Nine years ago to the day we got up and enjoyed a beautiful September day. We dressed, we had a cup of coffee or tea, and we got ready to go about our day's business. Few of us gave any thought to the Islamic world. That changed when 9 a.m. rolled around. Almost 3000 of us wouldn't live out the day. Four plane loads of people would end the day as body parts, many of them never to be recovered. That was the day the Islamic world entered the American thought process.
Since then we've learned much about the world of Islam, often despite attempts to feed us pablum or nonsense. We've come to understand a culture that is in many ways antithetical to our own, a culture whose roots stretch all the way to the dawn of civilization, when man belonged to the temple and his lot was to work for the gods under the supervision of the priests. It was a culture we thought we had defeated, stopped at the Gates of Vienna on another September 11th, 327 years ago.
When the Eastern Empire died in 1453 our Western world wasn't that different from the Muslim world. Neither had religious freedom, both societies were priest-ridden, and both worlds' economic systems were approximately the same. Serfdom was dead 130 years in France, still alive in England, and the conditions of the emerging peasantry weren't all that different from serfdom. Nevertheless, the two civilizations had split and would continue to diverge.
From the 12th century Europe's gentry had adopted and adhered -- often in the breach -- to the code of chivalry. It contained ideas that grew out of Christianity's Golden Rule, concepts which are absent in Islam. Chivalry introduced the concept of an obligation upon the strong to protect the weak. It carried with it the concept of love, courtly perhaps, but love nonetheless between man and woman, with woman idealized as Beauty, much more than just a bearer of sons or a dynastic tie. It also carried with it the concept of the gentilhomme -- the corresponding male ideal. The concept of the gentleman was impossible without the concept of the dignity of man. The devil lay in the details of who got to be a gentleman and who got to tug at his forelock. It's an argument that's still not over in the West, that hasn't started yet in the world of the Mohammedans.
Today we look on the world of Islam and we see what our own world could have been without the Romance of the Rose. A dwindling number of Catholic (and a few Anglican and Lutheran) churches still ring the Angelus at 6:00 am, noon, and 6:00 pm. Had we not diverged from the God-centered world of the Middle Ages we'd be required to stop what we're doing and recite Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ, whether we knew what it meant or not. Mohammed went the Christians two better and his followers are required to pray five, not just three, times a day, in Arabic, whether they know what the prayers mean or not. We in the West have gone through Jan Huss, 95 Theses, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Renaissance. In city after city the Angelus bells fall silent because we've stopped paying attention. In the world conquered by the Arabs the muezzin continues to yowl, right on schedule.
The enemy accuses us a fighting a religious war against him. But we're not. The Crusades have been over for hundreds of years. We don't think that way anymore, even though he does. We've moved on. He hasn't.
What many of us forget is that what we're fighting is a war of cultures. On one side is a world view in which man is the property of his god, born to sacrifice and hardship for the greater glory of the god. The common name Abdullah, borne by two Arab kings today, means literally "Slave of Allah." Woman is born to bear sons, also for the greater glory of the god. On the other side is what we have evolved into with the passage of a thousand years, still imperfect, still evolving, still bickering and arguing over details. But the core beliefs of our side -- kindness, humility, individual liberty, equality of man and woman, and their right to be left alone -- are worth defending to the death. The alternative to that defense is a regression of a thousand years, our children to live as property of a god.