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Nov 15th 2001 From The Economist print edition Not if Osama bin Laden or others who think like him can prevent it. Yet over the centuries it has often happened--and it happens constantly today AP AP Western women, Muslim women, all in Buddhist Thailand 58 Get article background IS IT really a clash of civilisations, under the flags of rival religions? Osama bin Laden has been determined to provoke such a clash. Until September 11th, that seemed unlikely, almost preposterous, for all the rise of Islamic feeling in the past couple of decades. Granted, a rather old-fashioned sort of geopolitical competition was gathering pace in the resource-rich heartlands of Eurasia; In quarrels over the Caspian, Orthodox Christian Russia had made common cause with Shia Muslim Iran, even as Russia waged war against some of its own Muslim citizens. Partly in response, Israel and Turkey--a committedly secular state, but one of Muslims--had strengthened their ties, with the blessing of their common friend, the United States, whose people are mostly Christians. In the Caucasus, Georgia--an ancient Christian nation--got on better with Muslim Azeris than with its Armenian co-religionists. And the "Christian West" had united in support of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. In the 1850s, when Europeans took their Christianity far more seriously than most do now, France and Britain had united to aid the overtly Muslim Turkish empire against Russia. Even very recently, it sometimes seemed that the old rivalry between Russia and the western powers (led this time by America) was simply continuing under a new guise, with each side picking its own friends in the Muslim world (the fundamentalist-Muslim world included) and exploiting that world's internal rivalries. Afghanistan had been no exception: as in the 19th century, competition for influence there had more to do with geopolitics than religion. When the Taliban took power in 1996, they were instantly condemned--as products of an unholy alliance between America, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan--by the religious establishment in Iran; Whatever the logic of this many-sided game, it was not a contest of Muslims versus the infidels. Enter Osama bin Laden Osama bin Laden and the network of Islamic fundamentalists he heads want to change this complex picture and make it a simple one. Making artful use of history, theology and current geopolitics, he has, in effect, urged all the world's billion-odd Muslims to bury their internal differences and consider themselves at war with all the world's Christians and Jews. In his efforts to galvanise and unite fellow Muslims, he has made a careful choice of themes. His self-proclaimed quarrel with the Jews is not only, and perhaps not even mainly, about the fate of the Palestinians: he has focused instead on those places in Jerusalem that Islam considers holy, especially the Temple Mount, which is both the most sacred of sites for Jews and revered by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, the place where the Prophet made his ascent to heaven. Mr bin Laden's quarrel with what he calls the Christian world is also about holy places. American troops have remained in his native Saudi Arabia since the Gulf war of 1991. Far though they are from any sacred sites, he says they are "occupying" the holy city of Mecca. As weary American diplomats found last year as they tried to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, there are some questions to do with sacred geography that cannot be finessed: in the end, a given spot must be controlled by one side or the other. And Mr bin Laden may calculate that, in the case of the Temple Mount, no conscientious Jew or Muslim could be indifferent to the outcome. By labelling the entire western world as "Crusaders", he has artfully harked back to the time when Christians too were making non-negotiable claims for sacred real estate in what were by then Muslim lands. Most Christians today--as did some even at that time--would say the Crusaders had misread their own faith. Still, there are good reasons why al-Qaeda's rhetoric homes in on memories of the Crusaders; The very word "Crusader" recalls a time when the western-Christian world aspired to be a monolithic power and one that often defined itself in opposition to the "heathen" world--in practice, that of Islam. To tug at the historical heart-strings even harder, Mr bin Laden has reminded followers of the glories of al-Andalus, today's Spain, where in cities like Granada and Cordoba Muslims ruled what were, a millennium ago, the most civilised places, as measured by artistic and scientific accomplishment, in Europe; The subliminal message is that Muslims, who once ran the most flourishing state in Europe, should not put up with western imperialism, which may no longer exist in its literal sense but is still said to persist in the vaguer form of political, cultural and economic influence. The appeal of bin Laden From the viewpoint of such would-be polarisers, things have not gone too badly since September 11th. The war of weapons may be lost, but not necessarily that of propaganda. Right after September 11th, most Muslims seemed united with the West in condemnation of the outrage, readily rejecting the idea that Islam could be invoked to justify a mass murder of civilians. It is true that the war in Afghanistan has pitted one group of Muslims--the Uzbeks and Tajiks of the Northern Alliance--against a particularly zealous group of co-religionists known as the Taliban. The northern allies enjoy the whole-hearted support of their ethnic kin in the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, these last two both historically Muslim places. And one country of Muslims, Turkey, has promised to send troops to the American-led war. Yet even those Muslim countries inclined, for geopolitical reasons, to support the struggle against terrorism hesitated to do so. Iran, for example, disliked the Taliban as much as ever; The attitudes of most Arab states, including pro-western ones, ranged from lukewarm to ice-cold. Because Iranians and Arabs, Shia and Sunni, alike saw how Mr bin Laden's views and videos appealed to their own citizens. He has denounced the new American-Russian partnership against the Taliban as a "Christian" alliance. Has Christianity anything real to do with the self-definition, or international posture, of America or Russia? Even if it did, how much have George Bush's clean-shaven, clean-living Methodists to do with the incense-burning, icon-kissing world of Russian Orthodoxy? Yet when television viewers in Rabat or Cairo, Islamabad or Jakarta, see Russian-built tanks and American aircraft going into battle against the Taliban, Mr bin Laden's propaganda may look quite plausible. The answer Given that al-Qaeda is using religious and historical arguments, they need to be countered by arguments of the same sort. It is not enough for westerners to argue that past history is past, or that religion is a private matter. One promising place to look, surely, is among the large number of people who do not fit into the dualist vision that Mr bin Laden is propagating: Christians with ancient roots in the Middle East, and Muslims who have put down deep roots in western countries. Few as they are by now, the Christians of the Middle East are more than a historical curiosity. They have their own profoundly-held beliefs about the history and heritage of their region, beliefs that serve as a counterweight to the enduring legacy of the Christian polarisers of the Middle Ages--the Crusaders--and also to the Muslim would-be polarisers of today. Take the conquest of Jerusalem by adherents of the new-born Muslim faith in 638. Many western accounts of this event unconsciously reflect a Christian assumption that it was a great historical disaster. For Middle Eastern Christians, however, the Arab conquest of the Levant, and the subsequent articulation of Christian liturgy and teaching through the medium of Arabic, was a proud and central chapter in their communities' history. Or consider the arguments which still rage over the heritage of Muslim Spain. Muslim historians accuse western historians of playing down the extent to which the re...
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