<p>Comparisons of political-economic development in Western Europe and the Muslim Middle East have been a staple of Western social theory since the late nineteenth century. Over the past fifteen years, research on this topic has again come to the fore of comparative political and sociological inquiry. This essay provides an overview of this new generation of cross-civilizational research. It focuses in particular on analyses of what the political scientist Timur Kuran (2012) has described as the “long divergence” between Muslim and Western civilizations, a concept also examined by Jared Rubin (2017) and Ahmet Kuru (2019). This new research has not yet reached a settled consensus on the causes and consequences of the long divergence. However, it has taken the discussion forward in ways important for a comparative sociology of Islam and the West, and for a deeper understanding of the multiple modernities that mark our age.</p>