We can­not afford to main­tain these ancient prej­u­dices against Islam

In the 12th cen­tu­ry, Peter the Ven­er­a­ble, Abbot of Cluny, ini­ti­at­ed a dia­logue with the Islam­ic world. ​“I approach you not with arms, but with words,” he wrote to the Mus­lims whom he imag­ined read­ing his book, ​“not with force, but with rea­son, not with hatred, but with love.” Yet his trea­tise was enti­tled Sum­ma­ry of the Whole Heresy of the Dia­bol­i­cal Sect of the Sara­cens and segued repeat­ed­ly into splut­ter­ing intran­si­gence. Words failed Peter when he con­tem­plat­ed the ​“bes­tial cru­el­ty” of Islam, which, he claimed, had estab­lished itself by the sword. Was Muham­mad a true prophet ? ​“I shall be worse than a don­key if I agree,” he expos­tu­lat­ed, ​“worse than cat­tle if I assent!”

Peter was writ­ing at the time of the Cru­sades. Even when Chris­tians were try­ing to be fair, their entrenched loathing of Islam made it impos­si­ble for them to approach it objec­tive­ly. For Peter, Islam was so self-evi­dent­ly evil that it did not seem to occur to him that the Mus­lims he approached with such ​“love” might be offend­ed by his remarks. This medieval cast of mind is still alive and well.

Last week, Pope Bene­dict XVI quot­ed, with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion and with appar­ent approval, the words of the 14th-cen­tu­ry Byzan­tine emper­or Manuel II : ​“Show me just what Muham­mad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhu­man, such as his com­mand to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Vat­i­can seemed bemused by the Mus­lim out­rage occa­sioned by the Pope’s words, claim­ing that the Holy Father had sim­ply intend­ed ​“to cul­ti­vate an atti­tude of respect and dia­logue toward the oth­er reli­gions and cul­tures, and obvi­ous­ly also towards Islam”.

But the Pope’s good inten­tions seem far from obvi­ous. Hatred of Islam is so ubiq­ui­tous and so deeply root­ed in west­ern cul­ture that it brings togeth­er peo­ple who are usu­al­ly at dag­gers drawn. Nei­ther the Dan­ish car­toon­ists, who pub­lished the offen­sive car­i­ca­tures of the Prophet Muham­mad last Feb­ru­ary, nor the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists who have called him a pae­dophile and a ter­ror­ist, would ordi­nar­i­ly make com­mon cause with the Pope ; yet on the sub­ject of Islam they are in full agreement.

Our Islam­o­pho­bia dates back to the time of the Cru­sades, and is entwined with our chron­ic anti­semitism. Some of the first Cru­saders began their jour­ney to the Holy Land by mas­sacring the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties along the Rhine val­ley ; the Cru­saders end­ed their cam­paign in 1099 by slaugh­ter­ing some 30,000 Mus­lims and Jews in Jerusalem. It is always dif­fi­cult to for­give peo­ple we know we have wronged. Thence­forth Jews and Mus­lims became the shad­ow-self of Chris­ten­dom, the mir­ror image of every­thing that we hoped we were not — or feared that we were.

The fear­ful fan­tasies cre­at­ed by Euro­peans at this time endured for cen­turies and reveal a buried anx­i­ety about Chris­t­ian iden­ti­ty and behav­iour. When the popes called for a Cru­sade to the Holy Land, Chris­tians often per­se­cut­ed the local Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties : why march 3,000 miles to Pales­tine to lib­er­ate the tomb of Christ, and leave unscathed the peo­ple who had — or so the Cru­saders mis­tak­en­ly assumed — actu­al­ly killed Jesus. Jews were believed to kill lit­tle chil­dren and mix their blood with the leav­ened bread of Passover : this ​“blood libel” reg­u­lar­ly inspired pogroms in Europe, and the image of the Jew as the child slay­er laid bare an almost Oedi­pal ter­ror of the par­ent faith.

Jesus had told his fol­low­ers to love their ene­mies, not to exter­mi­nate them. It was when the Chris­tians of Europe were fight­ing bru­tal holy wars against Mus­lims in the Mid­dle East that Islam first became known in the west as the reli­gion of the sword. At this time, when the popes were try­ing to impose celiba­cy on the reluc­tant cler­gy, Muham­mad was por­trayed by the schol­ar monks of Europe as a lech­er, and Islam con­demned — with ill-con­cealed envy — as a faith that encour­aged Mus­lims to indulge their basest sex­u­al instincts. At a time when Euro­pean social order was deeply hier­ar­chi­cal, despite the egal­i­tar­i­an mes­sage of the gospel, Islam was con­demned for giv­ing too much respect to women and oth­er menials.

