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of art. Anyone, even with a limited knowledge of art and architecture, can look through a folder of photographs of buildings and objects and pick out those that are Islamic. The arcade and minaret of the mosque, the arabesque and geometrical patterns of decoration, the rules of sequence and association of both poetry and cookery-all these, despite many variations, show a fundamental unity of tradition and aesthetic that is Islamic, and derives essentially from Middle Eastern-Arabic, Persian, or Turkish-archetypes. In music, buildings, carpets, and cuisine, this unity in diversity of Islamic civilization can be heard, touched, seen, and tasted. It is also present, though less easy to identify and understand, in such things as law, government, and institutions, in social and political attitudes and ideas.

    The Islamic history of the Middle East was begun by the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, which, for the first time since Alexander, created a united imperial system from North Africa to the borders of India and China. The territorial and administrative unity of the Arab Empire was in time eroded and destroyed by invasion, dissension, and the processes of political fragmentation; the dominance of the Arab nation was challenged and ended by the rise of other nations within Islam. But the religious and cultural unity of Middle Eastern Islam survived, and was symbolized in the ideal unity of the caliphate, which all agreed to respect. There were moments of grave danger when Islam was threatened from both east and west, but they were overcome. The Turks indeed came as conquerors, but they were converted and assimilated and brought new strength and vigor to a faltering society and polity. With that strength, Islam was able to hold and repel another invasion, that of the Crusaders, from the west.
    From both directions, however, new and deadlier blows were to follow. On two occasions, the Islamic Middle East was crushed and overwhelmed by alien invaders who dominated it by force of arms and, if they did not destroy the old civilization, sapped the confidence of those who maintained it and turned them on to new paths. The first was the invasion of the heathen Mongols from eastern Asia, who ended the Baghdad caliphate and, for the first time since the Prophet, subjected some of the heartlands of Islam to non-Islamic rule. The second was the impact of the modern West.

     

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The Impact of the West
    It has been our practice for some time now to speak of the group of countries to which we belong as the West, a term that is no longer a purely geographical expression, but also denotes a cultural, social, and, until recently, a political and military entity. What are the geographical boundaries of this entity-not merely of the Western alliance, which are fairly obvious, but of the larger entity whose will to survive the alliance expressed? The westernmost limit of the West is clear enough: the Pacific coast-and dependencies-of North America. The eastern limit is more problematic. Leaving aside the local American concept of the West, the West as a cultural or civilizational entity has generally been understood to cover both shores of the North Atlantic and to extend into Europe to a point that has been variously fixed, at various times and for various purposes, on the Channel, the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder, the Vistula, the Bosphorus, and the Ural Mountains, the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia.
    The West is most easily defined in relation to the East, and of course there is more than one East. In the West, when we used to speak of East-West contrasts and conflicts, we usually meant the Cold War and its ramifications. In this sense, the East meant the Soviet or Communist blocs (the two were not identical); the West meant the Western alliance and its associates, sometimes loosely called the free world. It included, in this context, a string of more or less dictatorial regimes on several continents, but