Introduction: Islamic Worlds in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

In a controversial, albeit popular tome, the eminent historian of early modem imperialisms, Anthony Pagden, pits “East” against “West” in a millennial conflict that he sees in the guise of a puritanical brand of Islam versus the personal freedoms touted by “bourgeois liberal democracy.”2 The genealogy of today’s “East” that he constructs runs from Ramzi Yousef (convicted for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993) and Osama bin Laden (who claimed responsibility for the devastating attack on September 11, 2001) back through Mawlana Abdullah Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb (the early-twentieth-century architects of modern “political Islam”) and Ibn Taymiyah (the thirteenth-century Hanbali jurist lionized by this movement). The genealogy for the “West” is, predictably, Greco-Roman-Renaissance-Enlightenment, all leading to “us.” Pagden, though apparently “Whiggish” in orientation, thereby endorses the “clash of civilizations” propounded by the neoconservative political scientist Samuel Huntington.3