ABSTRACT
For most of the twentieth century the word ‘religion’ was confined to the footnotes of books dealing with the Third World. Change in Africa, Asia and Latin America-‘modernisation’—was seen as intimately connected with secularisation, with the retreat of ideas about the sacred, supernatural or otherworldly. When the term ‘Third World’ came into widespread use in the 1960s these assumptions meant that religion had long been viewed as merely a remnant of traditional cultures which were presumed to be undergoing linear change towards a Western model. In a comment about the Middle East which might have been made to stand for religions of the non-Western world as a whole, Daniel Lerner observed that in the face of modernisation, ‘lslam is absolutely defenceless’1 (Lerner 1964:45). Within a decade, this assessment was thrown into question; twenty years later, with Islamic currents among the most dynamic on a world scene in which religious movements were expanding rapidly, the assertion seemed absurd.
