Islam and the End of History

Abstract

Introduction The debate about the end of history raises issues that sometimes touch almost upon the philosophy of history, insofar as they relate to the significance of not only a particular century but of the human species. Francis Fukuyama provoked this debate in his seminal article entitled, "The End of History?" in the journal The National Interest. 'At the end of the twentieth century, Fukuyama saw "an unabashed Victory of economic and political liberalism."' His central argument was that the whole world was moving towards a liberal democratic capitalist system that was destined to be the final sociopolitical paradigm of all human evolution. As Fukuyama put it: What we may be witnessing is just not the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human govemment. For Fukuyama, at the time of writing the original article (in 1989), the momentous changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, ...