The fall of communism and its possible consequences have been falsely assessed in the West. Among the main reasons for this was a lack of insight into the connection between event and structure. The overwhelming force with which certain events ruptured political structures lured us into false long-term predictions and premature fantasies, and it now seems that we understood too little about the power of such events to conserve structures.
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Yet the basic problems currently confronting industrial societies concern the long, rather than the middle run, and it seems unlikely that they can be resolved without thoroughgoing adjustments in understanding and mentality. Europeans cannot hope to meet the challenges of the post-Communist epoch by simply extending their usual patterns of action or by stabilizing deeply ingrained habits of thinking. Only recently have we begun to perceive beneath the spectacle of events the inertia of our structures of understanding, the recalcitrance of what Bacon called the "wheels of custome".
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It is high time to change our conceptual framework and to challenge the dominant mentality of cultural colonialism which has shaped the self-perception of Europe and a great deal of European politics since the nineteenth century. Opposition to such a change is deep-rooted. Even in France, historical Islamic studies are being increasingly confined to a philological context, which neutralizes their potential impact. For instance, a specialist of medieval Egypt can teach only Latin courses in the history department, and must represent his own discipline in the department for Arabic languages while the professorship for the history of the Islamic East has been transformed into a chair for researching the medieval West. 10
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4 * See my inaugural speech at the Collége de France, held on February 21, 1992: "La Fin de l'utopie et le retour de la mélancolie. Regards sur les intellectuels d'un vieux continent." Paris: (Collége de France), 1992.
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10 * I take these examples from a presentation written by Mohammed Arkoun, formerly teaching Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne, for the European Union, "Contribution de la civilisation islamique à la culture européenne," Paris, 1991, Ms. For an equally dramatic collection of examples from England see Robert Irwin, "Burying the Past: The decline of Arab history and the perils of occidentosis," The Times Literay Supplement, 3 February, 1995, pp. 9-10, a review of N. E. Gallagher, ed., Approaches to the History of the Middle East, Reading: Garnet, 1994.
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