ABSTRACT
Arguably, Europe outstripped the Muslim civilization in the modern age because it maintained a spirit for change and because it was a sui generis frontier society – it explored new lands, and new territories of science, social thought and political organization – at a time when the Muslim world had exhausted the dynamism of its frontier culture, and when its political and social organization was stagnating. The political and social model associated with Europe’s supremacy is the nation state. This chapter looks at the impact of the rise of the nation state on the historical zone of contact between Christianity and Islam. This book adopts a simple periodization of history by distinguishing between modernity (related to the nation state) and postmodernity (related to the interspersing of communities in the age of globalization and interdependence). The chapter deals with the expansion of the model of the nation state in the region and its link to the civilizational frontier, and Chapter 4 deals with the postmodern, functional frontier in the zone of contact. The key argument of these two chapters is that the different speed of development of nation states and of postmodern mixed societies is a major source of friction in the zone of Christian-Muslim contact.
