Ian Montgomerie said:
A classification doesn't have to be exact to be useful. "The west" has always included the US and Western Europe, and you can argue about various other countries but there is clearly a region with a lot of common cultural experience (first world nations, ex-imperial powers, NATO members, etc, predominantly Christian religion, etc).
Forgive me, Ian, I know this is going to sound snide, but your statement to me sounds suspiciously like "Eastasia and Oceania have always been at war." A "West" which includes the US and Western Europe - WENSA if you will - has only existed for the last two centuries, if even that - and I'd rather take the bird's eye view of things and examine the sources of this division from its very inception. WENSA is a reality today, sure, but so much has changed in the recent past to create this reality.
I agree that a classification need not be exact or even, for that matter, accurate to be useful. It is
clearly useful to discuss both the commonalities and the differences that exist between two groups in contact. Nonetheless, I do not see the utility of looking at the history of Muslim-Christian relations as a dichotomy along the lines of East v. West, North v. South, Good v. Evil, Us v. Them, etc. We don't examine the history of contact between other groups in this manner!
Think of western histories of the contact between Mongols and the Chinese, or the Japanese and the Chinese. What about the Aztecs and the Maya? The various groups within the Middle East and Europe, respectively? We don't couch them in these terms. Most histories of Muslim-Christian relations are better relegated to the sphere of histories of religion, because they presuppose as their starting point a fundamental religious gulf and fail to analyze the many commonalities that exist. More recently, people have tried to emphasize these while maintaining the traditional structure but, IMHO, this is just a bandaid applied to a gushing wound. We need to completely rewrite the history of the region.
I can imagine a history where the Ottoman Empire "graduated" into a commonwealth of states, united by their shared history and culture. It's not impossible. I can imagine a federal India, within which Muslims, Hindus, and other communities receive equal representation. I can even see a Middle East without artificial nations divided by confessional groups - no Israel and Lebanon
per se, but with Christians and Jews participating fully within political life. All three of these scenarios could have emerged in the last century or two, and yet we (as a world) blew it.
We chose to highlight our differences, deny that people of different confessional backgrounds can collaborate, and split the world along religious lines. Now we sit back and say "see, look at the mess
we've created - this proves that Jews, Christians, and Muslims simply can't live together!" This, in a nutshell, is the source of the great division between us today, and it was man-made, not inevitable.