ABSTRACT
The above epigraph is taken from a recent speech by the United Nations Secretary-General, in which he called for a “dialogue among civilizations”, as a counter to the “clash of civilizations” theme propounded by Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington in 1993. Kofi Annan’s reference to the “stamp of history” and “cultural fault lines” provides some context for the present paper; about the most significant among those fault lines were, of course, the Crusades.
