Rite and Reason: Analysts who are picking over the recent Madrid bombings refer to the lessons to be learnt by Bush and Blair. But to assume that Spain is a target of al-Qaeda and fundamentalist Islam only as a result of her involvement in the coalition formed to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq or as a result of western colonial dictates, or even Zionism, flies in the face of historical and political reality. There are much older scores to be settled.Al-Qaeda is spearheading Islam's third attemptin history at worldwide "submission" and totaldomination, argues Susan Philips
Within 100 years of the death of the prophet Mohammed, in Arabia in AD 632 , the Muslim armies of the Umayyad dynasty had established a force which spanned from the Atlantic almost to the Pacific.
Sweeping up from north Africa to conquer Spain, this militant and unprovoked march of Islam was finally halted outside Paris when Charles Martel and the Celtic army of the Franks killed Abd-er Rahman at the Battle of Poitiers in AD 732. It then took until 1492 before Ferdinand and Isabella finally returned Spain to Christian rule.
The second wave of Islam reached its zenith towards the end of the 16th century, by which time Islam represented the greatest power block the world had seen. By conquering Constantinople in 1453 jihad had been phenomenally successful, and by basing rules on the sacred law of the Shariah the creation of a homogeneous religious life through the vast Islamic Empire was established.
Under Suleiman the Great (1520-66) the Ottoman Empire reached its apogee and stretched from the Yemen, through Syria, Iraq, Anatolia, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Balkans and Crimea to Hungary and west along the north African coast from Egypt to Algeria.
The Christian West was in perpetual and imminent danger. By 1529 Muslim forces were at the gates of Vienna, where the ultimately successful landward defence of Europe depended on the Austrian Hapsburgs.
Despite a further and unsuccessful attempt to take Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire was already in a slow state of decline, the result of a combination of a Western military alliance and a new technological economic system within Western Europe based upon capital investment, releasing society from the constraints of an agrarian culture.
The Quran had always taught that the ummah (people) who lived according to the law of Allah would prosper, because the community was in harmony with the fundamental principles of existence.
When the Ottoman Empire was finally abolished in 1922 Muslims were quick to re-examine the writings of such Islamic philosophers as ibn Taymiyyah (1268-1328) and, later, Mawlana Abu al Ala Mawdudi (1903-79) to understand exactly why Allah had ceased to bless their exploits.
Mawdudi advocated that Muslims should band together to fight a universal jihad and return to a literal reading of the holy texts of the Quran. Jihad was to be conducted against all non-Islamic regimes as a religious obligation for all Muslims and a tool for combating the Dar al Harb - the abode of war which refers to those other parts of the world not yet acquired by Islam through conquest or conversion.
It is of course this return to Quranic writings which has laid the foundations for a return to fundamentalism, and this explains why Islam today has a militant and aggressive side, exactly as it did in the two previous great waves.
Al-Qaeda is now spearheading the third wave for Islam's quest for worldwide submission and total domination over what it calls the great Satan of Christendom.
To those who choose to ignore both history and the Quran to place the blame for recent fundamentalist attacks on the behaviour of the coalition in Iraq, it is useful to point out that in both 1531 and 1689 the world had never heard of America, Israel was a nation scattered to the four corners of the earth and those defending Vienna had no newspapers in which to apportion blame.
But what the defenders of Christian Europe knew for sure was that only they could stop the total Islamic occupation of Europe - and they did.
Spain and Australia may indeed be high on the modern Islamic hate list along with the US and Britain, but the time will come when "goody two shoes" France or Germany - and even Ireland - will be vulnerable to attack for the reason that they are part of the Dar al Harb.
The US and Britain have removed one of the most gruesome and tyrannical dictators and have opened Iraq to the possibility of a Middle East democracy in an area where other countries tolerate no separation between church and state, and the fundamentalists are fighting back.
But Iraq is just one pawn in the Islamic struggle for world domination. We here would do well to recall that the US was in neither Afghanistan nor Iraq when the twin towers and the US embassy in Nairobi were destroyed, and that the meticulous planning for both events occurred during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Susan Philips is a former Independent County Councillor for Wicklow and a synodsperson of the Church of Ireland