I mention China now to raise the question whether history might yet repeat itself. At this moment of human progress (the year 2008), the old fault line between northwest and southeast has become an aggravated, suppurating wound. A historian can only shake his head at the spectacle of the European Community debating with anguish whether to allow the citizens of Istanbul to join their tribe, when the word "Europe" itself was born to describe the ground on which that city stands. Intelligent but ill-educated people the world over have discovered that the Shiite community of Islam, which we had learned with difficulty a generation ago to associate with the peoples today occupying the Persian highlands, not only pervades but even nourishes its roots in sacred shrines and cities of southern Mesopotamia, and politicians struggle to make sense of the way borders carved on the map at Versailles have blinded Europeans and their cousins to the true ethnic and religious geography of western Asia.

Complementary phenomena

Just at the moment, it is fashionable to express deep anxiety at two complementary phenomena: the globalization of western capitalist culture and the Islamization of western Europe. Some lament the former's invasion of traditional societies, including those of the east; many bemoan the growing demographic presence in the northwest of peoples owing their origins and much of their religion and culture to the southeast. Readers of this volume should recognize many of the rhetorical blunders of antiquity—mistaking Rome for civilization and the opponents of Rome for opponents of civilization, for example—still living and flourishing in our midst.

The opportunity that slipped away in the aftermath of Mehmed's conquest, driven off when European seaborne activity expanded, has returned. Humankind might yet be able to find a way to build commonality of culture and purpose to link the peoples of Europe, western Asia, and south Asia—to achieve, in other words, Alexander's dream. Such a confrontation and eventual coming together would be painful and difficult to imagine, and neither devout Muslims nor devout Europeans at this moment will accept any future we could now envision—but the importance of finding one is undeniable.

Two risks present themselves. The peoples whose stories are not part of the Eurasian narrative—those of Africa and of east Asia—can distract us once again. Africa offers the lesser risk, but a real one; poverty and disease will find for themselves literal and figurative weapons with which to claim the attention of the world's wealthy and healthy, and to exact redress of grievances. Nothing says that the rich nations yet have it in themselves to respond to such a challenge.

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