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Byzantium versus Rome: Warring Christian Polarities
If Islam had never appeared on the stage of history, there is no doubt what
religion would dominate the Middle East today—it would still be Eastern
Orthodox Christianity. There has been no other credible religious challenger.
And a still-dominant Orthodox Church would likely have maintained deep
suspicions toward the West until now. If Eastern Orthodoxy had preserved its
dominance across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, it would very likely
have been the standard-bearer today for accumulated Eastern anger over the
many centuries of grievances and clashes with the West. We will see this theme
build over the next few chapters, providing an important basis for the case that
the Middle East could distrust and fear the West even without Islam.
The existence of these differences between the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire
and the Western (Roman) Empire—religious, cultural, geopolitical, historical,
artistic, and psychological—caused scholars such as Samuel Huntington to posit
Eastern Orthodoxy as one of several world civilizations that could “clash” with
the West, with or without Islam. Indeed that hostility in many ways is still there,
even though the church no longer controls the Middle East.
In our Western tradition, we are rather blind to the Eastern Orthodox Church.
We see few of these churches around us, and we usually fail to appreciate what
an important place the Eastern Church enjoys in Christian and Middle East
history. First, it is the earliest and most “native” Christian religion of the Middle
East, compared to the Roman Catholic Church, which grew apart from it in rite,
theology, politics, and outlook, and at much greater remove from Jerusalem.
Furthermore, Orthodoxy still exists in the Muslim Middle East in the form of
minority Orthodox communities. It prides itself in being closest in form and
spirit to the original church; it began life on the original church lands, and
nurtures the belief that it has avoided the doctrinal and institutional corruption
that it perceives in the Western Latin Church.
Deep roots of anti-Westernism still exist in the Orthodox Church. What is
more striking, many of these anti-Western feelings among the Eastern Orthodox
strongly resemble certain Muslim attitudes toward the West as well, suggesting a

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common geopolitical source of shared views, suspicions, and grievances toward
Western influence, intentions, and interventions. We have already noted this tie-
in with Islam: how numerous Christian doctrines on the nature of Jesus, later
denounced by church authorities as heretical, resemble some Islamic views on
Jesus as well. Shared grievances toward Western power on the part of both the
Orthodox Church and Islam suggest that civilizational “fault lines” are not
simply cultural peculiarities of these religions; they also had a lot to do with the
nature of the West and its confrontations with the Middle East going back a very
long way. Differences of a political, social, and economic nature could often
transform seemingly small theological differences into major heresies and
rebellions. (The same is true of the Sunni-Shi’ite split within Islam, where initial
differences over succession to the Prophet had almost no significant theological
character, but later grew into deeper communal hostility.)
There’s a chicken-and-egg question here: Do theological differences spark
political, social, and economic conflicts? Or is it the converse—do existing,
concrete political, social, and economic differences come to be reflected in
theology or ideology? Once a small theological split emerges, it can often end up
entrenched in communitarian issues of identity and even community existence.
Put another way, people might reasonably differ over smaller theological points
relating to Jesus’s precise nature. But what impels people to kill and die over
them? Other important factors are obviously at work here as well.
WE NEED TO GO back to Alexander the Great to witness the opening scene of
a more than two-millennia history of East-West geopolitical struggle. Alexander
launched the first great thrust of Western power into Asia in 334 BCE, as his
forces crossed from Greece into Persian-dominated Anatolia and conquered the
powerful Persian Zoroastrian Achaemenid Empire of Iran. These regions formed
only a part of the Alexandrine Empire, which came to include Syria, Egypt, and