Rooms and borders: The West's variable experience with Islam

IT TAKES TWO to make a border, even a bloody one. Samuel Huntington's trope about Islam's sanguinary cyclical history of confrontation and expansion was adduced when hot embers still glowed in the residue of the Cold War-and when the idea of "the West" still rang true as intellectual currency.

Today, European borders are dissolving faster than metaphysical or emotional attachments to the new trans-national polity can form. On this side of the Atlantic, we too are at sea. As our old European alliances are being de- and renatured by Europe's self-transformation, our conception of the interface of East and West must shift as well.

Once we considered the Hellespont as the interface of Europe and the Islamic world, but as Eastern Europe has returned to the fold, and Russia's cultural center of gravity has shifted westward from the Urals, America's imaginary interface with Islam is drifting away from its imagined locus classicus. This is no cause for alarm, for the West's Islamic frontier, like the earth's wandering magnetic poles, was never at rest to begin with.

This frontier has meant many things to many different imaginations, European and American, and our different experiences of this border's past cartographic meanderings may explain why our attitudes toward Islam vary so greatly today.

THE WEST'S 19th-century frontiers with Islam were less civilizational than denominational. Continuing the Byzantine status quo, Orthodox communions stood vigil on the long eastern flank of Islam, from Tomsk to Tashkent and on to Tatarstan and the Turkish frontier into the Balkans. Across the top of Africa, Roman Catholics confronted the inheritors of the imperial victors that had carried Islam to-and just a tad beyond-the apex of its 8th-century expansion at the battle of Tours. In the Levant, a complex gerrymander of sects and territorial relics of the several Crusades simmered under the unenthusiastic administration of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire.

The Holy Land, meanwhile, was still more an object of pilgrimage than a polity, and Judaism, like Protestantism, was less a political presence or demographic force than that even of the Armenian, Coptic, Chaldean and Maronite churches, or the sectaries of Druze and Alawi Islam. Zeal was in relatively short supply close to the coast, but Mahdiism in the Sudan, the Chechen insurgency in the northern Caucasus and the Wahhabi ascendancy in east-central Arabia provided it in copious amounts farther inland. These were products of the local equivalent of the wild American West, as were the Berber and Uzbek rebellions that followed the Great War and the Russian Revolution.

The early American experience of Islam was that of Lepanto writ small-a series of Mediterranean raids and skirmishes that even over decades never amounted to the sum of one Napoleonic naval battle. The Barbary pirates, for all their buckle and swash, were far less of an historical force than their slave-trading co-religionists south of the Sahara. Far from inspiring fear and loathing, Islam in the American mind's eye lost much in translation, becoming the substrate of such Victorian phenomena as the Moorish Corner, the Shriners, the expurgated works of Richard Burton, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat and that nadir of the saccharine, Turkish delight.

This contrasts so sharply with the European experience of collision and total colonial immersion that the echoes of the disparity reverberate still today. The French mission civilitrice saw a million colonists dispatched to put down roots in North Africa, an episode whose success must have been regarded with interest by everyone from early Zionists to the younger sons of Calabrian farmers. It was tempting some decades ago for Europeans to presume that they had a right to reoccupy the suburbs of abandoned Roman cities. If the Jews should not forget Jerusalem, why should the Italians forget who won the Punic War, or the Franks write off Krak des Chevaliers and centuries of hegemony and a horde of sandy-haired descendants in the Lebanon?

But, of course, the national experiences of different European countries with the Muslim world have varied enormously. The Venetians were up to their necks in Islamic gore for a millennium, while northern Europe scarcely suspected the successive Caliphates' existence or the Ottoman ascendency. Along the Baltic shore, until a century before Columbus, the only fit object for a crusade was the axis of infidels consisting of tree-worshiping Letts, Wends and Sorbs.

