    22

    diver

    sity renders the notion of an Islamic threat, in Said's word,

    "phony."83  However, diversity within a cultural community does not

    necessarily halt its expansionist drive.  The European West spread its

    often brutal control over every continent while so divided and

    "diverse" that it was engaged in an almost nonstop series of internecine

    wars.  And early Islam conquered a territory almost equally vast while

    its leaders squabbled and fought, and its religious sects were rent by

    schism.

    Esposito, like many other writers on the topic, justifies the

    ferocity of anti-western Islamic sentiments by reminding us that "many

    in the Arab and Muslim world view the history of Islam and of the

    Muslim world's dealings with the West as one of victimization and

    oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power."  There's no

    question he is right.84  However the Islamic world held the upper hand

    in the struggle between the Occident and the Levant for over 1,100

    years.  The West managed to turn the tables briefly when the

    Crusaders established a short-lived middle eastern toehold.  However,

    the Crusader states were not planted on undisputed Moslem land.  The

    heartland of the Islamic empire, the section bordering the

    Mediterranean rim, was a deeply Christian area, a vital spiritual and

    economic core of a "Western" imperium which, for over six hundred

    years before Mohammed's birth, had included the non-Arab provinces

    of Turkey (known then as Asia, Galatia, Bithynia, Pontus and

    Cappadocia--where St. Paul established many of the first churches),

    Syria (whose city of Damascus was one of the earliest major Christian

    centers), Israel (homeland to the Jews since roughly 1,200 B.C., and,

    despite Roman efforts to expel the native population, still dotted with

    Hebrew villages when the Moslems arrived sword in hand), Egypt

    (populated at the time by rabidly Christian descendants of the

    pyramid-builders, along with significant numbers of Greeks and Jews),

    Libya (the former Cyrenaica), Tunisia (Carthage and its environs,

    where St. Augustine was born and eventually became bishop of

    Hippo), and Northern Algeria and Morocco (then called Mauritania).

    These were the countries that had produced the Bible, the Christian

    monastic movement (born in Egypt), St. Jerome's conversion (in what

    is now Turkey), St. John of Damascus, the famed early church historian

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