With his first column for this paper, my new colleague, Osama bin Laden, reminds us how rarely today's commentators attempt to take the long view. Leaving aside our regular references to the emperor who made his horse a consul, and the occasional, hazy deployment of Walter Bagehot, most journalists clearly feel that too much dwelling on the past will sound either schoolmasterish, or show-offy, or both at the same time.  No such scruples beset Mr Bin Laden, who this week compared Arab rulers who cooperate with the Americans with "our forefathers, the Ghassanids". Perhaps sensing that parts of his audience may not be au fait with these forefathers - whom I now understand to have been an ancient, pre-Islamic tribe living in what are today's Jordan and southern Syria - he supplied the following gloss: "Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs. Such is the case of the new Ghassanids, the Arab rulers. Muslims, if you do not punish them for their sins in Jerusalem and Iraq, they will defeat you. They will also rob you of the land of the two holy places."   Did the early Ghassanid collaborators do so much damage? Wouldn't we have heard about it? Even at this distance? A rudimentary search confirms that the Ghassanids were, as Bin Laden states, successful and accomplished vassals of the sixth-century Byzantines. In the Oxford History of Byzantium, Robert Hoyland quotes a Ghassanid poet addressing his master: "Do you not see that God has granted you such a degree of power that you will observe every king trembling at your feet; for you are the sun, the kings are stars, and when the sun rises, no star will be seen." Less than a century afterwards the Ghassanids had been crushed in battle and absorbed into the rapidly expanding Islamic empire. Indeed, from this admittedly unscholarly perspective, it is hard to see how the defeat of the Ghassanid collaborators could be anything other than a reassuring precedent for the jihad-minded Bin Laden reader.  Still, whatever the lesson of the Ghassanids, Bin Laden's latest references to ancient history confirm comments made by Bernard Lewis, in his enlightening and lucid The Crisis of Islam. "In current American usage," he says, "the phrase 'That's history' is commmonly used to dismiss something as unimportant ... The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it." It is hard, he adds, "to imagine purveyors of mass propaganda in the west making their points by allusions dating from the same period, to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy in England or the Carolingian monarchs in France". And even if our politicians did go in for more historical allusions, alluding to the past is not the same as trying to enforce it.  If there is no point in arguing with Bin Laden's implacable call to arms, there is every reason to try to comprehend his appeal to his followers. Which requires some acquaintance with history. Which, as we know, is not compulsory in the national curriculum for children over 14: precisely the age, some teachers point out, that they begin to understand it.