In a state of unhealthy denial, Chris­tians were pro­ject­ing sub­ter­ranean dis­qui­et about their activ­i­ties on to the vic­tims of the Cru­sades, cre­at­ing fan­tas­tic ene­mies in their own image and like­ness. This habit has per­sist­ed. The Mus­lims who have object­ed so vocif­er­ous­ly to the Pope’s den­i­gra­tion of Islam have accused him of ​“hypocrisy”, point­ing out that the Catholic church is ill-placed to con­demn vio­lent jihad when it has itself been guilty of unholy vio­lence in cru­sades, per­se­cu­tions and inqui­si­tions and, under Pope Pius XII, tac­it­ly con­doned the Nazi Holocaust.

Pope Bene­dict deliv­ered his con­tro­ver­sial speech in Ger­many the day after the fifth anniver­sary of Sep­tem­ber 11. It is dif­fi­cult to believe that his ref­er­ence to an inher­ent­ly vio­lent strain in Islam was entire­ly acci­den­tal. He has, most unfor­tu­nate­ly, with­drawn from the inter­faith ini­tia­tives inau­gu­rat­ed by his pre­de­ces­sor, John Paul II, at a time when they are more des­per­ate­ly need­ed than ever. Com­ing on the heels of the Dan­ish car­toon cri­sis, his remarks were extreme­ly dan­ger­ous. They will con­vince more Mus­lims that the west is incur­ably Islam­o­pho­bic and engaged in a new crusade.

We sim­ply can­not afford this type of big­otry. The trou­ble is that too many peo­ple in the west­ern world uncon­scious­ly share this prej­u­dice, con­vinced that Islam and the Qur’an are addict­ed to vio­lence. The ⁹⁄₁₁ ter­ror­ists, who in fact vio­lat­ed essen­tial Islam­ic prin­ci­ples, have con­firmed this deep-root­ed west­ern per­cep­tion and are seen as typ­i­cal Mus­lims instead of the deviants they real­ly were.

With dis­turb­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty, this medieval con­vic­tion sur­faces every time there is trou­ble in the Mid­dle East. Yet until the 20th cen­tu­ry, Islam was a far more tol­er­ant and peace­ful faith than Chris­tian­i­ty. The Qur’an strict­ly for­bids any coer­cion in reli­gion and regards all right­ly guid­ed reli­gion as com­ing from God ; and despite the west­ern belief to the con­trary, Mus­lims did not impose their faith by the sword.

The ear­ly con­quests in Per­sia and Byzan­tium after the Prophet’s death were inspired by polit­i­cal rather than reli­gious aspi­ra­tions. Until the mid­dle of the eighth cen­tu­ry, Jews and Chris­tians in the Mus­lim empire were active­ly dis­cour­aged from con­ver­sion to Islam, as, accord­ing to Qur’an­ic teach­ing, they had received authen­tic rev­e­la­tions of their own. The extrem­ism and intol­er­ance that have sur­faced in the Mus­lim world in our own day are a response to intractable polit­i­cal prob­lems — oil, Pales­tine, the occu­pa­tion of Mus­lim lands, the preva­lence of author­i­tar­i­an regimes in the Mid­dle East, and the west­’s per­ceived ​“dou­ble stan­dards” — and not to an ingrained reli­gious imperative.

But the old myth of Islam as a chron­i­cal­ly vio­lent faith per­sists, and sur­faces at the most inap­pro­pri­ate moments. As one of the received ideas of the west, it seems well-nigh impos­si­ble to erad­i­cate. Indeed, we may even be strength­en­ing it by falling back into our old habits of pro­jec­tion. As we see the vio­lence — in Iraq, Pales­tine, Lebanon — for which we bear a mea­sure of respon­si­bil­i­ty, there is a temp­ta­tion, per­haps, to blame it all on ​“Islam”. But if we are feed­ing our prej­u­dice in this way, we do so at our peril. 

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Karen Armstrong. (September 19, 2006). We can­not afford to main­tain these ancient prej­u­dices against Islam. Retrieved from https://bismikaallahuma.org/op-ed/we-cannot-afford-to-maintain-these-ancient-prejudices-against-islam/.