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[Richard Bulliet] focuses much of his discussion on the concurrent growth of communities of religious specialists in Islam and Latin Christendom beginning in the ninth century, suggesting that celibacy, for example, deprived Christians who entered orders of the opportunity to invest the growing strength of family and generations into the religious influence in communities, as the Muslim ulama were able to do. Lacking the complex hierarchy of religious authority that emerged in medieval, Christian Europe, the families of ulama were able to enlarge and enhance the purview of their influence in a manner quite beyond the capacity of European religious orders. Comparative approaches of this sort are packed into this little publication, suggesting what Bulliet himself places in italics "The past and future of the West cannot be fully comprehended without appreciation of the twinned relationship it has had with Islam over some fourteen centuries. The same is true of the Islamic world" (p. 45). Bulliet engages in lengthy and deserved criticism of the scholarship of the likes of Bernard Lewis -- so concerned to focus on what he thinks "went wrong" in Islam that the words actually entitle one of his works -- in the interest of focusing instead on "what went on." He points out that some of the heroes of the State Department model of modernization, such as Mustafa Kemal, really modeled themselves on such Western cultural and political stalwarts as Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin. The Napoleonic conquest of Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, conventionally regarded as the beginning of the modern era in the Middle East in the same sense as Commodore Perry's "opening" of Japan, Bulliet argues, demonstrated to ambitious demagogues throughout the Middle East what the modern state could get away with when not restrained by religious law and opinion. He provocatively suggests that the only real constraint on the emergence of a regional hegemony has been the West itself -- witness the containment of Muhammad Ali in 1840 and the American-led invasion of Iraq in 1991. Brief and open to debate, Bulliet's ideas are collectively imaginative and a major contribution to the slowly emerging context of careful historical analysis in the world of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond. As Bulliet himself admits, only a senior scholar endowed with great scholarly reputation can get away with essays such as this, and making the most of this book probably requires being well beyond the awful idiocies of popular culture. Bulliet's little work ought to be at the conclusion of every introductory course on Islamic civilization and included in every graduate reading list that purports to embrace global or world history. No reader will see the history either of Christendom or Islam in quite the same way.