Marshall Hodgson's work is not necessarily for beginners. Rather than recount a straightforward narrative, he lays out a theoretical framework based on environmental zones and economic factors. In terms of the history of orientalism, this was a major contribution in that is posited a basis for Islamic history other than religion.

Of the three volumes, Volume III is largely out-dated, while Volume II has held up the best since the work's publication. Perhaps the most serious problem is that Hodgson doesn't pay much attention to the development of Islamic societies in Southeast Asia and Africa, though he does include India, a major step for the 1970's. His chapters on Sufism and literary culture are among the work's strengths.

Those interested in a serious understanding of the Islamic world will work through Hodgson at one time or another. Those wishing for a strong, more casual introduction are better off with something like Ira Lapidus's A History of Islamic Societies or The Oxford History of Islam.

Marshall Hodgson, a professor at the University of Chicago, was a major 20th century scholar of Islam. His three volume history of Islamic civilization was published posthumously by the U of C Press. But, even before it came out in book form, xeroxed copies were being used as textbooks in the school's courses in Islamic Civ. That's where I first encountered it (and struggled through it) many years ago.

As other reviewers have pointed out, Hodgson is not always an easy read. His style is dense and ponderous. Nontheless, Hodgson's work was a milestone in Western scholarship about Islam and its history. He provides a wealth of information and a thorough, coherent account of the development of Islamic civilization. Unlike many books, Hodgson pays attention not just to political entities and dynasties, but also to the intellectual and artistic achievements of the societies.

Islam and things Islamic have been sorely neglected in most people's education. Even in our current post-9/11 climate, what most people know about Islam doesn't extend much beyond stereotypical (and largely inaccurate) ideas about jihad. If they're really sophisticated, they may know a little about Sufism and the mystical poetry of Rumi. But there is so much more to Islam and to Islamic civilization (if in fact one can even talk about a single Islamic civilazation). Whatever this books flaws, one could do far worse to start one's education here.

I kept my xeroxed for many years after I finished my coursework. But I finally lost them, and now I'm replacing them with the real books.

This book's chapters are dense. Of the three volumes of The Venture of Islam, however, it is the one that has held up the best under modern scholarship.

This book is a posthumous collection of Hodgson's essays on world history, Islamic history in particular. Much of the book was unpublished at the time of Hodgson's sudden death. Consequently, the book reads as if Hodgson was thinking out loud. The prose is very dense and he often pounds home points over several pages that could have been made in a paragraph or two. Nonetheless, many of the ideas presented by Hodgson were advanced for the time, and a necessary correction to William McNeill, his fellow University of Chicago prof. Hodgson's main thrust is to set right the place of Islam--or what he calls the "Islamicate"--in world history. This argument should be well-heeded in view of the overly Eurocentric tone that much work on world history has taken. Specialists on Islam will appreciate the book the most, and anyone interested in world history can benefit from it--but it is a very tough read that could easily be pared down to a precis.

Hodgson was the pre-eminent Western historian of Islamic societies, as set forth in "The Venture of Islam." In "Rethinking," Hodgson's widow has seen to the publication of a series of broader essays on the philosophy of history as applied to the world at large. Part 1 tries to get outside Euro-centrism as best as an Occidental can. Part 2 considers Islam in a global context, and Part 3 discusses commonalities and differences that make for meaningful comparison, decompositions, and aggregations in regional and global history.

The most interesting chapter is entitled "Modernity and the Islamic Heritage." Here Hodgson inquires whether it is possible for a society to be Modern yet not Western, given that the presuppositions of Modernity reach deep into the Medieval Occident. For example, "with an effort of the imagination, one can guess what the institutions of Modernity might look have been like if it had developed, for instance, in Islamic society... The nation-state, with its constitutionalism, its particularist characters of rights and responsibilities, stems from the corporate conceptions of Medieval Western society. From the very different legal conceptions of Medieval Islamic society, with their abstract egalitarian universalism, there might well have developed, instead of the nation-state, some international corps of super-ulama, regulating an industrial society on the basis of some super-sharia code." This tension between Western-ness and Modernity is palpable in the West, but elsewhere it is a defining issue running through politics, economics, and warfare. It is especially evident in the violent Islamist organizations, where Modernity is used to combat Westernization.

The successful resolution of those tensions, in the Islamic world as elsewhere on Earth, will be the only way that civilization of any kind can continue at all.