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For all the Western media talks about the "Arab street," most of us can scarcely imagine what that world is really like. Fuller Seminary professor J. Dudley Woodberry knows. Since 1957, he has studied, taught, and ministered in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, and he has visited 35 other predominately Muslim countries. We asked him to describe how Muslims view history, society, and the West.

This issue looks at turning points in Christian-Muslim relations from a Christian perspective. How might a Muslim history read differently? Would Muslims focus on the same events?

Their history would be similar in many ways, although obviously what might be an "up" for us might be a "down" for them. It would depend on the type of Muslim, because that which creates hostility would be a "down" for many Muslims as well as for Christians. Both groups are looking for good relations without giving up their evangelistic mandates.

There would, however, be significant differences. For example, last summer I was asked by a Muslim theological faculty in Turkey to gather a group of Christian scholars for a dialogue on topics including the Crusades. Most of us don't feel at all responsible for the Crusades. We're very individualistic in the West, and we just weren't around back then. But we apologized twice for what the Crusades did not only to Islam, but also to the region that is now Turkey. And we practically got a standing ovation for that. Quite obviously, with their sense of group responsibility and trauma, that's a much a bigger issue for them than for us.

Then there's the colonial period, which most Westerners would not think of as a Christian invasion. With our sense of the separation of church and state, we see colonialism as political. But for many Muslims, colonization represented a crusading spirit that also manifested itself as support for Zionism and Israel. Such feelings have been obvious in the statements of Osama bin Laden and even of some Palestinians recently.

Does Islam always link what we would consider the religious and the political?

The overwhelming majority of Muslims see Islam as a total way of life. Of course, many Muslims today, because of a pluralistic world or because in some regions they are a minority, know they're going to have to emphasize the religious aspects and not be bound by some of the seventh-century political ideas of Islam.

But in general, Muslims view the separation Americans make between church and state as an unhealthy one. They would even point to the breakdown in morality that we have here as evidence of what happens when you take religion out of the other arenas of life.

What, then, would Muslims see as the ideal political and religious system?

Well, you have more than one point of view. The Islamist or fundamentalist view is that all of the answers are in the Qur'an and in the practice of Muhammad and the early Muslim community. If we just return to that, we'll be all right.

Conservatives would join with the fundamentalists in looking backward. By conservatives I mean those who focus on the adaptations of the first 300 years of Islam. In that time the four major schools of Sunni law and Shi'ite law were established, Shari'ah law was developed, and the major schools of theology were in place. Conservatives would say the adaptations were enough, and if we just return to those, everything will be all right.

Others realize that fundamentalists and conservatives oversimplify things. These Muslims still idealize Muhammad and the era of Islamic dominance and culture during the Abbasid Period [750-1258], but they understand that we've got to live in the modern world. They attempt to retain and emphasize the values of that early period, as they remember it or have reconstructed it, within modern legal systems and pluralistic nations.

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