George Frederick Jewett Scholar Michael Novak

The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little unsettling.

Islam began making war on the Christian world from the very first moments of its birth. For a thousand years afterward, it fell to southern Europe, and in particular the pope, to give active military resistance to the Saracens. From A.D. 632 until about 1292, Arab nations led the Muslim onslaught on the West. After that, the Turks established their dominion (the caliphate) over most of the Arab world. For hundreds of years, a huge sea war ensued for control of the Mediterranean. But war by land was not called off. The Turks expanded their empire in all four directions on the map.

By 1540, the Reformation was separating the Christian nations of the north from Rome, and the sultans soon recognized that the Christian world would no longer fight as one. The next hundred years or so would be the most fruitful time since Muhammad's to fulfill the destiny of Islam in Europe.

There is no point here in giving the whole narrative of the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. In four hours, the battle was over. More than forty thousand men had died, and thousands more were wounded, more than in any other battle in history. After their defeat, never again did Muslim fleets pose a grave danger to Europe from the south. Technology--especially that pioneered by Venice and by ocean-going Portugal and Spain--had made the decisive difference. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, it was to capitalism that the victory was owed, for it was open markets that spurred competition to keep improving gunnery and ships, and it was the great merchant and commercial cities that built these new technologies. After Lepanto, the arts of gunnery replaced the arts of the bow and arrow. Ships were made stouter, taller, and more able to carry heavy armaments--and new methods had to be sought to replace locomotion by galley slaves.

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The Battle of Vienna in September 1683 had many of the same forces at play as Lepanto, only this time by land, not by sea. By July 7, Sultan Mehmet IV's army was in sight of Vienna. For the next several weeks, the sultan's army kept tightening the ring they had established on all sides of Vienna.

Meanwhile, Christian relief forces were belatedly and all too slowly advancing to lift the siege. On September 12, the Christian forces broke through the Vienna Woods and reached open ground with less than an hour of daylight left. The sheer speed and force of the Polish hussars was too great and too surprising to be resisted by the Ottoman army. The Christians pursued the fleeing Turks down through Hungary, retaking one city after another from Muslim control.

Thus, once again, Muslims had attempted to fulfill the Prophet's command to spread Islam to all corners of the world decisively and with force. The sultans had long had the advantage of an enormous standing army ready for all seasons. This time, however, the battle outside the walls of Vienna was the high-water mark of Muslim power. After September 11-12, 1683, that power kept receding--on into modern times.

It should surprise no one that the date chosen to bring the new resurgence of modern Muslim ambition to the whole world's attention was also September 11--318 years after 1683. The announcement came in the vivid orange bursts of blossoming flame and dark black smoke from two of the tallest towers of the West's financial capital. Muslim memory runs very deep, and so does the Muslim imperative to conquer the world for Allah. The West has always refused to give this long and deeply rooted Muslim threat against the West's own soul the sustained attention it requires.

Today, in most of the capitals of once-Christian Europe, there are more Muslims attending services in mosques on Fridays than Christians at worship on Sundays. In some ways, the pluralism of the West is a blessing, even an advantage--and yet its profoundest historical weakness lies in its own divided spirit. The ultimate issue between Islam and the West is not military force. It is the depth of intellect and engagement. In matters of the spirit, we seem always to become tongue-tied, as if lacking in spirited confidence. We do not insist on presenting better arguments in recognition of the inalienable rights to human liberty that our totalitarian opponents deny. Mere secular force will not do when the fundamental battle is spiritual. Thus, the same movie seems to be played over and over.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.