¹ What has been said so far has serious implications for the way in which we must view the relation of Modernity to the older Occidental culture. I have developed some of these implications in an article to appear in the Journal of the Central Institute of Islamic Research (Karachi). Briefly, the most popular views of world Modernization have seen it either as a shift from essentially unchanging tradition into repetition, at an altered pace, of Modern Western sequences (cf. Romein, J. M., “The Common Human Pattern”, in Cahiers d'histoire mondiale, Vol. IV, 1958); or as an expansion of the historical Occidental society which may be either adopted in various degrees or resisted by other societies. Both views are inadequate. They must be supplemented by understanding Modernity as the outcome of the breakdown of the common historical conditions on which rested the pre-Modern Afro-Eurasian historical complex as a whole. A degree of deliberate innovation was always present in the Afro-Eurasian civilized societies as compared with tribal societies; even major florescences such as those of classical Greece or classical Islâm, which sometimes led to serious changes in the historical configuration, could be consistent with its continuity. The Renaissance and the early Occidental expansion in the oceans, in fact, did not in themselves escape the presuppositions of the pre-modem historical pattern in any crucial way. In the sixteenth century the level of social and cultural power of the several Afro-Eurasian civilizations was still essentially on a common level (everywhere far higher than so many millennia earlier). Between 1600 and 1800, developments within the Occident finally destroyed these common historical presuppositions; but as soon as they were fully destroyed for the Occident itself (that is, by the generation of 1800), they were effectively destroyed for all the other civilized societies also, as a result of the already existing solidarity of Afro-Eurasian history. Since 1800 the results of that event in most other societies have been very different from those in the Occident, but equally “modern” in an important sense. Modernity is not to be compared with the spread of Hellenism, nor to be reduced to the stages of internal Occidental experience. Though its initiation within the Occident has certain crucial consequences, Modernity is simply “Western” neither in its origins, nor in its impact as a world event, nor even as an expression of regional cultural continuity; above all, not in the nature of the cultural problems it raises for us all.Google Scholar