ABSTRACT
The civilizational frontier between Christianity and Islam is essentially a mental construction, deeply rooted in the collective psychology of communities different in type and size. Christian-Muslim relations are shaped by each of these community’s capital of myths, which nourish feelings of hope and horror, amity and animosity. As Jean Gottmann put it in his theory about frontiers: ‘the real partitions which are the most stable and the least flexible are in the minds of men’ (Gottmann 1951: 519). On the whole, it seems that deeply seated mental constructions and attitudes cannot be altered easily, at least in the short term. Their intensity might change over time, in the way that American popular indifference to, and sometimes political complicity with, Islamists around the world was overrun by undisguised hostility after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001.
