As we pointed out, with the disappearance of the Ottomans many Muslims felt disoriented, for example in India the 'Khilafat' movement was one of the causes of the Moplah revolt in Malabar, India, in 1921.

Another development, where for centuries Jews and Muslims had often found themselves on the same side in the struggle against the Christians, Jewish-Muslim enmity became fundamental in international relations. Even in its original form the religious elements of this hostility were not dominant.

Few of the Zionists during the 1920’s would have considered themselves religious Jews, and the struc­tures of the later State of Israel owed as much to secular east European socialism as to Judaism. Similarly, Israel's principal enemy, Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt, was a secular nation­alist who, after using them for his own purposes, actively suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Islamic funda­mentalist group setup in Egypt in 1928. Supporters of Israel did not repudiate the idea that it represented Western values, but these were secular political values rather than religious ones. Israel claimed to be the only true democracy in the Middle East, an example and a reproach to the mostly authoritarian governments of the Arab states. Arabs, however, preferred to see Israel as a new version of the Christian crusader states of the medieval period, an artificial creation that would eventually be overwhelmed by the forces of Islam.

Indian independence in 1947 undermined the reasons for British control in many countries that had been taken over to protect the route to India. By the end of 1947 British forces in Egypt had all been concentrated in the Suez Canal zone, but the need to protect that waterway could no longer be linked to India. And the old Egyptian political class seemed unable to control the situation, so in July 1952 army officers under General Neguib overthrew King Farouk and established a republic. In April 1954 Neguib was replaced as leader by Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, who signed a treaty with the British later in the year that promised the removal of British forces from Egypt. The last British troops left in March 1956, by which time Nasser had established himself as the leader of pan-Arab nationalism in the Middle East. See also:

Israel's victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War of June 1967 was to have consequences that under­mined secularism on both sides. In Israel the religious right grew in power, determined to retain and settle the land taken from the Arabs.

Where the anti-Western rhetoric of many Arab nationalists  encouraged links with the communist bloc. Egypt, for example, had close relations with the USSR from 1955 to 1972. More conservative and religious Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, were implacably opposed to any link with 'godless' communism. Stressing the importance of Islam, Saudi Arabia tried to take over leadership of the Arab states from Egypt. When the Arab League had been set up in Egypt in 1945 it largely supported secular nationalism; when Saudi Arabia took the lead in creating the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 1969 it was perhaps the largest religious interstate body in the world. While deeply Muslim, however, the Saudis were politically conservative and retained their close links with the USA.

The regular armies of the Arab states had failed to take Palestine, so a Palestine Liberation Organization (founded in 1964), under Yasser Arafat, set up a military force. Guerrilla raids were supported.The PLO, however, was based in Arab countries bordering Israel, and while some kept it under close control, others allowed it to form 'a state within a state'. The Jordanians eventually used military means to drive out the PLO in September 1970 ('Black September'), and the organization now made Lebanon its chief base.

The political structure of Lebanon had always been fragile, and the principal posts in government were divided between the Maronite Christians, the Muslims and other groups, most notably the Druze, a sect related to the Shiites. In 1975 the right-wing Christian militia clashed with leftist forces led by the Druze. It was the beginning of a civil war that would last on and off for the next fifteen years. At first the PLO tried to stay out of the conflict, but by the start of 1976 the organization was assisting the leftists, and soon their side controlled 80 per cent of Lebanon. Back in 1860 when the Muslims had been attacking the Maronite Christians, France had rushed troops to their aid, but such feelings of Christian solidarity hardly existed in the secularized West of the 1970s.

The civil war in Lebanon was a conflict that did not as yet excite the interest of the two superpowers. Of more significance to them was the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, which for the USA brought together its three principal reasons for being active in the Middle East: Israel, oil and Cold War strategy. After her 1967 victory, Israel had grown complacent about the Arab threat, while the two superpowers had lost interest in the Middle East peace process. Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, sought to stimulate renewed interest in the region by launching a surprise attack on Israel. In October 1973 the Egyptians and launched across Israel's borders and there were terrorist attacks in the wider world on Israelis and their Syrians had considerable initial success, but the USA poured military assistance into Israel and the] ewish state soon reasserted its old military superiority. For a brief moment a superpower military clash between the USA and the Soviet Union seemed possible, but was avoided.

