ABSTRACT
Personally involved in one of the most publicized cases of opposition to ‘otherness’ in contemporary history, Salman Rushdie articulated the postmodernist idea that conflicts based on cultural identity had replaced the Cold War ideological division of the world (Rushdie 1999). Such political theorists as Samuel Huntington and Johann Galtung elaborated, during the 1990s, on the concept of a ‘clash of civilizations’, which they described as the defining feature of international relations in the contemporary age. From their works a notion of the civilizational frontier as a faultline of confrontation made its way in social thought. From a different perspective, the book that you are just starting to read argues that the civilizational frontier between Christianity and Islam should be understood as a zone of contact, in which the alternative between accommodation and confrontation is open. Similar to the raison d’être of other frontiers, the function of the Christian-Muslim frontier in world society is to introduce order. A ‘civilization’ is an elusive concept, and even the most ardent advocates of the ‘clash’ theory would admit that a civilization cannot be defined as a coherent entity with clear-cut borders. Any frontier, be it political, social or cultural, is the product of human imagination and an instrument for shaping the structure of human society. Sovereign state borders and civilizational frontiers have a similar raison d’être: they are powerful mental constructions, framing the societal and spatial limits within which social organization becomes possible. It is much more difficult to define civilizational frontiers than, for example, state or administrative borders, which people rank higher in their social practice. Defining the concept of the frontier between Christianity and Islam as a socially constructed
relationship is the central aim of this study. In their social practice, people construct and reconstruct the frontier in the same way as each generation constructs and defines the parameters of its social organization. The chapters of this book look at the various manifestations of the process of constructing the frontier. In this connection, the book reveals the advantages and problems of representing the frontier as a zone of contact that has its specific features and purpose in the organization of society.
