William Dalrymple on the close historical links between East and West

"So one of the things that I hope to achieve with White Mughals is to present an image of how Islam is lived in this period, where Hindus and Christians are participating in Muslim ceremonies and vice-versa, with none of the “fundamentalist” attitudes of Taliban Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, which people seem to believe is the norm for Islam.

"Clearly you have a world of enormous culture, enormously attractive, tolerant, syncretic, Sufi Islamic culture which seduced the British of the time. That is the Islam that I have seen still clinging on in my travels. And in a sense From the Holy Mountain and this book, although one is about the modern Middle East and one is about 18th-century India, have very similar themes at their heart, which is the relationship of East and West, Christianity and Islam, and the incredibly close links that bind the two.

"The idea that there is some essential clash of civilizations between on one hand a Judeo-Christian West and on the other hand this completely alien tradition of Islam seems to me to be bonkers. Anyone who knows anything about history and relationships between East and West knows that Islam and Christianity grow out of the same roots and that Western culture and Eastern culture both developed out of the mingling of East and West. So the fusion of these two things created Christian, Hellenic, Western civilization.

"The influence of the Arab world through the preservation of the Greek classics in the Islamic world -- all these things fertilized the very roots of Western civilization. Dante’s Divine Comedy is derived from a Spanish Arabic model, a journey through paradise. The pointed arch of the gothic arch was taken from the Arabs in Sicily. Western medicine survived via having been preserved from classical antiquity in the Islamic world.

"The two are inextricably bound together and the idea that there is any essential clash between two different traditions is nuts to anyone who knows about the origins of Islam and where it comes from and it also involves forgetting that Christianity, of course, is an Eastern Religion, it's not a Western religion. It was born in the Middle East, and is just as much an Eastern religion as Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism."

--William Dalrymple, fireandwater.com interview, 2002