In When Worlds Collide, Gene Heck challenges conventional wisdom that the introspective Wahhabi movement or classic Islamic doctrines are the root causes of modern Middle East terrorism. Instead, he persuasively argues that current regional unrest stems directly from internal perceptions of relative political and economic deprivation as well as from ad hoc abortive efforts by tunnel-visioned Western intelligence agencies to co-opt radical regional political-religious elements as opposing forces against other emerging global ideologies deemed more politically dangerous at the time. The...

Gene W. Heck explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe's twelfth century commercial renaissance. Determining that Europe's medieval feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns, he demonstrates how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in "Dark Age economics" - in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism.