One of the most important conceptual moves that Hodgson made in The Venture of Islam was to focus on what he called “the Middle Periods” (pointedly not the Middle Ages) of Islamic history. By this he meant period from the decline of the Abbasid caliphate as a centralized bureaucratic empire (c. 945 A.D.) until the rise of the gunpowder empires in the sixteenth century. This was important for several reasons. First, although conventional scholarship emphasized that after 945 A.D. Islamic societies entered into a long period of decline, from which they were to emerge only in the nineteenth century, Hodgson noted that the most celebrated cultural, scientific and artistic figures of Islamic civilization (including, among others, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, al-Biruni, and al-Firdawsi) lived after this date, and that this alone would call for a searching reevaluation. Hodgson’s emphasis on the Middle Periods enabled him to argue that Arabic was not the only Islamic language of culture. Rather, from 945 A.D., Persian and Turkish played major roles in the elaboration of a cosmopolitan Islamic culture. It is this which provides a key to grasping the hemisphere-wide role of Islam in China, India, South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Balkans and the Maghrib. The Middle Periods were times of the greatest advances of Islamic civilization. Thus Hodgson’s reexamination of the traditional periodization led to a remarkably fruitful reinvention of how Islamic civilization might be conceived, this time not as a truncated version of Europe, but in a world historical context and on its own terms.