Reflections on the anniversary of a historical turning point... Within fifty years of the death of Mohamed in A.D. 632, his successors had engineered military conquests all across the Middle East and North Africa. While their pace slowed after that, as they worked to consolidate their gains and establish bureaucratic management over the extensive lands they had won, the Muslims continued to expand, crossing Gibraltar and conquering much of the Iberian peninsula, in preparation for their eternal goal: the conquest of Europe. Now, Europe in those days was hardly the organized collection of developed, defined, modern states we know today....