Then in January 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to set up an Islamic republic in Iran, run as a theocracy by Shiite clerics. After decades of conflict with secular nationalists in Muslim countries, the West had been taken by surprise. The unimaginable had happened. A popular revolution had led to the creation of an Islamic fundamentalist state, and a Muslim country that had been in the forefront of modernization and Westernization had turned against the West, and particularly against its closest ally, the USA. In future, the conflict between the West and Islam would take on a very different form.

Instigated by Iran, a suicide car in 1983 destroyed the us embassy in Beirut, killed 58 French paratroopers and 241 us Marines. In the face of such effective terrorist attacks, the Western governments did not wish to continue their commitment in Beirut and soon withdrew their forces. The suicide bombers then moved on to the Israeli-occupied zone in southern Lebanon and destroyed an Israeli headquarters at Tyre later in 1983. The Israelis withdrew from most of Lebanon in 1985, but retained a security zone just north of its southern border.

Delighted by the success of their terrorist surrogates against the Americans and other Western forces in Lebanon, the Iranians then introduced Hizbollah and similar groups to the hostages game. Between 1984 and 1992 approximately 100 Westerners were kidnapped in Lebanon. Some, such as William F. Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, never returned alive, but others were ransomed by Western governments who made payments or other concessions to the kidnappers. Aware of the part the Tehran hostages affair played in the downfall of his pre­decessor, President Reagan was very sensitive to the fate of American hostages in Lebanon. This concern led him to secretly agree to supply several thousand anti-tank missiles to Iran for use in its war with Iraq, in return for which the ayatol­lahs would use their influence with the Lebanese kidnappers to secure the release of American hostages.

Three hostages were released, but others were then seized. In November 1986 the whole affair became public; President Reagan had difficulty explaining his policy, and several mem­bers of his staff faced legal proceedings. The Iranians could now claim to have humiliated two American presidents in hostage cases and to have driven the American military out of Lebanon.

Due to the drawn out Iran-Iraq war by the end of the 1980s most of the worst fears about the impact of the Iranian Islamic revolution, failed to spark a series of similar Islamic fundamentalist revolts across the Muslim world. Thus in  1986 the CIA decided to give active support to the policy Pakistan’s secret service (ISI)  had begun in 1982, of recruiting radical Muslim vol­unteers from around the world to join the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Invasion. Between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim volunteers from 43 countries fought alongside the mujahideen. The recruitment policy had apparent advantages for the leading players on the anti-Soviet side. General Zia aimed to cement Islamic unity and make Pakistan a leader of the Muslim world; the USA wanted to show that the whole Muslim world was fighting the USSR.

By 1990 it seemed that the USA had surmounted its main problems in the Muslim world. Revolutionary Iran had been contained and weakened by its long war with Iraq, while the Islamic resistance movement in Afghanistan had forced the Soviets to admit defeat and withdraw. But in time it would become obvious that many of the Muslim volunteers had their own agendas. Their hostility to the Soviets would one day be turned against the USA and the Muslim governments that were its allies. Plus that same year, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Claiming that the conquest of one country by another could not be allowed to stand and that Saddam Hussein now posed a threat to Saudi Arabia, the USA set about assembling an international coalition that was intended to stop the Iraqi dictator in his tracks. The ruler of Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, agreed to invite American, British, French and other 'infidel' forces into the heartland of Islam. But, many ordinary Muslims around the world saw Saddam Hussein as a hero, a new Saladin opposing what they interpret to be Western imperialists today.

Yet the growing collapse of the communist bloc gave the United States both more freedom to act and more forces to send. In the second half of February 1991 General Schwarzkopf launched the coalition ground offensive aimed at liberating Kuwait. Distracting Iraqi forces in Kuwait by threatening an amphibious landing and launching some direct attacks on their positions, Schwarzkopf made his main effort many miles inland through the desert. This left hook around the flank of the Iraqis achieved swift success and only narrowly failed to trap the Iraqi forces trying to escape from Kuwait. In only 100 hours of ground combat dozens of Iraqi divisions were destroyed, along with all their tanks and other equipment that had not already been knocked out by air attacks. Although General Schwarzkopf hoped he could go on to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein, President George H. W Bush decided otherwise, and a ceasefire was agreed with the Iraqis.

