ABSTRACT
No contrast between major political entities in the world is as great as that between China and Islam. Though their populations are roughly similar—1.3 billion as opposed to 1.5—in every other way they are fundamentally different. China is a unified and coherent nation ruled by a godless secular regime of subtotalitarian Communism. Modernization in the Islamic world has been going on in one way or another for two centuries, but it must be admitted that it has largely failed. Modernization has been going on for a long time but has not taken hold in these societies. All three of its forms have been successively tried: Europeanization, Sovietization and Americanization. Despite the violence sweeping it at present, Islam as a religion is still largely intact and of late becoming much more assertive in the Islamic world. Given all this prevailing violence, predicting what the future may have hold for the Islamic world is a foolhardy venture. Regimes rise and fall continually.
