Abdulrahman bin Mohammad bin Khaldun Al-Hadrami, (1332-1406), generally known as Ibn Khaldun, was an Islamic theologian, scholar, and jurist internationally known as the father of sociology. His book, the world-renown Muqaddimah (The Introduction), is considered the breeding ground for numerous disciplines of study, including the social sciences, the philosophy of history, historiography, social history, demography, and economics. Mohammad Jaber Al-Ansari, a Bahraini professor of Islamic and Cultural Studies at the Arabian Gulf University in the Kingdom of Bahrain and, since 2000, the Advisor for Cultural and Scientific Affairs to the King of Bahrain, is a leading and highly respected Arab intellectual and the author of twenty-one books, well-known and widely-read throughout the expanse of the Arab world. His intellectual treatises have been honored by numerous Arab governments and intellectual organizations, and he has received a number of prestigious awards for his social, political, and cultural contributions to modern Arabic intellectualism. This book is the encounter between these two Arab minds, six centuries apart, trying to connect the past to the present, as Al-Ansari attempts to sow the seeds of Khaldunism, with its dimensions of modernity, in the public consciousness in order to establish a culture of reason and rationality in the modern Arab world. Only then, as Al-Ansari states, can the Arabs move forward, by understanding and analyzing the flaws of the past to make way for a better future. "If there were anyone to be considered the best representative of Ibn Khaldun's way of thinking in the 20th century, Mohammad Jaber Al-Ansari would definitely be one of them." Khalid Al Harub - Khulood Amro Cambridge Book Review "Electric shocks for the Arab mind...Al-Ansari threw out a burning ball of ideas...will Arab intellectuals consider it or will they be afraid of burning their hands?" Saudi Minister and poet Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History explores cultural contact as an agent of change. It takes an encounters approach to world history since 1500, rather than a political one, to reveal different perspectives and experiences as well as key patterns and transformations. It studies the spaces between cultures historically to help us transcend human differences today in a rapidly globalizing world. The text focuses on first encounters that suggest long-term developments and particularly significant encounters that have changed the direction of world history. Because of the complexities of these encounters, the author takes a user-friendly approach to keep the text accessible to students with varying backgrounds in history.

Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in the crucial moment of modernity as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. This exploration of the concept of historical time considers the perceived relationships between the present (once the future) & the past (once the present).

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

This is a clear and original examination of the impact of modernity on Greece and Turkey, and the influence of the West on these former states of the Ottoman Empire during the crucial hundred years between 1850 and 1950. "Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey" explores the reactions and coping mechanisms displayed in both societies in reaction to Europe's all-pervasive influence. Elites in both societies engaged in defensive modernization, culminating in parallel attempts to mould their nations in line with the western blueprint. The authors examine reforms in the legal regime, the changing nature of family and gender relations, and re-engineered conceptions of space and the built environment. They describe and analyse different aspects of the changes in the two societies over this period, as they defined their practices and identities against Europe, and often against each other.

One of the hallmarks of world history is the ever-increasing ability of humans to cross cultural boundaries. Taking an encounters approach that opens up history to different perspectives and experiences, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History examines cultural contact between people from across the globe between 1453 and the present. The book examines the historical record of these contacts, distilling from those processes patterns of interaction, different peoples’ perspectives, and the ways these encounters tended to subvert the commonly accepted assumptions about differences between peoples in terms of race, ethnicity, nationhood, or empire. This new edition has been updated to employ current scholarship and address recent developments, as well as increasing the treatment of indigenous agency, including the major role played by Polynesians in the spread of Christianity in Oceania. The final chapter has been updated to reflect the refugee crisis and the evolving political situation in Europe concerning its immigrant population. Supported by engaging discussion questions and enlivened with the voices and views of those who were and remain directly engaged in the process of cross-cultural exchange, this highly accessible volume remains a valuable resource for all students of world history.