Like most people in India, the majority in West Asia and North Africa have been made to contemplate the significance of a millennial year in a calendar which is not indigenous to them.

In acknowledging the significance of the Christian calendar they have to perforce recognise the current ascendancy of Western civilisation and the probability that this mode of tabulating time will prevail henceforth. A juncture at which important elements of civilisational autonomy appear to have been lost is being seen as an appropriate one at which to reflect on past triumphs and the prospect of an inglorious future.

To the Arab world, the end of the second millennium of the Christian era is a particularly poignant moment. At the beginning of that millennium, the Arab and Muslim world was at its zenith with its political boundaries stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus and from the Pyrenees to the edges of the Sahara. Within this region there were great centres of learning, its people contributed hugely to growth of the sciences and its traders conveyed the wealth of the world.

At the time, Western civilisation barely deserved the name, mired as it was in superstition, poverty and squalor. Today, the roles are not exactly the reverse but while Western civilization is at the top of the spiral, the Arab, and to a great extent the Islamic world, are at the bottom.

Surprisingly, and unfortunately, the Arab world does not appear ready to make a serious stock-taking ... Life in the Arab world is largely run according to the Christian calendar except when deference is paid to Islam in respect of the weekly break and the holidays. This pride-filled rejection of reality is a tendency which pervades other aspects of the Arabs' world view.

Pan-Arabism has failed and so has pan-Islamism. Specific nationalisms are now the leit motif in every Arab country but the liberalism which is so necessary for, nationalism to thrive is stifled by rulers who are either dictators or control so much power that the difference does not matter. There is still the yearning for a composite Arab ethos which is liberal and progressive but the articulations of it are lost in the clattering crash of the other "isms". At a period when the Arab world is being penetrated by the West on almost every front, there is no concerted effort to prepare for the future.

Two other Islamic peoples of West Asia appear to be doing better. The Turks and the Iranians are digging into their past to discover the identity and the historic lessons which will help them position themselves better in the world of the future ... In relatively isolated Iran, there are efforts at various levels to acquire modern knowledge, skills, technologies and habits of thought ... The Iranians and the Turks have broken out of the cycle of defeatism which still grips the Arabs.

Another West Asian people are undergoing transformations of a different kind. After two millennia during which they did not exist on the political map of the world, the Jews have returned as a politically organised community. Having contributed so hugely to the progress that the West has made in the last 500 years, the Jews have no reason to feel civilisationally challenged or diminished ... The Jews ... are perhaps entitled to call Western civilisation their very own ... (Source: The Hindu, 6 January, 2000)