Historical Reflections on Islam and the Occident

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.