Following the horrific events of Sept 11 2001, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists have been prodding the world down a spiral of threats and counter threats, inching towards a fulfillment of that once laughable vision of an apocalyptic civilisational clash between the post-Christian West and the Islamic East.

The people in the White House who are running the "war against terror" have the unprecedented popular support of the political right and religious conservatives. They may repeatedly deny that they are casting Islam and Muslims as the new scourge of the world or terrorism as being intrinsic to Islam, but the reality convinces few Muslims.

Measures put in place in the name of fighting terrorism have meant harassment and undignified treatment of Muslim and Middle-Eastern men at the hands of immigration officers and law enforcers; serious erosion of civil liberties and human rights; open discrimination; and the rise of unabashed Islamophobia in the world's mainstream media.

Few believe that the looming war against Iraq war is not underpinned as much by ingrained prejudice against Islam as by imperialistic designs to control the world's energy resources which happen to lie beneath where Muslims live.

The war has been drummed up in an inept way the pretext at first was Saddam's links to al-Qaeda, and now, of Iraq's build-up of weapons of mass destruction when no proof of the former has yet been found.

Terrorism, religious or otherwise, is real menace. Instead of seeing it as a great moral problem that the world needs to collectively address by seeking out its root causes and striving to find genuine solutions, the war mongers with their thinly veiled designs know only too well that there is nothing like pandering to the passions of religious fanatics on both sides to create and maintain the mood for war, the only way through which these objectives can be achieved.

Divided perceptions

East is East and West is West...The casual Western observer passively fed on the diet of today's media would arrive at the conclusion that a post-Christian West and Islamic East are wholly incompatible, ever antagonistic, and that soon the former would come out triumphant in that climactic civilisational showdown.

To the simple Third World Muslim, Christianity is a Western religion. At no time is this Muslim misperception more pronounced than during Christmas with images of Santa Claus riding his sledge in a winter wonderland to bring presents to happy European children.

And if the Crusades are too historically remote, there is always the collective memory of European colonialism whose more genteel pretext was to civilise the savages through the Bible.

To be civilised is to adopt the ways of the Western man, including his religion. No doubt, this aspect of the East-West encounter European colonialism whose legacy has shaped today's geopolitics and continues to exert its influence has been one of the more potent factors fuelling the conflict between fanatical followers of Islam and Christianity up to today.

Historical connections

Yet for all this long history of conflict and cultural tension, Islam and Christianity are closely linked in more ways than one. To start of with, the two great religions shared the same geographical origin, the ever volatile Middle East.

It is ironically at Christmas time that one is reminded of this fact of Christianity's birth place through Nativity plays and carols about the beautiful Star of Bethlehem "guiding the wise men on their way, unto the place where Jesus lay..."

A great many Muslims, myself included, long used to the idea that Christianity has become wholly Westernised, have been pleasantly surprised by recent events that some historical vestiges of Christianity's origins still exist today. These include Manger Square of that beautiful carol "away in a manger" and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Only that this awareness has come about when the Palestinian people were suffering their cruelest blow in recent times.

Last year, riding opportunistically on the war against terror, the Israeli army invaded West Bank towns including Bethlehem in response to the acts of Palestinian suicide bombers, culminating in the siege of the Church of the Nativity where a group of Palestinians had sought refuge.

That such violence and destruction could have taken place at the very site where Jesus was born must have conveyed a deep sense of sad irony to many people. The Church of the Nativity where the Palestinians occupied has had a long association with Islam that stretches back to the religion's earliest years.

During the course of Islam's early expansion, Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem was obliged to hand over Palestine in AD 638 to Umar Ibn AlKhattab, Islam's second caliph and a companion of the Prophet.

Cordial relations were established between the two men and the Church's sanctity was respected by Umar. Muslims were given the right to pray in the south aisle, a right that has been maintained to this day.

Positive encounters

Uninformed non-Muslims may harbour the perception that Muslims are anti-Christian and anti-Jesus in reciprocity of the way that fanatical Christians have slandered Prophet Muhammad and Islam, the tele-evangelist Jerry Fahwell being the latest to come down this very long line.

And this is not helped by the Muslim fundamentalists' fiery promises of total annihilation of Christians and Jews. But the truth is nothing at all like that.

Many people are surprised to learn that Muslims actually revere Jesus as one of God's great messengers, and do not mention his name without adding "peace be upon him" out of respect and reverence.

