HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS - The Revenge of Geography - page 37

than Morgenthau could have imagined. Meanwhile, even the remotest parts of the world
become further urbanized, and while Spengler could see the decline of culture in the deser-
tion of the soil and agricultural life, sprawling and teeming urban conglomerations are, as
McNeill intuited, now leading to the metamorphosis of religion and identity in vigorous
and, albeit, troubling ways: 28 Islam, for example, becomes less of a traditional, soil-based
religion and more of an austere, in some cases ideological, faith, in order to regulate be-
havior in vast, impersonal slum settings where extended family and kinsmen are less in
evidence. This leads to a Middle East of megacities and other urban concentrations in the
former countryside that, while poor, are generally low in crime, even as the offshoot is oc-
casionally a destabilizing global terrorism. Christianity, too, becomes, as a consequence of
the stresses of suburban living in the American South and West, more ideological, even
as a loose form of environmental paganism takes root in the cities of Europe, replacing
traditional nationalism, given that the super-state of the European Union has only abstract
meaning to all but the elite. Meanwhile, war is no longer, as in eighteenth-century Europe,
the “sport of kings,” but an instrument of nationalist and religious fanaticism, whether on a
large scale as in the case of Nazi Germany, or on a smaller scale as with al Qaeda. 29 Add to
that the awful specter of nuclear weapons in the hands of radicalized elites at both the state
and substate level. And in the midst of all these awkward, turbulent shifts, classical geo-
graphy again rears its head, shaping tensions among the West, Russia, Iran, India, China,
Korea, Japan, and so on, all of which we will need to explore in detail. McNeill's thesis of
interactions across civilizations has never been truer than today. But it would be a mistake
to equate an emerging world culture with political stability: because space —precisely be-
cause it is more crowded and therefore more precious than ever before—still matters, and
matters greatly.
Whereas McNeill's scholarly eye scanned the entire earth, Marshall Hodgson's scope, for
our purposes, was narrower, encompassing the Greater Middle East. Still, Hodgson, a pas-
sionate Quaker who died at forty-six, demonstrates a prodigious ambition in his three-
volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization , published
in full in 1974, six years after his death. For this largely forgotten University of Chica-
go historian, so much less well known among contemporary journalists than other distin-
guished scholars of the Middle East, say, Bernard Lewis of Princeton or John Esposito of
Georgetown, has in this monumental work put Islam geographically and culturally, accord-
ing to McNeill, in the context of the larger currents of world history. Hodgson's style can
veer toward the academic and the opaque, but if the reader perseveres, he or she will be
rewarded with an explanation as to how Islam was able to emerge, take root, and spread in