Rivers of ink have been written recently by political scientists, cultural anthropologists and pundits galore on how to resolve the age-old conflict between Christianity and Islam. Most secularists and rationalists wish the problem away by excluding the two religions from the public agora and relegating them to churches on Sunday and mosques on Friday. For many of them the ultimate solution is simply the liquidation of religion altogether which they misguidedly blame for the conflict in the first place, and the sooner the better.

As far as they are concerned, enlighten European history begins with the advent of the EU in 1950; what precedes it is a mere preparation for it. This “enlightened” stance which doubts of everything except its own rationalistic methodology remains a deeply flawed one. Perhaps a look back to the poetry of Rumi, a 13th century Moslem mystic and contemporary of Francis of Assisi, may provide some much needed light on the issue.

For part of my life I have lived in Barletta, a city in Puglia which is a stone throw away from the ancient ruins of Canne, the place where Hannibal defeated the ancient Romans. The city boasts the biggest bronze statue of medieval times portraying the 7th century Roman Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610-641) as a 20 plus foot high colossus holding a cross in his right hand and the world in the other. Many legends grew up around this statue, often mistaken for Constantine, the first of the Christian Roman emperors. The confusion is understandable, for in this representation too, there is a familiar icon at work: the socio-historical legitimacy of the cross associated with, and asserted with temporal power: "in hoc signo vincit": with this symbol thou shall conquer.

It is through that conquering, so goes the ancient theological argument, that God shows His favor. Be that as it may, this triumphal statue is appropriately situated on the side of a basilica named Holy Sepulcher, after the renowned place by the same name in the Holy Land. At that basilica in Jerusalem Heraclius (the only Roman Emperor ever to visit the city in 627) carried the alleged true cross of Christ which had been retrieved all the way from the isolated Christian Nestorian Church at Kerkurk in Northern Mesopotamia (present day Irak).

Still today, people come from all over the world to admire the sheer awesomeness of the statue. It remains there in the open, unperturbed by the weather, as it has been for many centuries, with the whole world in his left hand and the cross in the other, as a sort of proclamation of the cultural superiority of Western Christendom as a natural by-product of European culture, oblivious of the fact that, if truth be told, Christianity itself originally came from Asia. One is tempted to ask: is this a case of form and content being one and the same? And could such a cultural phenomenon as represented by the statue begin to explain the adamant reluctance of Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, Confucians, secularists of all stripes and ideologies, to give any quarter to a Christianity, that proclaims itself universal and trans-cultural, but comes to other cultures dressed-up in an unmistakably Western form, albeit a Byzantine one?

I suppose the fish in water never thinks of water. Neither did I, when residing in Barletta, ever make a connection with Hannibal's defeat of the Romans at Canne during the Second Punic War. That downed on me later when I visited the ancient ruins of Canne. At the time I jotted those ruminations in my dairy. What follows is their synthesis in some kind of order. In the first place, the historical connection between Hannibal and Heraclius suddenly hit me. It was indeed at Canne that the Romans, as Westerners, received the first of the devastating military and cultural blows (to be precise, it was the third within the second Punic war fought on the Italian Peninsula), that would arrive via North Africa from the Middle East, the crossroads of civilizations. This geo-political menace to Western civilization which began with the second Punic war, would at times be desultory but almost incessant throughout Western history. As hinted above, paradoxically Christianity had arrived as a religion of non-violence from the same place.

"Cartago delenda est," Cato would frequently remind his fellow-Roman senators after the defeat by Hannibal carrying in the senate chambers a basket of fresh figs just arrived from Carthage, not too dissimilar from the modern scene of the Nazi general carrying a fresh cake just arrived from America. The point was eventually grasped by his fellow senators who appointed Scipio as consul to remove the threat once and for all. Not for nothing, he was dubbed Scipio "the African."

To connect the dots of the relevancy of the above to the modern geo-political predicament, it bears mentioning at the outset, that the same ominous threat appeared suddenly and menacingly once more on the West's cultural horizon on September 11, 2001 in the sky of New York, thus inaugurating a new millennium when the conflict between Christianity and Islam may well be resumed. This opening salvo was shortly after followed by the Madrid train bombing, within the European peninsula first conquered by Islam. The London bombing followed shortly thereafter.

This connection may well surprise some readers who may have bought wholesale Fukuyama's "end of history" rosy scenario. In fact, not surprisingly, at a lecture I gave in Italy two years ago, I was criticized for merely suggesting this renewed conflict as a working hypothesis. Nevertheless, I believe history will eventually confirm that the cultural conflict between the two monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam, which began in the 8th century AD, is far from over. That does not necessarily mean that it will take the form of a military clash, Armageddon style, so to speak, as the exalted imagination of some Westerners prone to crusades might suggest. But it does mean however that the band-aid of a secularism devoid of religion ready to declare European civilization proper, or at least what is best in it, as beginning in 1950 with the advent of the EU, is naïve at best in believing that it possesses the solution to this old-age conflict. It does not, especially when it forgets that the concept of inalienable rights was neither Greek nor Roman but is derived from Christianity. Jefferson did not wake up and invent it out of the blue sky one fine morning.

In the movie The King and I an astute observation is proffered by the king regarding the subterranean invisible mysterious influences of one culture upon another; a mysterious process indeed, as mysterious as life itself. Those influences, contrary to what cultural imperialists of all stripes would like to suggest, are always a two way street. If hermeneutics means anything at all it means that we, as protagonists and makers of history, are constantly making fresh reassessments, in the light of subsequent events, of what we'd like to think as the hard objective, undisputable, unchangeable facts of history, for history like life is a process. For one thing, not all the facts can ever be placed in the history books; that some are chosen and placed there is already an interpretation of what is and what is not important for the narrator.

PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE