Listening to the video of Osama Bin Laden that was released after the US began its attack on Afghanistan, I was struck by the way the interpreter had him calling President Bush the "head of the infidels" and insisting that the "army of infidels" must leave the land of Mohammed. "Infidel" is such a quaint word in English that I wondered whether it was a fair translation.

With the help of an Egyptian colleague, I checked out the Arabic version of Bin Laden's message. He had used the word "kaafir," which does indeed translate as "infidel." "Kaafir" is one of those elastic terms that can stretch from out-and-out heathens to the heretics in the apartment upstairs. (The word exists in Hebrew, too, as "kofer.") But in its strict meaning, "kaafir" refers to non-Muslims, particularly when they're considered confrontationally.

Muslim scholars divide the world between the Dar-al-Kufr, the land of the kaafirs, and the Dar-al-Islam, the land of the Muslims, with the Dar-al-Harb, or land of war, in the contested middle. I suppose the term "Dar-al-Islam" would be the Muslim counterpart to our word "Christendom," but that word is pretty antiquated, too. The concept of Christendom hasn't played much of a role in the Western psyche since the Poles and Germans turned back the Turkish armies at the siege of Vienna in 1683, the last time Muslim power was ever a serious threat to the West.

That seems to be the story with a lot the words that translators use to render the language of Islamic fundamentalism -- they have a musty medieval sound. When someone talks about infidels, I have an image of the characters in Ivanhoe who were always dashing off to the Holy Land to fight the Saracen infidel. In fact it was an old-fashioned word even by Shakespeare's time. He used it occasionally, particularly in the phrase "Turks and infidels," but he wouldn't have taken it seriously.

In Modern English, "infidel" isn't a word we ever use in earnest. People may style themselves infidels to suggest their defiance of some ruling orthodoxy. But it's a sign of how thoroughly our culture has been secularized that not even Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson would use the word to describe nonbelievers, whatever their sexual orientation. It's like calling someone a "pagan" or "heathen" -- it makes you sound like a sergeant-major out of a Kipling story. (That was the weirdest thing about Falwell's rant about all the people who had brought the September 11 attacks down on America's head -- he said it was the fault of "the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians,. . .[and] the A.C.L.U." To most Americans, that word "pagans" was a tip-off that Falwell wasn't simply being intolerant -- he was living in some other century.)

In fact the only time we still hear the word "infidel" used literally is when it's put into the mouths of swarthy villains. That's what was so odd about hearing the word in the voice-over translation of Bin Laden's video. It sounded like something from a pulp-fiction melodrama: "Die, infidel dog!" "Infidel" may have started its life as a home-grown English word, but it's ending its days as a translation. Whether it's ominous or comic, it isn't a notion we use ourselves.

That's always the problem when you try to translate across a cultural divide -- the words may be there, but they echo differently in the other person's room. The difficulty can cut both ways. A couple of weeks ago the White House had to apologize when President Bush offhandedly described the war on terrorism as a "crusade." Americans use that word without paying much attention to its origins, and we tend to forget that it has the root for "cross" buried in it, particularly when our Latin is shaky. But in Arabic "crusade" translates as "al-hamalat as-salibiyya," or "campaign of the cross," and it can still evoke some vivid historical memories. It was disconcerting to hear Bin Laden throw the term back in an utterly literal way, referring to Bush as a "big crusader." For us that's a word you apply to a courageous politician, a cartoon rabbit, or a World War II British tank.

It all underscores the problem that the US faces as it tries to persuade the Muslim world that it isn't engaged in a religious war. Things are bound to me misuderstood (you think of what Islamic fundamentalists are likely to make of the people at ballparks singing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch, and how hard it would be to explain to them that it's really an Irving Berlin show tune). And it's all the more difficult because in a real sense it is a religious war, as Andrew Sullivan was arguing in an article in the New York Times last week. Not a war between Christendom and the Dar-al-Islam, but between modernity and traditionalism -- and deeper than that, between two visions of salvation, one secular and the other fundamentalist. You wonder how there could be any accommodation or understanding between the two sides, when they hear the same words so differently.

In the end, though, it's hard to believe that communication is hopeless. A couple of days ago I was talking about Bush's "crusade" gaffe with a friend who teaches medieval Arabic history. Actually, she told me, if you wanted to do justice to "crusade" the way Bush used the word, you wouldn't translate it with the Arabic phrase that means "campaign of the cross." You'd use that word "jihad." "Jihad" does have the meaning of a religious war, and in fact it was used to describe the military response to the crusades. . But like "crusade," it can also mean any kind of personal moral struggle. "These days," she said, "my jihad is being department vice-chair."

That made "jihad" feel a little less alien to me, and with it the corner of the Muslim mind that it inhabits. You wonder if the worlds are really so different that there can't be any translation between them. It reminded me of what a translator told me once. Verbatim translations tend to sound odd, particularly when they have to bridge a vast cultural gulf. But if you root around you'll usually find some other word that suggests a common point of understanding. If you're a translator, he said, have to believe that when it comes to the crunch, people can always find something to talk about. And sometimes the translation that takes people at their literal word is the one that winds up being unfaithful.

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