To the east and south of the classical Islamic world there were only pagans, some of them, as in India and China, with high levels of material culture, but both essentially regional, and neither offering a serious challenge to Islam. Like the French and the Russian in their time, the Iranian revolutionaries play to international as well as domestic audiences, and their revolution exercises a powerful fascination over other peoples outside Iran, in other countries within the same culture, within the same universe of discourse. If that could happen in Sarajevo, one wonders what might be happening among the sixty million Muslims in the Soviet Union, far closer to Iran, in both geography and culture, than those of Yugoslavia. The United States might escape this hatred by changing its civilization-hardly a serious proposition-or by relinquishing its leadership and relapsing, like former leaders, into relative insignificance and perceived harmlessness. With that leadership comes the inevitable price of hatred. The last words of the verse are not a cold logical deduction from the previous argument, but rather an earnest exhortation suggested by the solemn thought of our oneness with Christ, and the price paid by Him to make us His.The words “and in your spirits,” which are in the Authorised version, are not in the older Greek MSS.

Dominican Vodou uses a different percussion, a lot of times it is played with Abates or “Tambour de Palo”, which are of Kongo origin; along with it a Guira (Scraper) is usually used. But most find it easier-and much safer-to direct their hostility against the West, the source of most of the changes that have come to the Islamic lands in modern times and, as they see it, have undermined and disrupted the Islamic way of life. Historically, in the Muslim perception, the House of War par excellence has been Christendom, later called Europe, in modern times redefined as the West. There may be another way-when the Muslim leaders are persuaded that it is no longer the West or Christendom that is the main enemy and the main danger, but another creed and another power that offer a far greater threat to all that they cherish. This is not at all part of the Islamic creed.

It was and remains very strong in the greater part of the Muslim world, where Shi’ism is virtually unknown. In other Islamic countries, the first task still remains. An examination of the record however, in Iran and elsewhere, reveals that the rejection of Europe and its offerings is by no means as comprehensive and as undiscriminating as the propaganda might indicate, and that some of the importations from the lands of unbelief are still very welcome. The parallel is again very close between what happened in the Islamic world in our day and what happened in Europe and beyond following the Russian and French Revolutions-the same upsurge of emotion, the same uplifting of hearts, the same boundless hopes, the same willingness to excuse and condone all kinds of horrors, and the same questions. In this article, we’ll explore some Russian traditions and discuss the unique geopolitical, environmental, and cultural influences that shaped these practices. There is another respect in which the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran have, alas, borrowed from Europe.

Like the Western radicals who, in their day, responded with almost messianic enthusiasm to the events in Paris and Petrograd, events “that shook the world,” so did millions of young and not so young men and women all over the world of Islam, from West Africa to Indonesia, from the Sudan to Sarajevo and Kossovo in Yugoslavia, and, more recently, among the millions of Muslim immigrants and guest workers in Western Europe. This perception was reinforced by centuries of conflict-jihad and crusade, conquest and reconquest, the Muslim invasions of Europe and the European invasion of Islam. Though its population is predominantly Muslim, Sarajevo is a European city in a country that had by then been under communist rule for thirty-five years. However, the symbol only came into widespread use after it was associated with the Ottoman Empire, who took it from being the symbol of Constantinople after their takeover of the city. Needless to say, in the long war in which they have been engaged with Iraq, the Iranian revolutionary leaders have made the fullest use of such weapons as the West and its imitators are willing to supply-guns, rockets, tanks, and planes on the one hand, radio, television, and the printing press on the other.