Islam is a case of this unconscious – and conscious – oblivion. For a significant part of our shared history, the Dar al-Islam has been the First World, and Europe the Third: as Gibbon put it, ‘the age of Arabian learning continued about 500 years, and was coæval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals.’ Yet we seek all too often to diminish the colossal achievement of the Islamic empires, the cultural and scientific achievement above all of Abbasid Baghdad, unrivaled in the West for centuries after its fall. We ask the Islamic version of the ‘Needham question:’ if the achievement was so great, why did it suddenly stop? And in that question is another layer of assumed superiority – the grudging admission that ‘they’ may have been great once, but now are degenerate and in perhaps terminal decline. It is of course an element in bolstering our own self-esteem, and it is all too obvious in modern historiography with books like that of Sylvain Gougenheim, whose Aristote à Mont St-Michel is a thumb to the nose, a sort of ‘Ya-boo-sucks’ to anyone who thinks that the scholars of Baghdad and Toledo made a significant contribution to modernity, because even what we have traditionally and grudgingly admitted – that Muslim scholars carried the Greek, Aristotelian torch through the Dark Ages, is wrong.

This seems to me to be the central problem. It seems almost impossible for us to think about intercultural history without competitiveness, as though our cultural understanding was a video-game, a winner-takes-all shoot-‘em-up in which there can only be one winner. Even when we speak with openness about the shared past, we do so in terms that reflect Us and Them as binary categories. And it all too easily degenerates into arguments (like Gougenheim’s) of precedence, modern Muslims too succumbing to this urgent need to show that ‘they’ discovered this and invented that. Our inability to construct a larger Us is damaging and deforming: by its very nature it renders impossible a subtle, nuanced and relatively objective understanding of human culture and human society.

Acknowledging that our Western account of ourselves, our origins and our intellectual history needs expansion is just a beginning. Competitiveness, however well clad in academic rigour, still declines to admit that there are no single and undivided streams that flow from past to present. Claiming anything for ‘Us’ is to misunderstand the nature of human history (in what sense do I own anything that my grandfather did, or wrote, or said – let alone Ptolemy, or Roger Bacon or Isaac Newton? In what sense do I not own the achievements of Ibn Rushd or Confucius, Ibn Haitham or Maimonides?) To focus myopically on our own story as we are used to hearing it told is childish, a yearning for the warm security of the nursery.

An interculturally literate view of the word is vital, therefore, not just so that we can appreciate the achievement of ‘other’ cultures; but so that we can understand how badly framed that statement is: we are all passengers on the same ship, children of a humanity that stretches back into a very remote past, of a Eurasian Bronze Age and a Neolithic revolution and a prophetic age. The last few centuries are small eddies in a big picture – what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. It’s rather important that we get over them.

This requires mutual knowledge, a will to understand and trust, and the building of personal relationships. The truth is that we actually know very little of other cultures – that even when we think we know, our knowledge is as much the result of (often selective and purposeful) reading as of direct personal experience. I was very struck at the time by a remark made by the thoughtful and intelligent editor of a major British newspaper after the July underground bombings in London: I have thought long and hard, he said, and I realize that I have never had a Muslim at my dinner table. That is our predicament: knowledge without experience. The editor undertook, in his column, to put this right. So must we all.

I am the director of a project run by the British Council, called Our Shared Europe. It is an attempt to give substance to some of this thinking – the creation, if you like, of a common dinner table at which we can get to know and trust one another across precisely the divides that most deform our society. Ignorance is a problem of both sides of the Atlantic (though it takes different shapes). Much of it is unintended – ‘I realize I have never had a Muslim at my dinner table’ – and the result of perfectly natural identification with one’s own, and a reticence about branching out. But much too is quite intentional – ‘I shall never have a Muslim at my dinner table’ – and is all too frequently aimed at using fear and alienation to garner support for other, and profoundly unattractive, political causes.

Our Shared Europe is designed to explore each other. It focuses on three areas: education, ideas and debate, as well as commissioning ground-breaking research into questions like the media that European Muslims consume, the art they make and the reasons for their under-representation in crucially important youth exchange schemes. The mechanics, in other words of how They are Us.

Education is vital – and no area is more important than the way history is taught, which can close doors or throw them open. Our intent here is not primarily to enter into a competition of narratives, but rather to introduce thought-provoking novelty. Our first project is material, for exhibition and the classroom, on Evliya Celebi, the great 17th century Turkish traveller in Europe and the East. It is an opportunity to look at cross-cultural continuities from music to medicine, and coffee to vaccination. As I walked round the exhibition behind a group of small Muslim schoolboys in shalwar khameez, I heard one say to another enthusiastically, “Why don’t they teach us this stuff in school?” We agree: ‘they’ should, and we shall try to make it easier to do so.

This leads me on to our work with historians at a higher level, work which will concentrate on building bridges between scholars across the Atlantic, to re-examine some of the central questions of our shared past, which when prejudicially examined can all too readily be used to build hostility. What they build when examined unprejudicially remains (by definition) to be seen, but we are confident that open, generous and above all research-based debate about some of the great shibboleths of the past will be fruitful. Evidence-based positions are always better than position-based evidence; and the Carnegie Corporation has recognized this aspect of our work in recent weeks by awaiting a major grant.

Finally – and of course closely linked with the other two corners of the triangle – we have worked in public debate about contemporary issues in European Islam, often in situations like the European Parliament, where audiences have been large and powerful. Perhaps the most powerful and certainly the largest, was the audience for a debate on the motion ‘Europe has failed its Muslims,’ which took place in London last February, in front of a live audience of 900, and a global BBC television audience of some 70 million. (Interestingly, the motion was lost by a relatively small margin, which demonstrates clearly the non-propagandist nature of the event.)