M CHAPTER FOUR Both the reformist and the Fundamentalist currents of modern Islam take their inspi ration from a vision of history that favors the beginning over the end, the past over the future. Such a view unquestionably posits a utopia of the ideal beginning, s to speak. That sort of backward. utopian thought is fairly common, In nine teenth-century Europe, it took the form FPnationalism; there too, a mythical past was constructed in an effort to forge an identity, and that mythical past was recon ‘ituted through a slanted reading of the historical te For Muslims, a further sment has been added—namely, revela tion, which marks the beginning of histori al reality and therefore forms an indelibl part of the utopia, The divine message hat been adapted with unexpected success to VN i Translated by Jae Maric Todd