AN OLD STORY : Muslim-Western conflict.

Behind the false idea that Osama bin Laden's attacks on the United States launched a modern war between civilizations is the historical reality of a real war between empires and nations that began with the Muslim conquest of Roman Jerusalem in 638. The Arab empire went on winning that war until the late Middle Ages, and then it began to lose.

Europe's Crusaders took Jerusalem away from the Muslims in 1099, but a century later the city was retaken by Saladin and, from then on, remained part of a vital and expanding Muslim empire that marched on Western Europe and very nearly conquered it. The Crusades were not a one-way street.

Arab Muslim power was imposed in Egypt and North Africa, onward to Spain and southern France, and through the Balkans to Vienna. Muslim civilization was at that time the equal or superior of Western Europe's by virtually every standard of military, political, economic, and aesthetic accomplishment. Had the French under Charles Martel failed at Poitiers in 732, had the Venetians and Spaniards lost the battle of Lepanto in 1571, or had the Austrians and Poles lost at Vienna in 1683, we might all be speaking Arabic today.

Even though the Arabs were eventually forced out of Spain, and parts of their North African empire became autonomous, they ruled the Balkans, or most of it, until 1914. It was only after the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I that the Arabs found themselves dominated by Europeans in a series of new states, set up under League of Nations mandates, in the former Ottoman territories.

The independent Arab and Egyptian governments that emerged after World War II proved another defeat. The supposed reformers of the Baath movement turned Iraq and Syria into hereditary dictatorships. Egypt became that anomalous modern phenomenon, the quasi-democracy, or consultative dictatorship.

Islamic society failed to take off economically, falling under the commercial control of Western oil companies, banks, and businesses. It remains technologically backward, under the intellectual domination of Western ideas and science on the one hand, challenged by a reactionary and utopian religious fundamentalism on the other. What went wrong?

Islamic society, the West's equal at the time of the European Renaissance, failed to make the transition to a modern society. In matters of material power, the Europeans passed from crafts and artisanal technology to empirical science, and eventually to industrial technology. They explored the world, establishing global systems of trade, commerce, and intellectual exchange. They experienced political evolution--sometimes violent--that limited monarchical power, empowered the middle and professional classes, and eventually produced modern liberal democracy. They developed institutions of law, adjudication, and contract.

The sophistication of Arab mathematics, astronomy, governmental administration, and military organization was very great at the end of the Middle Ages. There had been a remarkable philosophical flowering, and advanced theoretical science. The Arabs preserved Greek philosophy, transmitting it to Western thinkers. But they failed to make use of it themselves, as the Westerners did, to reform their institutions and to reestablish the basis of their political and social thought. Islam proved incapable of formulating a modern conception of politics and government, able to cope with a non-Islamic world much more powerful in material means, organization, and science.

There seem to be two fundamental reasons for this, both of them religious in origin. The first was that religious and state authority were never fully separated in Islamic society, as they came to be in the West. Efforts to establish an intellectually legitimate nontheological basis for independent state authority have failed. This means that an independent civil society has never emerged. The West had a biblical basis for independent secular political authority in the distinction made by Jesus between the things that belong to Caesar and those that belong to God. Caesar was acknowledged the ruler of an autonomous political and social order. In 800, Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the pope himself.

The second basic reason the West could create modern society was that from the Middle Ages forward, philosophy was distinguished from theology. Adopting Aristotle's philosophy of natural reason, Thomas Aquinas argued that reason is a source of truth independent of theological reasoning, and authentic in its own terms. He said that reason and religious faith are two harmonious but distinct intellectual realms. This was the historical basis for the independent speculative life of the West, which gave us the modern world.

Islam since 1914 has failed to make a serious intellectual response to the modern West. Culture and intelligence, not power, decide the quality of societies. This is the failure that has produced Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda, and it is a failure more dangerous to Islam than it can ever be to the West.

[C] 2001, Los Angeles Times Syndicate International.