Late Antiquity, post-modernity, and Islam: the 1970s as a point of departure and retrospection

The 1970s saw the rise of two unrelated and yet affine historical concepts: Late Antiquity (Brown 1971) and Post-Modernism (Lyotard 1979). It is almost as if the breakdown of Antiquity in the way it had been traditionally understood, clearly delineated from the Middle Ages and the Byzantine Empire, heralded the dissolution of the Modern Western self-understanding and everything that went with it. For Byzantine studies, it came with a flora of textual rediscoveries; but the gate that had opened onto the spiritual meadows of Late Antiquity could also be used to approach and contextualize Islam in a new way.