ISLAM-CHRISTIAN DIALOGUE

82 objectives of conquest. Precisely for this reason, the accusation that is most often brought against the work of the Arab go- vernments politically allied to the West is that they do not follow the teachings of the Koran to the letter and instead give in to compromise with the Western world and its external symbols. Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and abolition of the Caliphate In the second half of the 18th century, with the decline of the Muslim world, the decline of the Ottoman Empire began, from which England and France tried to take advantage by acquiring power in the region. In the middle of the 19th century, thanks to Arab philosophers and thinkers, Christians and Muslims joined together, despite colonization, in search of a lost identity and to create a secular Arab natio- nalism on the model of the ideas imported from Europe, taken as an example for the emancipation from the medieval laws to which they were still subject. Nationalism was secular in order to bring together in the common interest all the communities that formed it; it was constitutionalist and emphasised cultural, economic and indu- strial development and the emancipation of women. This also had repercussions in the way the elites lived and practiced Islam: it evolved in a different way from popular practice. After the First World War, France and England agreed on the partition of the Ottoman Empire, which had kept different peoples united through the strict application of Sharia law. With the dismemberment of the Ottoman Em- pire and the abolition of the caliphate by Ataturk in 1924, the Muslim peoples re- mained "orphans" from the religious point of view, provoking reactions of rejection which gave rise to movements for the Islamic awakening and the reconstitu- tion of the concept of "Umma" and "dar el islam" in opposition to the concept of nationality. Jewish Home At a time when the Arabs, on the model of Europe, managed to emancipate them- selves from religious-based legislation, a British document of 1917, the "Balfour Declaration", guaranteed the creation of a national Jewish home, a state based on religious identity and therefore discri- minating against non-Jews. The commit- ment made, while confirming the aspira- tion of the first Zionist Congress held in 1897 following the pogroms suffered by the Jews in Europe and Russia, was not in keeping with a previous commitment, consisting in the creation of an Arab State as a reward for those Arabs who had sup- ported the war against the Turks. Muslim awakening We have seen that originally the union between the Arabs began as an engine to achieve independence and socialism was the instrument to introduce social ju- stice, economic and cultural development. With the independence acquired after the Second World War, the Arab countries promoted free education and industrializa- tion with the consequent phenomenon of urbanization. But the new recruits, espe- cially university students, uprooted from their rural context, with a degree but no job, have become easy prey for Islamic fundamentalists, who fill in with their ide- as the ideological void and absence of a stable social fabric caused by the flow of peasants coming into the city on the wave of the population explosion and gradua- tion at all costs. With the time passing, this awakening takes on a precise political colour. Religion becomes the engine of liberation and conquest movements and coincides with the expansionism of Arab Islam in Africa. The recent movements of