Clamor of civilizations: in the battle between the West and Islam, words may be more dangerous than bombs

Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam By Andrew Wheatcroft Random House, $29.95

Christians and Muslims have been butting heads for 1,400 years, violence alternating with uneasy coexistence. Swords and spears have morphed into hijacked aircraft and laser-guided bombs, but one weapon has remained the same: Maledicta, words of evil intent, are still hurled back and forth. Their objective is not to communicate with the enemy but to bind "Us" together in self-righteousness by demeaning "Them." Historian Andrew Wheatcroft sees Osama bin Laden and President Bush's paired epithets, "crusader" and "evildoer" for example, as merely the newest generation of an ancient rhetorical family.

Infidels is the history of three Muslim-Christian encounters: The first is the 8th-century Muslim conquest of Christian southern Spain from its Visigothic kings, and its subsequent rise to riches as "Al-Andalus." Cordoba, its greatest city, was known to 11th-century Europeans as "the jewel of the world," an almost unrivaled center of learning and culture. Many southern Spanish Christians converted voluntarily to Islam, but many did not. Mostly, these two communities, together with a third community of Jews, managed a highly productive, if wary cooperation.

It was, however, an arrangement based on keeping the communities operating in parallel rather than in any true partnership. As with any apartheid, it was buttressed by words. This from the Muslim rulers of 12th century Seville: "Frankish women must be forbidden to enter the church except on days of religious services or festivals for it is their habit to eat and drink and fornicate with the priests"; and this from the Christian side: "Muslims are ... fickle, crafty, cunning.... completely befouled ... rejecting chastity as though it were filth, disparaging virginity as though it were the uncleanness of harlotry...." Note the symmetry, especially the sexual innuendo. But some Christian kingdoms survived in northern Iberia, and beginning in the late 11th century, slowly rolled hack Muslim power. Toledo was recaptured in 1085, and Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of Aragon and Castile as well as patrons of Christopher Columbus, completed the "Reconquista" with the capture of Granada in 1492. The monarchs of newly Christian Spain, however, knew a thing or two about irredentism. The Jews were expelled in the same year, although those who converted were permitted to stay. By 1614, the last of the Moors had gone--even those who professed Christianity were evicted.

The linguistic front developed in parallel. The "Moros" (Moors) who could occasionally be "noble" in a ballad, became "Mudejares" (the left behind), and then "Moriscos," a people who "have only the outward appearance of a man, for the rest of you are beast." Such linguistic barbarity was, of course, a two-way street.

Wheatcroft's second story is the 300-year struggle for the Levant and in particular Jerusalem, beginning with the First Crusade in 1096. Here he draws attention to the parallel linguistic development of those totemic words "crusade" and "jihad." The term "crusade," he reminds us, was not coined until the 13th century in Spain. The verb did not arrive in English until the 18th century, just in time to be taken up by the muscular Christianity, of Victorian England. "Jihad" meanwhile mutated to become its mirror image. The Prophet's distinction between the "greater jihad," the internal struggle to become a better Muslim, and the "lesser jihad," war to defend or extend Muslim lands became lost. Jihad and crusade however, are merely emblematic of a whole lexicon of reciprocal denigration. As Wheatcroft puts it:

   The degree to which each
   group produced reverse or mirror
   images is remarkable. Christians
   regarded Muslims as inherently
   cruel and violent; Muslims felt the
   same about Westerners. Christians
   developed wild imaginings
   about the sexual proclivities of
   Muslims. Muslims regarded the
   Franks.... as little better than animals
   in terms of sexual propriety.

Wheatcroft takes his third example from the Balkans. Serbian folk animosity towards Muslims and particularly towards the Ottoman Turks has been fuelled by two mythic events: The cataclysmic defeat at Kosovo Polje ("The Field of Crows") in 1389, and then the "Great Migration" of 1690, a Serbian "Exodus from Egypt" complete with the Moses-like figure of Patriarch Carnojevic. In that year, a large portion of the Serbian nation fled the advancing Ottomans in the wake of a retreating Austro-Hungarian army. Their descendants still live in Vojvodina, Serbia's northern province. What interests Wheatcroft, though, is the survival of Serbian hatred of the Turks, and after the Turks quit the Balkans in 1922, the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians. It was still in evidence in the late 1980s and became one of the precursors to another round of Balkan slaughter and ethnic cleansing. Wheatcroft quotes to good effect an interview with an aging Serbian nun in Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts: "I am a good Christian, but I will not turn the other cheek if some Albanian plucks out the eyes of a fellow Serb, or rapes a little girl, or castrates a twelve year old Serbian boy." As she must have been born no earlier than the 1920s, and this interview was conducted before the post-Yugoslavian conflicts, it seems likely that this was not her own memory, but a communal one. Kaplan's coda certainly suggests this: "Her eyes, while fiery, also appeared strangely unfocused, as though blotted out by superstition."