For the second time this week, I'm reading a post at Benzene's brother-blog, Done with Mirrors, and the response I wrote for the comment box was way too big. So I'll put it up here instead.

Except for the one in this paragraph, any "you" is aimed at Callimachus, author of the post. It's a long an interesting commentary on what Pope Benedict said about Islam (something that is on REG's mind as well, I know). I'm really only responding to one paragraph, which I realize isn't really central to C's point. Readers who know me will recognize the paragraph when they read it, since it's got all the trigger words that set off my alarms. I won't quote it here, though, because you really should go there and read the entire post.

And now my response:

If you truly wish to avoid attacking the "Islamic straw man", I invite you to re-examine your chauvinistic view of Islamic history. Like so many centuries of Christians determined to see Muslims as the other, you are imagining contrasts that don't exist.

Yes, the first community captured Arabia largely by violence, and the Qur'an is full of battle stories from that period. But, notwithstanding its book, Islamic religion, culture and philosophy was not born in the 7th century, any more than Christian philosophy was born in the 1st. Arabia is but a small piece of the Islamic world, and a sparsely populated and uncivilized one at that. The "sword" that conquered Arabia is not what allowed Islam to sweep through Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, and Transoxania. The Islamic "conquest" was an internal revolution just as surely as was the Christian "conquest" of the West. (But note how funny it sounds when we say the Christians "conquered" Europe. Isn't that Christianity's home territory? Well, no, actually, it isn't.)

You say "there was no Rome" for the early Muslims. What can you mean by that? The Eastern Empire is where civilization survived. By the end of the 5th century Rome was no great city at all. What were the great cities of the 7th century? Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria. The great cities of Islam.

And that's the elephant in the room that everyone in the Christian world refuses to see. Islam is no less an heir to Rome, Greece, and "the West" than Christian Europe is. Because of the accident of history, we see everything from the locus of Western Europe, from which perspective we imagine the France and Italy are the center of the Roman world. They are not, and it takes very little examination of history to see that. In many ways the Caliphate is a truer successor to Rome than Europe is. Syria is the only place in the entire West where a monetary economy survived unbroken from classical times to today. Pirenne famously noticed that the essence of Rome was the economic network based on the Mediterranean. But he turns it upside-down when he says Rome withered and died when it was separated from the Mediterranean, which he saw as stolen away by Muhammad, with Venice and Byzantium defecting as well. But that network which he so carefuly described was not separated from the Mediterranean. France was separated from the Mediterranean community, but France is not Rome. The Caliphate was that community, and thus, by Pirenne's own definition, it was "Rome".

Just as 19th century Balkan nation-states imagine a heritage from empires of centuries past, our Western civilization imagines a Greco-Roman heritage -- sometimes seeing ourselves in their image, and more often seeing them in ours. There is indeed some heritage, yes, but in order to hoard it all for ourselves we must deny it to everyone else. Everything that doesn't fit the pattern is overlooked -- that the Empire's center of gravity was in the east, that its dominant political philosophy was not democratic, and that our brother culture Islam was not an alien conquerer but in fact was a natural product of the Greco-Roman world.

This idea would perhaps be less foreign to Westerners if we weren't so poorly versed in Islamic literature. Pick up something as simple as the Arabian Nights and you'll find references to Alexander or Caesar. "Wait a minute," you'll think, "those guys weren't Muslims!" No, and they weren't Christians either. To the Muslim writer of the Abbasid era, Alexander was one of "us".

I talk about the notion of the Islamic conquest as being accomplished by the sword -- a false notion, which doesn't even stand up to the plausibility test given the rapidity and permanence of the conquest -- as if it were a Western myth, but it too is something we share with our Muslim brothers. The Islamic world cherishes the myth just as much as we do. After the battle lines were drawn between Christianity and Islam, it was the Muslim hagiographers who reinvented their own early history as glorious conquest. Many of the mythical episodes propagated by medieval European writers -- eg, the alleged burning of the Alexandrian library -- were in fact written by Muslim chauvinists.

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