The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, by Richard Bulliet, a Middle East specialist at Columbia University, also seeks to bridge the gap between Islam and the West, although his approach is historical rather than theological. He is dismayed by the widening rift between the two camps; his solution is to try to patch things up by emphasizing all that Islam and Christianity have in common. If he can demonstrate that Islam and Christianity constitute not two civilizations but one, then a clash of civilizations between them becomes more and more unlikely.

To this end, Bulliet devotes considerable energy to showing how the two religions proceeded along parallel tracks during much of their formative period. Although Christianity would appear to be the older by some 600 years, he points out, the Western Church did not begin its historic expansion until after the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, which makes it roughly contemporaneous with the Arab expansion in the Middle East. As both faiths began to grow and develop, both gave rise to parallel bodies of religious specialists--monks, on the one hand, and the ulema, "possessors of religious knowledge," on the other. Not long after centers of Islamic learning known as madrasas appeared in the eleventh century, the first universities began taking shape in cities like Paris and Bologna--another parallel that Bulliet finds intriguing. As religious fervor grew, he notes, the two camps also saw the appearance of popular preaching societies, the Beghards and Beguines among the thirteenth-century French and Flemish, the Sufis among the Arabs and other Muslim nations.

Bulliet's polemic is well intentioned, but it is more than a bit one-sided. In emphasizing the similarities between Muslim and Christian development, he winds up obscuring differences that are no less crucial. The madrasas and universities that he describes as parallel institutions, for instance, were actually polar opposites. As the historian Toby Huff has shown, madrasas were pillars of orthodoxy that allowed only one type of law to be taught (Islamic, needless to say) and one school of interpretation. Because rivals rarely engaged in face-to-face debate, students were not trained to wrestle with contradictions but to ignore them or, even worse, to regard them as threatening to the unity of Islam. European universities, by contrast, grew out of a guild tradition that allowed for a far greater degree of autonomy and self-governance. Rather than one type of law, they taught two, canon and Roman (or common law in the case of England). Disputations were central to the curriculum, and at the University of Paris, the oldest such institution north of the Alps, discussions were periodically thrown open so that students, teachers and visitors could raise any topic they wished. A series of thirteenth-century popes tried to prohibit the teaching of Aristotle but got nowhere; simultaneously, it was said of a religious leader in Damascus named Ibn al-Salah that he forbade the study of "logic and philosophy" on the grounds that both were sacrilegious and that "kings obeyed him." As important as it is to know what drew the two religions together, it is equally important to know what drove them apart.

Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam also tackles the East-West divide, although it chiefly succeeds in demonstrating the poverty of a certain kind of sociological approach in which ultra-fine distinctions are drawn, paradoxes are posed and the language grows increasingly cloudy and obscure. Roy has come a long way from the 1980s, when, as a cheerleader for the Afghan mujahedeen, he was assuring readers that the reimposition of Shariah in the Afghan countryside was nothing to worry about because "cutting off a thief's hand, or stoning couples caught in adultery, are very rare events." Still, his attitude in his latest study remains faintly exculpatory. He argues that "the debate on what the Koran says is sterile" and that "the role of Islam in shaping contemporary societies has been overemphasized." Because Islam is not a problem, therefore, there is no need to put it under the microscope and subject it to a thoroughgoing critique. For similar reasons, he maintains that the danger posed by Al Qaeda has been much exaggerated and that the group will never amount to more than a "security problem" because it "has no strategy in the true sense of the word."

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