AFTERWORD 353Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt helps bring democracy to those soci-
eties, not to mention the blessings of a free market. It also seems plausible
(to some) to assert that Islamic social values are backward and need cor-
rection by more progressive people, even if force must needs be applied to
get it done.
From the other side, however, the moral and military campaigns of re-
cent times look like the long-familiar program to enfeeble Muslims in their
own countries. Western customs, legal systems, and democracy look like a
project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units
making autonomous decisions based on rational self-interest. Ultimately, it
seems, this would pit every man, woman, and child against every other, in
a competition of all against all for material goods.
What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for
citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful
strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and under-
cutting people's ability to maintain their communal selves as familial and
tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each in-
dividuallooks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.
The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best under-
stood as a "clash of civilizations," if that proposition means we're-different-
so-we-must-fight-until-there's-only-one-of-us. It's better understood as the
friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Mus-
lims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their off-
shoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds
crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is
still going on.
Unraveling the vectors of those two crowds is the minimum precondi-
tion for sorting out the doctrinal bases of today's disputes. The unraveling
will not itself produce sweetness and light, because there are actual incom-
patibilities here, not just "misunderstandings." When I started working on
this book, I read my proposal to a group of fellow writers, two of whom
declared that the conflict between the Muslim world and the West was
promoted by hidden powers because "people are really the same and we all
want the same things"; the conflict would fade away if only people in the
West understood that Islam was actually just like Christianity. "They be-
lieve in Abraham, too," one of them offered.