Many Muslim thinkers and the community leaders who were interested in trying to reform their societies and meet the challenge from the European presence, colonial domination and exploitation had an inferiority complex. Many of the early informers or late 19th into early 20th Century in Arab world and in India and sub continent and other parts of the Muslim domain, they saw that the way to advance was to adopt to the rational world view and the scientific and technological advances that Europe had clearly demonstrated were superior and effective. And that there were certain aspects of their own tradition, particularly a kind of obscure [antistic] mystical obsession over emphasis on certain spiritual and faith based disciplines that were holding them back. So there was an implicit acceptance that their view of us has something true. We have to for example get rid of these Sufi orders; that was a very popular perception 150 years ago. The Sufi orders which were so widespread in part of Muslim societies were seen by many dynamic young westernized Muslim intellectuals as obstacles. We see that with Kemal Ataturk for example in Turkey and in other parts of the Islamic world and there was an assumption that we had, Muslims had to catch up somehow. Muslims are caught in this dilemma. They have to catch up to try to achieve what has been achieved by Euro-America, let’s use that term rather than the west, and therefore they have to turn their back on aspects of their own historical, social and religious experience which they see as factors that hold them back.

We see therefore that we find Muslim countries who would like to get nuclear technology or at least industrial technology or become a base for information technology on a par with that which is dominated and monopolized to a large extent by Euro-American societies. And so the issue became one of: why didn’t Islam develop its own form of modernity? It’s well known that there was an intellectual and rational trend in Islamic thought and history which had sources in the same intellectual and rational experiences that European modernity derived much of its world view from, the great [Go Hellenic] rational tradition of philosophy and science. We know that for close to a millennium the [Hellenic] rational disciplines were preserved and cultivated and advanced among Muslims whereas in Dark Age Europe, they were more or less forgotten or had vanished. They recovered for the Europeans by a massive translation wave from Arabic into Latin and Hebrew in the 13th and 14th Century primarily through Andalucía. And that body of literature had been transposed from earlier [Hellenic] sources in the 8th and 9th centuries from eastern Mediterranean lands into the central Islamic domains. So there was this double translation flow of thought which preserved Greek work, [western] science and technology if you will. The technology of medicine, the technology of engineering which allowed bridges and arches and domes to built these type of medieval technologies; water systems for irrigation. There’s a whole host of related traditional technologies which today we don’t necessarily include in our view of technology but which are very important historically.

And then of course there is a Euro-American perception of why Europe achieved its dominance. Why it achieved a kind of, not just technological mastery over the forces of nature but a sort of intellectual and even a sort of spiritual superiority over the traditional societies of Asia and other parts of the world. And this has been debated a lot. There was some kind of assumption somehow that perhaps certain economic patterns of early capitalism, certain philosophical assumptions about the importance of the individual, the autonomy of the reason apart from organized religion etcetera guaranteed or promoted a sort of European dominance which was spread through the colonial enterprise. Recently a number of different thinkers have questioned these assumptions which are understood or seen now as very Euro-centric. They put European and Euro-American enterprise in the center of history. Everything else is either far east or mid east, east of where? East of Paris, London, Berlin? This type of assumption that history really began in 18th century Europe, modern history, and the rest of the world is a reaction, a series of reactions to the developments that European progress and advance promoted. In fact people who were interested in what they call world systems analysis and what also was understood today as a form of critique of the role of capitalism as a globalizing force for homogenous culture, peripheral capitalism. The so to speak anti or alter globalization view of the current reality of our globe have suggested that that’s a bit of an overdrawn and exaggerated image.

Up until the 18th century at least technologically and scientifically there was hardly any difference between Western Europe and countries like China and India and the Middle East and especially when you look at trade patterns. And furthermore in terms of the rise of capitalism as a social and political system in the 19th century particular, very closely associated with European imperial outreach and expansion and the search for markets. But it is now more clearly understood that it was the new world source of bullion, particularly silver, that encouraged and made possible the dominance of Europe in a global sense and the so to speak golden age of imperialistic reach just