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to do battle against the infidels.
    I realize that terms like “apostate” and “infidel” sound harshly unfamiliar to the Western ear. There is something strange and antique about them, as if they belong to the world of our
ancestors. And of course they do. A thousand years ago, during the time of the Crusades, the ancestors of the West understood their Islamic foe very well. Nobody spoke of “the West” at that time; they spoke of “Christendom.” It was a time, one may say, when the Christians, too, had their jihad , and it was aimed at the reconquest of the Holy Land. For Christians, the crusades combined two traditional practices, pilgrimage and holy war. Kings and popes alike proclaimed that those who died in battle were martyrs for the faith and would go straight to heaven.
    There are important differences, of course, between Islam and Christianity, and the religious armies who faced each other in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were very conscious of them. But they were also conscious of the deep similarities between the two faiths. Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, and they are the only two religions that can truly be called universal. Judaism is a religion for God’s chosen people, and God’s instructions are intended for them, not for anyone else. Hinduism is largely confined to India and the surrounding areas. Buddhism has longer tentacles, but it too is largely an Asian religion with a few adherents in the West. Confucianism is not really a religion, and in any case it has a limited reach. Christianity and Islam, by contrast, believe in a universal truth handed down by God that is true for all people in all places at all times. Believing themselves in possession of this exclusive truth, Christians and Muslims have historically sought to inform the whole world of their truth and to bring them to the one true faith. During the Crusades they both had a name for each other, “infidel.” It was the same name, and both sides interpreted it the same way. Islam and Christianity clashed not because they failed to understand each other but because they understood each other perfectly well.

    But a lot has happened since the twelfth century, and we have forgotten a lot of things. American culture is rather present oriented, and even what happened in the 1980s now seems dated. It is time that we started to learn and to remember because our enemies do. When bin Laden invokes the name of Salah-al-Din (Saladin), he is drawing inspiration from the great twelfth-century Muslim general who threw back the Crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem. In his videotaped statement released on Al Jazeera television, bin Laden said Americans should get used to suffering because “our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years.” He was referring to the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire, the last of the great Muslim empires, by the victorious European forces after World War I.
    Say what you will about the terrorists, they know who they are and where they are coming from. And behind their physical attack on America and the West is an intellectual attack, one that we should understand and be prepared to answer.

    O ne reason the terrorist assault startled Americans so much is that it occurred at a time when American ideas and American influence seemed to be spreading irresistibly throughout the world. The zeitgeist was captured by Francis Fukuyama in his best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama argued that the world was moving decisively in the direction of liberal, capitalist democracy. 12 In Fukuyama’s view, history had ended not in the sense that important things would cease to happen, but in the sense that the grand ideological conflicts of the past had been forever settled. Of course the pace of liberalization would
vary, but the outcome was inevitable. The destiny of Homo sapiens had been resolved. We were headed for what may