While Saddam Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising, when attacks were made on the Kurds the USA and Britain created 'safe haven' areas for those people and threatened to launch air attacks on the Iraqis if they continued their offensive. One reason President Bush allowed the Iraqi dictator to sur­vive was because of fears of what sort of regime would succeed him. The majority Shiite population in Iraq would probably have taken power in Baghdad.

Elsewhere that same year the break-up of the Soviet Union gave independence to many Muslim peoples, but  the dissolution of Yugoslavia after 1991 brought both freedom and suffering for its Muslim populations. These were the Muslim remnants left behind as the Ottoman empire diminished during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chief groups in Yugoslavia in 1991 were the Muslims of Bosnia, sometimes known as Bosniaks, and the Albanian Muslims who dominated Kosovo, a province of Serbia, and had a large minority in Macedonia. The Serbs had domi­nated the old Yugoslavia and they were determined that even if that state was broken up, one of its successors would be a 'greater Serbia' which included the Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia. In 1991 Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Slovenia broke away with little trouble, while after some heavy fighting a UN-backed ceasefire was achieved in Croatia in 1992, leaving only a few Serb areas outside the control of the new government in Zagreb. The worst violence in the fall of Yugoslavia was to occur in Bosnia, where the Muslim popula­tion found itself under threat from both groups of Christian inhabitants, the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats.

In 1991 the main ethnic divisions of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina were 44 per cent Muslim, 3 I per cent Serb and 17 per cent Croat. There were hopes that a unitary, multi-cultural state could be established when Bosnian inde­pendence was declared in March 1992 with Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, as president of the new country. Unfortunately, most Bosnian Serbs were opposed to independence and a civil war soon broke out. As the remains of the federal Yugoslav army withdrew from Bosnia, they handed over most of their weapons, including artillery, to the Bosnian Serbs. This mili­tary advantage allowed the Bosnian Serbs to overrun most of the country and begin a siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, which would continue intermittently for the next three years. Although comprising only one third of the population, the Bosnian Serbs took control of 70 per cent of the country, and their political leader, Radovan Karadic, set up his 'capital' at Pale, near Sarajevo. Slobodan Milosevic, president of what remained of Yugoslavia, continued to give military and other assistance to the Serbs in Bosnia.

After much political back and forth in June 1993 the UN declare six towns in Bosnia - Sarajevo, Bihac, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde and Srebrenica - to be 'safe areas' for Muslims, where they would be protected. Some 25,000 UN peacekeeping troops went to Bosnia, but they had only limited success in setting up and protecting the 'safe areas'. The United States showed a marked reluctance to become involved in any ground commit­ment in Bosnia that might lead to military losses. The American preference was for a policy of 'lift and strike', that is, lift the arms embargo so that anti-Serb forces could obtain better weapons and then support their operations with selective air strikes. For many months, however, the Americans did little to carry out even this policy, and the winter of 1993-4 was one of the darkest periods for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Although reluctant to act itself, the United States was prepared to turn a blind eye to the military assistance that Bosnian Muslims were receiving from the Islamic world in defiance of the UN arms embargo. Thus arms shipments to Bosnia from Iran, supposedly America's great enemy, enjoyed tacit us approval, and such shipments were often financed by Saudi Arabia, a major American ally and usually hostile to Shiite Iran. The Saudis also mobilized the Organization of the Islamic Conference to send other forms of aid to the Bosnian Muslims, and to pressure the West for direct intervention in the conflict. As in Afghanistan in the 1 980s, Muslim volunteers from around the world came to Bosnia to assist their co-religionists, and their total number probably exceeded 4,000. Some had fought in the earlier Afghan war, while others were from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The European allies of the United States were uneasy about this increased Islamic activity in the Balkans, but since neither they nor the Americans were ready to under­take a decisive military intervention in Bosnia, there was little they could do to curb it. By the second half of 1994, Islamic mil­itary support had helped the Bosnian government army to become a much more effective fighting force.

