Chechens started out as freedom fighters, not terrorists. During the 1990s, the struggle for Chechnya’s independence engaged the sympathy of many. It had no less a champion than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who came to admire the unbending spirit of the Chechen people he met as a prisoner in Joseph Stalin’s labor camps.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote that “there was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission – and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens.”

In 1991, then still in American exile, the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” supported independence for most of the Chechen republic, apart from the historically Cossack lands.

Today, Chechen independence is advocated by no Western government and few individuals. By 1999, after militants from Chechnya invaded the Botlikh region of Dagestan, killing eight Russians, Mr. Solzhenitsyn himself went on television to voice his conditional support for Moscow’s anti-separatist measures in the Caucasus. “For 15 years we’ve been withdrawing and capitulating,” the 80-year-old Nobel Peace Prize-winning author said. “We have to stop somewhere.”

The French philosopher Andre Glucksmann, a supporter of the Chechen cause in the West, suggested that the change occurred after September 11, 2001. “After September 11,” Mr. Glucksmann offered in a 2002 interview, “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin managed to portray the Chechens to the world as terrorists ‘working’ for Osama bin Laden.” In Mr. Glucksmann’s view, it was Russian disinformation combined with the natural apprehension of the post-September 11 period that caused world opinion to swallow the notion that all Chechens were religious extremists and terrorists. While admitting that “horrible things happened in Chechnya – for example, the notorious murder of the Red Cross doctors,” Mr. Glucksmann attributed the shift in the world’s mood to the success of Russian manipulation and propaganda.

To me, it seems the other way around. If world opinion is giving Mr. Putin a hearing today, it’s because of 155 dead children in Beslan last week, 89 dead passengers aboard two sabotaged airliners last month, a hundred-plus dead spectators in the Dubrovka Theater raid in 2002, or 39 people blown up along a parade route in Dagestan five years ago. The Chechen movement for independence, along with other national causes, has been hijacked by the jihadists. Russia may exploit this fact, but it’s a fact nevertheless.

Conflicts have been alternately smoldering and raging at Islam’s perimeters all over the globe. By 1999, the Islamist leader Shamil Basayev vowed to expel the “infidels” from the North Caucasus. By “infidels” he meant non-Muslims. Before their defeat, Mr. Basayev’s forces declared themselves to be the government of “Independent Islamic Dagestan.” Subsumed into this tide of Muslim militancy, the cause of Chechnya has degenerated into another branch of Islamist terrorism.

A few commentators have been noting this for some time. As David Warren put it last week: “An independent Chechnya is, notwithstanding the accounts in our media, not the object of this [terrorist] exercise. It is instead to detach Chechnya from the Russian, ‘Christian,’ Dar al-Harb, and attach it instead to the Dar al-Islam – to recover it for Islamdom.”

Before the jihadists can take over Dar al-Harb, though, they need to take over Dar al-Islam. They haven’t done so yet, but they’re making good progress. Xinjiang in northern China is at one end of an Islamic continuum that extends northwest into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the North Caucasus, then southwest into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and ultimately the Middle East. Islamist acts of terror have been recorded in every one of these regions. Uighur separatists in Xinjiang were responsible for some 200 violent incidents in a decade, according to China.

Who are the jihadists? Paul Verlaine described their possessed type in a poem called “Les Vaincus,” written after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. Verlaine’s portrayal of the vanquished communards would have fit the 32 Muslim militants who staged their bloody hostage drama in Beslan, North Ossetia, last week. The echo from Verlaine’s stanzas traces the mental landscape of fanatics, religious or secular, historical or contemporary, with the precision of sonar. The hostage-takers claimed 380 lives in Beslan, almost half of them children. The terrorists refused food and drink for their captives during the standoff. “When children began to faint, they laughed,” a hostage named Alla Gadieyeva was quoted as saying afterwards. Verlaine wrote: “Et nous rirons, sans rien qui trouble notre joie.” (And we’ll laugh with nothing to disturb our joy.) The jihadists behaved just as the French symbolist conjured up the doomed zealots in “The Vanquished.” Verlaine’s poem ends with the credo of the fanatics (my translation):

The dogs, the wolves, the birds will peck, claw, and destroy, Tear flesh from your bones and dig into your stomachs, And we’ll laugh with nothing to disturb our joy, For the dead are well dead and you learned this lesson from us.

Voices from Dar al-Harb are offering a similarly intransigent lesson. “We showed weakness,” Mr. Putin said on Russian television last Saturday, “and weak people are beaten.” Once Islam as well as Christendom are taken over by zealots, a clash of civilizations can’t be far behind.