Ground Zero in Islamabad

It’s become a truism to say that it isn’t safe to be seen in American company in parts of the Muslim world. Even truisms can be true. This weekend a luxury hotel where the top government officials of Pakistan planned to dine blew up in Islamabad.
The officials had changed plans, but one has to believe they are left with a nasty case of nerves. The other day the Pakistanis opened fire on a couple of American helicopters. Who’s a friend? Who’s a foe?
It might be a good idea to take a look at the world – and the history of European/Muslim relations – from the Muslim point of view. So here goes an abbreviated version that will, hopefully, offer some explanation for the seemingly intractable hostility we face.
George Bush didn’t cause the problem. Neither did any other American, living or dead. The situation goes back centuries – from the moment Muslim armies boiled out of Arabia, overwhelming Christian armies and conquering over half of all Christian territories – in the 700s.
A thousand years ago, the highest culture and leading technological advances belonged to Islam. The attitude toward the primitive Christian states was, at best, condescending. Christians could be beaten in battle, their civilization was only too hungry to borrow and learn from Islam.
In short, by the Eleventh Century, Islam was the top of the heap. Then Islam made a bad PR move. It cut off western European pilgrims from visiting Christian holy sites in Palestine. The pilgrims were unarmed and harmless. There was no good reason to shut them out.
This provoked a wave of European religious fanaticism. The knights and footmen who poured into the Holy Land to reopen the holy places were unwashed and illiterate. Eastern Christians in Constantinople, who were prepared to welcome them as allies and liberators, to one look at the grimy western knights and wouldn’t let them in the city.
But these grubby, unlettered knights brought with them a technology that was to turn Muslim/Christian relations on its head. The knights wore armor and rode horses the size of Budweiser Clydesdales. A handful of these “tanks” were the equal or better of a legion of Arab horsemen.
A few hundred of these armored monstrosities were able to keep the tiny Christian states the Crusaders established intact in the face of thousands upon thousands of Muslim soldiery for two centuries. In that time, Western Europe regained the use of money and acquired a lot of expertise.
Islam won the battle, by 1295 the last Christian enclave was taken and lands belonging to Allah were again free of the infidel. They won the next few battles, too. It seemed nothing much had changed as Muslim warriors rode up the Balkans as far as Vienna itself.
Constantinople – the last Christian fortress in the once totally Christian Near East fell in 1453. (As the Christian scholars fled west, they sparked something called the Renaissance.) But only 40 years later, after six centuries of battling Muslim invaders, Spain conquered their last fort in Spain in 1492 – and set out to challenge Muslim power in the Mediterranean.

In 1571, the Battle of Lepanto, near Greece, ended Muslim domination in the Mediterranean. The Russians, having freed themselves from Muslim rule, began their drive south toward the Black Sea, eventually making a host of Muslim states into Russian colonies.
In the 1700s, the British defeated the Mogul (Muslim) empire in India, finally crushing them in 1857. “Christians” – please understand that “Christian” and “Muslim” are herein cultural or ideological terms – having nothing to do with faith or belief—seemed militarily unstoppable.
In the 1840s, the French went into North Africa ending the Barbary Pirate threat to Christian shipping. In the 1870s, the British found themselves pushed by the possibly mad general, Chinese Gordon, into East Africa to end the thousand year old Muslim slave trade in black Africans.
A last Muslim holy man/war lord – the Mahdi – was killed after he besieged Khartoum and killed Gordon. By the 1890s, Muslim resistance to Christian armies was everywhere crushed. By 1920, nearly every single inch of Muslim territory from the Atlantic to Indonesia and the southern Philippines was under a Christian flag—in the Dutch, British, French, Italian and American empires.
Only interior Arabia – Saudi’s Arabia – and Afghanistan escaped this fate. It was a time of unbearable humiliation for a group whose culture was once the highest on the planet, whose arms ruled everything from Southern France and North Africa to the gates of China.
Not until 1979 – a century after the death of the Mahdi – did Islam find a new hero. The Ayatollah Khomeini seized control of Iran from a man seen as an American puppet, the Shah. It was as if a fire were lit in the entire Muslim world.
Once again, Muslim arms and Muslim culture had victories to report. The new Christian enemy, the greatest Christian power, was of course, the United States. Muslims who dream of past glory amid their present poverty see it as an infidel state to be attacked at any point that can be reached.
When will we have peace with those who remember the glory days of Islam with such fervor? When we acknowledge the supremacy of Allah, stop backing the infidel State of Israel, pull our “Christian” troops out of Islamic lands – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, to name a few, and when we cease to be any sort of military threat (actual or potential) to Islamic lands.
In other words, when we stop being who we are. Only then. Spain fought them for six centuries, Constantinople held out for seven. Russia has fought to survive them for five or more. We – and our occasional friends of convenience in the Muslim world -- may have a long struggle ahead of us. There are lots of Mahdi’s now.