ABSTRACT
Just as the political currents of the 1960s deeply influenced historical thought and writing worldwide, so the changed political constellation of the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet empire between 1989 and 1991 and the end of the Cold War presented historians with new challenges. The universal peace that the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in his essay, “The End of History?”1 in which he predicted a worldwide, even if gradual, acceptance of American-style free enterprise and democratic institutions after the collapse of Soviet communism, did not materialize in the way he had foreseen. In fact, the years since 1989 have been marked on the international level by new forms of belligerent confrontation, not between states as in the Cold War, but with enemies, particularly in the Middle East, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Africa, without clearly definable borders and involving various forms of terrorism. Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), in The Clash of Civilizations,2 had written of an irreconcilable conflict between Islamic and Western – and incidentally also East Asian culture – but operated with very simplistic notions of a timeless Islam as a unified culture, overlooking the divisions in the Islamic world, its history, the effects of modernization, the role of economic factors, and finally the interrelation between Islamic societies and the modern West.