Early in 1994 increased Bosnian Serb attacks on Sarajevo brought threats that the UN would authorize air strikes against the besiegers. More importantly, in March the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croats made peace and agreed to cooperate in the struggle against the Bosnian Serbs. By the end of 1994 the USA had declared it would no longer observe the UN arms embargo and gave substantial military assistance to Croatia; lesser military aid went to the Bosnian government. Diplomatic efforts to find a way to peace also continued, and during 1994 the five-nation Contact Group (USA, Russia, France, Britain, Germany) put forward a plan for settling the Bosnian war. A Muslim-Croat federation would have 51 per cent of the country, a Serb republic would have 49 per cent, and they would be linked in a joint Bosnian government. Since they still controlled more than two-thirds of Bosnia, the Serbs rejected the plan, but it would eventually form the basis of the final peace agreement in 1995.

In March 1995 an alliance was agreed between President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Presidentlzetbegovic of Bosnia, aimed at the final defeat of the Serb insurgents in both their countries. Occasional NATO air strikes on the Bosnian Serbs now started, and in June the Bosnian government felt its forces were strong enough to launch offensives against its enemies around Sarajevo and at Bihac in western Bosnia. The Bosnian Serb reaction was to launch attacks on the UN 'safe areas' for Muslims. In July General Ratko Mladic's forces took Srebrenica and massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the worst single atrocity of the Bosnian war. Mladic went on to take Zepa and then threaten Gorazde, but overall the Bosnian Serb position was beginning to collapse. NATO air attacks on the Bosnian Serbs became more numerous and effective during August, and the Serb forces in western Bosnia were steadily driven back by the Croats and Muslims. The Bosnian Serbs began to withdraw their heavy weapons from around besieged Sarajevo in September, and soon afterwards they agreed to a ceasefire.

Perhaps the most important reason for the collapse of the Bosnian Serbs was the decision of President Milosevic of Yugoslavia to cut off assistance to them. In November 1995 Milosevic met the presidents of Croatia and Bosnia at Dayton, Ohio, in the United States to bring an end to what has been called the 'third Balkan war'. Milosevic forced the Bosnian Serbs to accept a settlement in Bosnia that largely followed the proposals made by the Contact Group in 1994, and American, British and French troops were sent into Bosnia to implement the Dayton Peace Agreement. In all, perhaps 25,000 people were killed during the Bosnian war and several million became refugees. It was the worst conflict in Europe since the Second World War, and even after the Dayton Accords relations among Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia remained strained.

If President Milosevic looked like a peacemaker at Dayton, this did not imply any slackening in his commitment to Serb nationalism. The province of Kosovo in southern Serbia was almost holy ground to Serbs because they believed that it was there that the Ottoman Turks had destroyed the independence of Serbia in battle in 1389. The problem for the Serbs was that, by 1991, 90 per cent of the population of the province was made up of Muslim Albanians, usually known as Kosovars, and only IQ per cent were Serbs. With other areas of the former Yugoslavia breaking away from Serb control, it was hardly sur­prising that the Kosovars would want to do the same, or that Milosevic would seek to prevent them.

In 1996 the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began terrorist attacks on Serbs in the province. The KLA'S stated aim was independence for Kosovo, but this might only be a prelude to union with Albania in a 'greater Albania' that could also include the Muslim Albanians in Macedonia. In 1998 Serbian forces stepped up their operations against the KLA, and the inter­national community became concerned that 'ethnic cleansing' activities similar to those in Bosnia might take place in Kosovo. International pressure forced the rival parties to attend a con­ference in Paris in March 1999 and attempt to find a peaceful settlement. The KLA finally agreed to accept autonomy rather than independence for the province, but Milosevic refused to allow a NATO force to enter Kosovo to implement the agree­ment. This defiance led to eleven weeks of NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia. The intention was said to be to discourage the Serbs from driving out the Kosovars; the result was just the opposite. "Within weeks the Serbs had forced more than half a million Kosovars to flee as refugees to neighboring countries.

