The Arabic original of this book was published twenty-six years ago. In times such as ours, that is, times of accelerated history and rapid change, half a generation is a long time indeed. The Arab World has in many ways and in the lifetime of one generation changed almost beyond recognition. This book aimed to understand historical change in the religious field, and the central cognitive purpose of this book remains unchanged. It was originally intended as a cognitive and cultural intervention in a constellation of specific political and cultural conjunctures arising from the end of the Cold War, and its purposes have clearly not been exhausted.

The book's purpose revolves around the capacity for recognition of fact and for discrimination: centrally between fact and fiction, however fiction might be generated, by complacency, hope, fantasy, disillusion, passion, resentment or fatigue, and, equally centrally. It strives for recognition of the distinction between cause and effect. It sought discriminating clarity in the histories of modernity and of secularisation, and in the circumstances and trends of relevance to its themes that were gathering at the moment of writing. It will be asked quite naturally if the tendential analyses provided in the book were borne out by subsequent developments or vitiated by them. This preface will problematise this question, and then take up the reasons why the terms in which it has been posed are inadequate to reality, including issues arising from recent critical analyses of the secularism thesis. It will end with considering one distinctive but not untypical case.

1992–2018

Like European societies in the past half century, like India and many other places as well, the Arab World has witnessed developments barely conceivable not long ago. Once marginal ideological, cultural, and political forces are moving to the centre and rapidly setting future agendas for themselves as for others – the reference here is primarily to forces fired by nativism, like the extreme Right in Europe, Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in south and south-east Asia, and Trumpism and the alt-right in the United States.