Arab and Islamic civilization has long been poorly understood in the West. This has been especially true in recent years, when long-standing stereotypes of the Arab-Islamic world as inherently backward, violent, sensual, intolerant, and anti-Western have been exacerbated by the rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism. Terrorist bombings by Muslim extremists, plus the Iranian Revolution and the kidnapping of foreigners in Lebanon, have strengthened the myth created by some Western Orientalists of the Middle East and North Africa as dark, dangerous, alien worlds forever at war with Western civilization. Reality, as the articles that follow illustrate, is quite otherwise.
Islam and Christianity in fact have common roots in Abrahamic monotheism and share a congeries of ethical and spiritual values which issue from their similar Judaic origin. Both first flourished around the Mediterranean and have been linked by intellectual, commercial, and technological bonds and borrowings for almost 1,500 years. Peaceful intercourse, rather than military confrontation, has been the most salient aspect of their historical relationship. Our contributors highlight the fact that Christianity and Islam have spawned sister civilizations that can best be understood as squabbling siblings, not strangers and mortal enemies.
John Voll explains that neither the West nor the Arab-Islamic world would be what it is today without the creative interaction and cultural exchange that have been the hallmarks of their encounters in history. He notes that not only were both societies shaped by Abrahamic monotheism, but both also were heirs to Greek philosophy. This mixture of monotheism and Western classicism led to the marvel of medieval Islamic Spain, whereas Muslims, Christians, and Jews together created a remarkable civilization.
That civilization not only preserved Western classical learning, Voll argues, but through the creative work of such seminal Islamic thinkers as Ibn Rushd (Averroes) contributed to a philosophic awakening in Western Europe. Ibn Rushd, for example, was one of the greatest interpreters of Aristotle, and his influence on Saint Thomas Aquinas was enormous. Voll does well to recall that for the first thousand years of interaction between the Muslim world and Europe the flow of ideas was from East to West, that Islamic society maintained a "more complex level of technology and a more broadly based urban culture.
Antony Sullivan locates the roots of modern Arab nationalism in the Levantine cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century, and emphasizes the important contributions of Western missionaries and educators to that flowering. He traces the origins of many of the contemporary disputes between the Arab world and the West to conflicting promises made by England to the Arabs, Jews, and French during World War I. Despite these political controversies and their legacy, twentieth-century Arab nationalists, Sullivan explains, have not hesitated to draw heavily on European thought to articulate their political beliefs. In recent years events have demonstrated the failure of Arab nationalism problems. Today, Arab nationalism is largely the property of Arab refugee intellectuals in the West, Sullivan argues, with little chance for reexportation to the Arab world.
The void left by the failure of Arab nationalism, John Esposito points out, has been filled by Islamic fundamentalism. Revivalism, rather than
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