.Google Scholar
11. See for more facts and arguments Ladue, W.J. (1972) A written constitution for the Church? The Jurist, 32, pp. 1–13; and (1972) Legge e Vangelo. Discussione su una legge fundamentale per la chiesa (Brescia: Paideia).Google Scholar
12.Stickler, A.M. (1983) Die kirchliche Regierungsgewalt in der klassischen Kanonistik. Einheit der Träger und Unterscheidung der Funktionen. Savigny Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, K.A., 69, pp. 267–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13.The term ‘crisis’ was used in Paul Hazard's (1935) famous book La crise de la conscience européenne (3 vols). The same author also wrote La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle, de Montesquieu à Lessing (3 vols, 1946).Google Scholar

Recommended Bibliography

Fisk, R. (2005) The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Knopf).Google Scholar
Huntington, S.P. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster).Google Scholar
Huntington, S.P. et al. (1996) Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York: Foreign Affairs).Google Scholar
Lewis, B. (1940) The Origins of Islamism: A Study of the Historical Background of the Fatimid Caliphate (New York: W. Heffer & Sons).Google Scholar
Lewis, B. (2002) The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Lewis, B. (2011) Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press) (collection of recycled articles and lectures).Google Scholar
Rogan, E. (2008) The Arabs. A History (New York: Basic Books).Google Scholar
Van Caenegem, R.C. (1995) An Historical Introduction to Western Constitutional Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar