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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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