NATO had originally declared that it would not launch a land attack on Yugoslavia, hoping that the KLA would exploit the air attacks to advance on the ground. The Yugoslav (Serb) military in Kosovo largely survived the bombing, however, and pre­vented a KLA advance. By the summer of 1999 it became clear that some NATO land intervention might be needed. This possi­bility, added to the increasing wider impact of the air attacks, led Milosevic to give in to international demands in June 1999. Serb forces were withdrawn from Kosovo, NATO forces replaced them, and the province came under UN administration while its future was determined. Nevertheless, the peace settlements achieved in Bosnia and Kosovo remain fragile, and the activities of Muslim Albanians in Macedonia have begun to destabilize that country as well. In the context of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Western powers liked to see themselves as defenders of the Muslims, whether in Bosnia or Kosovo, against the Serbs.

And today, although memories of the crusades are touted by bin-Laden and his follower, the new conflict between the post-Christian West and Islam is more a clash between secular materialism and a revived reli­gion.

It was the Iranian revolution of 1979 that re-injected religious fervor into one side of the Christian-Muslim struggle and unleashed powerful forces that the West at first struggled to understand. A new vari­ant of the old conflict between the two sides had now begun.

During the overtly religious phase of the Christian-Muslim conflict, from the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 to the end of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, the military contest for the first 1,000 years or so had largely favoured the Muslims. The Arab conquests had largely overrun the Christian heart­lands around the Mediterranean Sea, and only the remnants of the Byzantine empire and the backward states of western Europe remained to uphold the Christian cause. The Byzantines beat off Muslim attacks, and in the second half of the tenth century began to win back territory, but they went into decline after their defeat at Manzikert in I071 by the Seljuk Turks. By the end of the eleventh century the Christians of western Europe had replaced the Byzantines as the principal defenders of Christendom and through the First Crusade had thrust deep into the Muslim heartlands, retaking Jerusalem. By 1300, how­ever, the Muslims had rallied and driven the Christians out of Palestine and Syria once again. This success was of more impor­tance to the wider Islamic world than the loss of most Muslim lands in distant Iberia to the Christian Reconquista.

In all these wars the technological gap between the two sides was not great. Innovations such as Byzantine 'Greek Fire' or Turkish horse archers had important short-term impacts, but the opposing side soon adjusted. Muslims mastered Christian siege techniques, while the Christian military orders soon had 'turcopole' light cavalry to complement their own heavy cavalry in the Holy Land. With no major technological advantage on either side, other factors became of more significance in Christian-Muslim warfare, most notably unity, leadership and discipline. The greatest advantage the Muslims gave the Christians was their tendency to dissolve into rival factions. Each of the main Christian advances in Iberia between 1000 and I2 50 was preceded by the collapse of al-Andalus into warring taifa states. Even during the last stage of the Reconquista, the war for Granada, the Muslims were fighting a civil war among themselves as well as trying to fend off Christian attacks. Above all, it was the collapse of the Seljuk Turkish empire in the late eleventh century that gave the Western Christians their chance to invade the Muslim heartlands, capture Jerusalem, and set up the crusader states of Outremer.

To restore unity on the Muslim side and revive the jihad against the Christians required strong leadership. In the Middle East this was provided by Zengi, Nur aI-Din and, above all, Saladin. Muslim unity was restored, a united Muslim state was created along the borders of Outremer, and Jerusalem was recaptured in l187. In contrast, in Iberia the interventions of the Almoravids and later the Almohads could only instil a short­lived unity in al-Andalus, with both these Berber powers always fatally distracted by affairs in North Africa. The Mamluks of Egypt were finally to destroy Outremer, but their strength lay not some much in leadership - although they had great com­manders like Baybars - and more in their disciplined military organization. Slave armies had been a feature of the Muslim military world since the ninth century, and when properly con­trolled they gave the Muslims a significant advantage. After the Byzantine army degenerated into a force of mercenaries, the defenders of Christendom were usually feudal levies raised by Western Christian kings who had no large permanent forces of their own. The Christian military orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers were an attempt to overcome this weakness in the context of garrisoning Outremer. Many Muslim rulers had disciplined bodies of slave troops, which provided a permanent force and a core around which their other military forces could be assembled in wartime. The Mamluks of Egypt carried this process somewhat further. In 1250 they had taken control of the state and their sultans were often no more than the first among equals. Nevertheless, the disciplined Mamluk military machine was capable of both destroying the crusader states and inflicting defeats on the previously invincible Mongols.