There are numerous narrations in the Quran of the miraculous birth of Jesus by the Virgin Mary that mirror Christian ones. In fact a chapter in the Quran is entitled Surah Maryam (Mary) and another, Surah Al-Imran (family of the Virgin Mary)

Apart from those scriptural parallels, Muslims are also familiar with Prophet Muhammad's encounters with Christians.

At the beginning of his prophetic mission, shivering violently and greatly disturbed by self-doubt after the archangel Gabriel came to him to announce that he had been appointed God's final messenger, Muhammad sought the counsel of (his wife) Khadijah's uncle, Waraqah Ibn Naufal, a devout Christian scholar.

It was only after Waraqah helped extinguish his self-doubts that he could begin his mission of calling people to Islam, starting with his wife. From his biography we also learn of an even earlier encounter with a Christian scholar.

Orphaned by the age of 5, Muhammad was taken into the care of his paternal uncle Abu Talib. At the age of 12, he accompanied his uncle on a trade caravan to Syria, something that he regularly did.

At one of these stops, Bahira, a Christian monk, observing the resting caravan from his cell recognised that young Muhammad bore the portents of, one day, being appointed God's messenger.

Common features

Apart from these positive encounters between Islam early in its history and Christianity, the worldview of the two religions are not dissimilar. They share many aspects of ethics and morality.

This is hardly surprising as Muslims consider the message brought by Muhammad as confirmation and summation of the messages of Jesus, Moses, Abraham and all the prophets through the ages.

Of course there are fundamental theological differences between the religions, chief among this being the status of Jesus. Muslims, despite recognising his miraculous birth, stopped short of according Him divinity.

Despite the shared historical and geographical origins, and similarity in many aspects of their teachings, much of subsequent encounters between Islam and Christianity or rather their followers have been characterised by conflicts between periods of uneasy coexistence.

Can this be explained on the grounds of theological differences alone? After the early positive encounters, medieval Christendom of Europe found Islam at its borders 100 years after the latter's birth, and Islam quite suddenly became a political problem.

The scholarly achievements of the Muslim civilisation added an intellectual dimension to this problem.

It was unfortunate that in dealing with this 'threat' posed by the rapidly expanding new religion, Islam was demonised as a pagan cult, savage and violent. Muhammad was abused and depicted in a range of persona from that of a sexually licentious heretic, a mad man, an epileptic to that of the anti-Christ.

This picture of Islam based on hatred and self-imposed ignorance grew more and more entrenched, and became the propagandist tool for the crusaders, and later European colonialists.

A more tempered but still unacceptable version of this image also found its way into early orientalist scholarship.

Reasoned understanding

With the advent of the global village, freer exchanges and encounters between peoples, an ability for more subtle analyses of world affairs and not least, a sense of political correctness have led to a better understanding of Islam and Muslims. Nevertheless, such a hostile image of Islam to a certain degree remains stubbornly entrenched in the Western psyche.

It is doubly unfortunate that the Muslim response to the Islamic world's civilisational decline and its present intellectual, economic and political malaise has been to blame everything totally on the machinations of the Christian West (and Jews).

There is deeply entrenched prejudice and ignorance, and unwillingness to understand each other by fanatical elements on both sides of the East-West/Islam-Christianity divide.

Even in late 20th century, religious passions have been the main factor or pretext that accounted for the bloodbaths or sectarian violence in such diverse places as the Balkans, Indonesia's Maluku island, southern Sudan and Pakistan.

In the last couple of years, with the emergence of a global terrorist network fuelled by religious fundamentalism, that apocalyptic civilisational clash appears threateningly close to actualisation.

The long history of conflict seems to lend credence to those who view religion cynically as at best, a crutch for those who cannot handle modernity, and at worst, the source of all violent confrontations, wars and human misery.

But the truth is every authentic religion, despite the theological differences, teaches compassion, justice and fairness, peace and goodwill among men, and condemns gratuitous violence. The real source of all human tragedies is actually fanaticism of whatever stripe religious, ethnic/nationalistic or ideological.

Both Islam and Christianity have directly or indirectly contributed immensely to human civilisation. The darker aspects of history generally blamed on religion, at closer scrutiny were the results of human aberrations in interpretation. The long history of violent conflicts and uneasy peace between Islam and Christianity certainly did not arise from their teachings.

Throughout history and up to our times, it was not uncommon that religion has been used as mere pretext in the worldly quest for power and domination.

What is needed in the encounter between the two is reasoned understanding. They are much closer than what we generally assume. Islam and Christianity have no need of fear and suspicion of one another only of ignorance, prejudice and obstrusive, predatory messianism.

Dr MAZENI ALWI is a medical practitioner who takes care of sick children.