Some 2600 years, very roughly because historical records for the most part were not kept, separate Abraham (c 2000 BC) one of the three patriarch founders of Judaism, from Muhammad the founder of Islam (c 600 AD). In between there came the prophet Moses who led the Jews out of Egypt into Israel (c 1400 BC), and then 1400 years later, Mary’s child, Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of Christianity.

These four men, patriarchs, prophets maybe, even God-like, but men, and not Gods, have shaped if not determined much of our history, the history of the West, during some 5000 years or so, right up until the present time with the very latest blast from a suicide bomber blowing herself up while exclaiming  Allahu Akbar, meaning death to those who were somehow different from herself.

Our Western world, because to begin with the rest of the world remained untouched, not peaceful, but untouched by the lives of these four men, at least during the 2600 years that separated Abraham from Muhammad. That was all to change, however, with the arrival of Columbus on Hispaniola where in 1492 he established the first colony in the New World, bringing with him plague and the religions of these four, which together, plague and religion, oppressed or destroyed entire populations, millions of New World peoples, people that were no different in essentials, in their humanity, from ourselves.

Now we are clearly one world, and we ought to be fashioning the structures that will be needed to enable us to live together as one people. But instead we remain under what continues to be the crippling influence of these four men and their followers, their influence still being the greatest obstacle to our becoming with all our differences just one world.