Islam, Modernism and the West Cultural and Political Relations at the End of the Millennium Edited by Gema Martin Munoz, London: J.B. Tauris, 1999, 264 pp.

Abstract

The relations between Muslim peoples and the West, and between Muslim
peoples and forms of modernity, have become increasingly pressing issues of
scholarly and political concern over the past twenty-five years. In part, this is
due to the growing power of Islamism in the lives and politics of many Muslim
societies and, in part, to the fact that some fonns of Islamism can appear to be
profoundly hostile to all that the West represents. The growing presence of
Muslim peoples in Western societies and the many assumptions which that
presence calls into question has also caused scholars and politicians to focus on
these relations. Add to this the fact that some leading members of the Western
policy establishment, most notably the US political scientist S. P. Huntington, have come to talk in the post-cold war era of a “clash of civilizations” in which
the clash between Islam and the West is the most profound and the most dangerous
for world p e .
This book, which contains sixteen essays by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars,
mainly from institutions in Europe and the Arab world, sets out to address
key issues in the relations between Muslims, modernity, and the West. It is the
outcome of a symposium held in Toledo, Spain, in April 1996, which was
prompted by the Eleni Nakou Foundation for the promotion of cultural contact
and understanding among European peoples, and held under the auspices of the
Jose Ortega y Gasset Foundation. &ma Martin Muiioz, professor of Sociology
of the Arab and Islamic World at the Autonoma University of Madrid was the
intellectual “playmaker” of the occasion. Due to its Islamic past and the fundamental
role it played in transmitting Islamic learning and culture for the
development of Christian Europe, Spain was a goad choice of location for the
aonference ...