The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization

[Abujak]

How a common experience drove two civilizations apart: In recent years
media attention for the Muslim world has increased tremendously and
many reputable scholars of Islam have joined the flurry of
publications that is released month after month. With Following
Muhammad -- a thoughtful essay on Islamic spiritual traditions --
Sufism expert Carl Ernst has attempted to counterbalance the torrent
of books on political radicalism. Bernard Lewis, the nestor of Islamic
history writing, took the easy way and jumped the bandwagon of Islam-
bashing by rehashed his 1999 Vienna Lectures Series under the title
What Went Wrong?

Partially in response to Lewis, fellow-historian Richard Bulliet of
Columbia University dusted off some of the manuscripts in his archives
and then elaborated further on these earlier musings. His The Case for
Islamo-Christian Civilization consists of four essays and, although
the first one was drafted more than thirty years ago, they have been
reworked into a remarkably consistent argument.

Refashioning that earliest essay, from which the book has taken its
title, into a rebuttal of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis,
Bulliet explains that there are more similarities than differences
between Christendom and the Muslim Middle East. The conversion
processes during the earliest centuries shared many features; in
particular the slow percolation of the new religions into the lower
social strata. As contacts became more intensive during the middle
periods, it is true that mutual hostility increased but even then
peaceful exchange was more common than violent interaction. Only from
about 1500 did the two civilizations go their separate ways, but - in
an explicit rejection of Huntington - Bulliet observes that this was
more due to accidents of history than an inherent necessity resulting
from irrevocably different outlooks.
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