The four military factors of leadership, unity, discipline and technology were most successfully brought together in the Muslim world by the Ottoman Turks between 1300 and 1600, producing the greatest threat to Christendom since the Arab conquests. For ten generations almost every Ottoman ruler had significant leadership qualities that were not only deployed to wage jihad against the Christians, but also to impose unity throughout the growing Ottoman empire. The Ottomans also brought the disciplined Muslim slave army to its highest peak in their elite household troops, above all the janissaries. The origins of permanent royal armies in Christian Europe are to be found in the late fifteenth century, but the Ottomans laid the foundations of such a force a century earlier and had largely cre­ated one by the time they took Constantinople in 1453. The Ottomans also proved willing to adopt the latest Inilitary technology, quickly taking up gunpowder weapons, including siege guns, field artillery and handguns.

Although primarily a land power, the Ottomans also built up a navy and by 1500 it was successfully challenging Christian power in the Mediterranean. Naval warfare and maritime endeavour was the one Inilitary field in which Christendom had achieved a lasting superiority over the Muslims after the year 1000. The Italian maritime states such as Venice and Genoa, later followed by French and Catalan port cities, achieved ascendancy in the Mediterranean Sea in both naval warfare and maritime trade from the eleventh century onwards. The cru­sader states of Outremer could not have survived for almost two centuries without the support of Christian shipping. Nor could the later crusaders have pursued 'the way of Egypt' without Christian ships to carry their men, horses and supplies. Outremer eventually fell to the Muslims, but Christian mar­itime domination of the Mediterranean remained until the Ottomans mounted a major challenge to it during the sixteenth century. Eventually the Christians retained control of the cen­tral and western Mediterranean, despite the continued attacks of the Barbary pirates, but the eastern Mediterranean came under Ottoman control.

The Christian-Muslim naval conflict in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century was important, but already that sea was becoming a comparative backwater in terms of worldwide maritime strategy. The Western Christians had developed the ocean-going sailing ship, and from the late fifteenth century onwards they began to use such ships to venture across the oceans of the world, exploring, trading, fighting and colonizing.

The movement was led by Spain and Portugal, the latter nation explicitly aiming to destroy the valuable spice trade routes across the Muslim Middle East by establishing direct sea routes to India and the Far East. Of the three great Muslim empires of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turks, the Safavid Persians and the Mughals in India, only the Turks had significant naval forces, and they were largely galley fleets concentrated in the Mediterranean. The Muslim empires were still formidable on land, but they conceded control of the eastern seas to the European maritime powers with comparatively little resistance. Once the Islamic world had hemmed Christendom into a small peninsula of Eurasia; now the Christians had outflanked the Muslims and broken out into the wider world.

Yet the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals were not greatly concerned about their naval weakness. They were pri­marily land powers, and their large and formidable armies still appeared to have the advantage over Christian forces. All this began to change during the seventeenth century as Christian European armies grew in size, discipline and technological sophistication. Ottoman military decline was marked by a loss of leadership, few sultans after 1600 commanding their armies in the field; by growing disunity within the empire; by the undermining of discipline among the janissaries and other household troops; and by a growing reluctance to adopt the new military methods and equipment of the West. Christian armies became stronger and more efficient, while Muslim military power dwindled. Although Muslim armies were still large and their soldiers often recklessly brave, it was not enough. Increasingly, the Muslims knew how to die but not how to win. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Christian armies were consistently defeating Muslim ones, whether on the borders of the Ottoman empire or in the fast-diminishing Mughal empire in India.

The Muslim failure to adapt to military modernity is high­lighted by the differing fortunes of Russia and the Ottoman empire. In 1600 Moscow seemed to envoys from western Europe almost as Asiatic a capital as Constantinople, but the Russians were to show a greater determination than the Ottomans in adopting European methods, particularly in military affairs. Czar Peter the Great destroyed the steltsi, the old react­ionary military elite of Muscovy, in 1698; the Ottoman sultan did not crush the janissaries, his reactionary military elite, until 1826. The Russians brought in European military and naval advisers and adopted the latest European military technology. By the second half of the eighteenth century the Russian army and fleet were steadily shedding their foreign advisers and emerging as major forces on the European military scene. The Ottoman sultans brought in some European military and naval advisers and attempted technological modernization in areas such as artillery and warships, but the old conservative military groups usually managed to thwart most innovations, often in alliance with Muslim religious leaders. Instead of achieving a military modernization to match that of Russia, the Ottoman empire was to become the principal victim of growing Russian military power.

