ABSTRACT
Introduction The second half of the twentieth century saw the independence of most Muslim countries and a new spirit of confidence regarding the possibility not so much of modernizing Islam but of Islamizing modernity. The usually unstated axiom behind the project was that modernity or its analogue, could have erupted somewhere other than Europe. Hence Marshall Hodgson’s thought experiment: what would the ‘Great Modern Transformation’ have been like had it arisen in an Islamic setting?1