Islam has always been to a degree autochonous, and hence of a mixed mind about the emigration of its faithful. Despite the relative proximity of Morocco to the shores of the New World, the first wave of modern emigration to America from Islamic lands was in large measure one of Ottoman subjects mostly Christian and Jewish. The diaspora of Lebanese and Armenian traders carried them throughout Latin America as well. So while America is richly leavened with cultural threads intertwined with Islam, there is little here of its whole cloth. The first mosque was not built on American soil until 1934 (in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of all places). Where Islam has excelled best in its modern expansion is the Indo-Pacific. It proceeded directly from Arabia, whose Omani and Yemeni sea traders are both Sinbad's descendants and ancient forebears. Their seamanship made possible that Hellenistic precursor of Bowditch, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Their entrepots along monsoonal trading routes were already doing business when word of Islam arrived from the home offices in the 8th century. Trade then carried the Green Banner before it, soon producing thriving clones of the mother culture from East Africa and Mughal India to the Straits of Sumatra and the SuIu Sea. Colonies and sultanates with blood relatives back in Arabia Felix flourished and wed Arabian brides, and still do so to this day. It is no coincidence that conflict has manifested itself, as in the BaIi bombing of October 2002, where extra-peninsular Islam finds itself face to face with the descendants of an earlier Hindu diaspora hosting hedo-nistic Europeans with a thirst for disco music and cold beer.

While the violence in such triple junctions is hardly surprising, the internal confrontations of Islam in Central Asia and North Africa are harder to understand-harder, at least, for Western outsiders. There are islands of Ismaili enlightenment scattered across an arc of mountains from the Himalaya to the high Caucasus, where the clash among Islamic cultures can be as desperate as any intercivilizational ones. On late Victorian maps tracking Czarist expansion, this area is either minutely subdivided or glossed over as a pale green swath legended "The Independent Khanates of Chinese Turkestan." There today a single range of high peaks can divide a statelet committed to universal female literacy from a valley where the Taliban are viewed as dangerous radicals who are soft on adultery. These divides may not exactly be borders, but they are there, and they hemorrhage disproportionately. These divisions exist in the heart of the Atlas as well as in deep Asia, and the sum of internecine violence in Asian and Algerian Islamic communities thus far dwarfs the death toll of the first and second intifadas and Al-Qaeda combined.

Past differences in Western experiences of Islam clearly do shape present attitudes. While America and the old states of western Europe may share a cultural home, when it comes to matters Arab and Muslim they inhabit different rooms. Thus nations relatively innocent of colonial confrontation, or with a past history of mere skirmishing with the Ottomans, have soldiered on to the gates of Baghdad. Others who have experienced the recessional trauma of resorbing millions of citizens did not volunteer to repeat the experience of a clash of civilizations. To them the paramount fact is that in living memory even Islam divided has expelled an infidel power. Jacques Chirac may not play in the same league as Charles "the Hammer" Martel, but another Charles comes to mind who was not exactly the beau ideal of a surrender monkey-and even Charles de Gaulle did not long hesitate to leave Algeria to itself.

DURING de Gaulle's presidency, a foreign office wall in the Quai D'Orsay bore a map of one of France's African possessions with an annotation defining its major strategic divisions, rather along lines that seem eerily relevant to how Iraq breaks down today (and may break up tomorrow). From south to north its three parts were Tchad Utile, Tchad Inutile and Tchad Futile. But it is futile to look for this laconic marvel today. It was taken down when Elf started finding oil in Chad in quantities that even Libya might find useful.

Cynicism is not a Gallic monopoly. Our relationship with France is so old, and so special, that we have a positive duty to refresh her historical memory whenever she forgets herself. There is no imprudence in reminding M. Chirac that the language of diplomacy might read from right to left had Charles Martel foresworn the sword and waved Abd Ar-Rahman's Saracens on to the White Cliffs of Dover. Today, France's main borders with Islam may be in the less fashionable arrondissements of Paris. But however much the Quai D'Orsay may hector Secretary Powell about America's imagined dreams of empire, from Guyana to New Caledonia, the sun never sets on trie French Foreign Legion.