Thus by the first decades of the nineteenth century the Christian states of Europe could increasingly dominate Muslim states in land warfare as they had long done in sea warfare. The result was that the nineteenth century saw the peak of European imperialism around the world and Muslim populations were among its main victims. Islam gave those populations an orga­nizing principle, often reinforced by Sufi brotherhoods, that allowed them to put up a stronger resistance than some other victims of European imperialism, but in the end even resisters like Abd el-Kader and Shamil had to give in to the military power of Christian Europe.

By the 1920's there were few truly independent Muslim states left in the world, and most Muslims lived under some form of colonial rule. Air power was now added to land and sea power to reinforce Christian military dominance. For a time the British even thought that air power alone might be sufficient to police some of the remaining Muslim resisters in their empire, but this view proved too optimistic and military garrisons were still ne­cessary. European military domination of the Muslim world seemed unassailable, but after 1945 political changes made it irrelevant. Christian values became progressively less important in Western countries, while stressing secular values such as free­dom and democracy undermined their will to dominate other  peoples around the world. Militarily, the Anglo-French forces won at Suez in 1956, the French gained the upper hand against the Algerian rebels, and the Dutch overran the Indonesian nationalists. Politically, the three European powers were defeated by superpower hostility and critical international opinion, forcing them to withdraw from their Muslim colonies.

As decolonization came to an end in the 1970s, a new Western military power, or rather superpower, the United States of America, began to be increasingly active in the Muslim world and particularly the Middle East. The USA'S three main concerns were to exclude Soviet influence during the Cold War; to ensure Western control of the region's oil supplies; and to defend the state of Israel, created in 1948. Despite earlier clashes with the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and the Moro rebels in the Philippines, the USA had no real record of past oppression in the Muslim world, unlike the Russians, British and French. It was now the leader of the Western world, however, and espoused secular materialist values that many reli­gious Muslims found unacceptable. Their resentment of America was considerably sharpened by the Iranian revolution of 1979, which installed an Islamic fundamentalist regime openly hostile to the 'Great Satan'. Although the Americans supported Muslims in the Soviet-Mghan war of the 1980s and in the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s, they were increasingly viewed as the main enemy by Muslim fundamentalists. The growing presence of us air, land and sea forces in the Middle East from the late 1980s onwards only heightened fears among some Muslims of a new age of Western imperialism.

The rapid destruction of Sad dam Hussein's Iraqi armed forces by the American-led coalition during the Gulf War of 1991 showed the impotence of even a supposedly strong Muslim military power in the face of superior American military technology. Despite the past pretensions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, there is no Muslim state powerful enough to act as overall leader of the Muslim world on the Ottoman model. There is certainly no Muslim state today that can deploy the sort of military power that the Ottoman empire wielded in its prime. In terms of conventional warfare any future Christian-Muslim conflict will be no contest. The military domination of the USA on land, on sea and in the air is at the pre­sent time unassailable. It is for that reason that the emerging conflict has become increasingly concentrated on guerrilla warfare and terrorism, warfare in which the political dimension is as important as the military.

At a time when the military superiority of the West ­meaning chiefly the USA - over the Muslim world has never been greater, Western countries feel insecure in the face of the activities of Islamic terrorists who make up only a tiny minority of the world's Muslim population. In all the long centuries of Christian-Muslim conflict, never has the mil­itary imbalance between the two sides been greater, yet the dominant West can apparently derive no comfort from that fact. Born in the Afghan war against Soviet invaders, when, ironically, it was supported by the USA, the international Islamic fundamentalist resistance movement has continued its struggle on battlefields as far apart as Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya and Somalia. The terrorist attack in London in July 2005 exploited the open nature of Western society and to date, Islamic terrorists remain both active and elusive, why, is what we will see next.

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