What a poor revision of history you’ve given. Regardless of this Islam first faced eastern Christianity, and it struck at this. So the ‘west’ had nothing to do with attacks on Islam until some 400 years later -and that’s after Islam attacked it - through Spain, Sicily, etc. The ‘west’ was not Latin after the 1500s when Imperialism and expansion were beginning.
Montalban, my brother, you seem to be flailing about making false distinctions in some places and ignoring real distinctions elsewhere.
The last time I checked Spain was part of Latin Christendom in the second decade of the 8th c. when most of it was conquered by Muslims (so even if you do not count Latin-speaking North Africa as part of Latin Christendom, the “West” was attacked by Islam in the first century of Islamic history, not the fifth).
The Protestant Reformation did substitute veracular languages for Latin in the areas where it triumphed, but that hardly constituted the creation of an entirely new civilization in those lands, particularly since Latin continued to be the common language of educated discourse across Protestant-Catholic lines for a few more centuries.
Montalban:
I don’t deny Napoleon attacked Egypt. This secularist’s actions aren’t therefore a contributor to Christian -v- Islamic animosity. France at that time had thrown out the Catholic church, officially (though of course there continued to be great public affinity with that church).
The agression to which Muslims are currently responding comes from the “West,” whether you want to define it in exclusively or only in partially Christian terms. And there are many in the West today who define it in exclusively Christian terms, not least of which those happiest to wage war in the Islamic world.
I see a pattern that suggests that Islam’s hatred for Christianity can’t stem from simply 200 years ago - despite your wish to ignore previous history. The Islamic world struck first. That’s a start. The Islamic world has as it’s core a belief in conquest and expansion. That’s a continuation. “the west” has changed in all that time. It’s more secularist now, but Islam’s hatred for Christianity is still part of the Koran.
If you really want to say who “struck first,” one could easily point to the way that the Arabian peninsula in the centuries leading up to the time of Muhammad was a battleground for the competing Roman and Sassanian Persian and for that matter Abyssinian empires, the first and last being Christian states.
I do not agree with Muslims who see the Crusades or the Reconquista (and the proto-colonial adventures flowing from it) as unprovoked Christian aggression against the Islamic world, but I wouldn’t characterize them as purely “self-defence” either.
There’s several differences.
The Old Testament is over. The Koran’s not got a ‘new Testament’. Moslem aggression has not be tempered by a peaceful Moslem version of Jesus.
The Old Testament is not an example for Christians; Christ is.
con’t…
It seems you have a rather rosy picture of Christian history, and I say that as a Christian who does not let the scandal of much of Christian history undermine his faith in Christ.
Jesus did not cancel the Old Testament, and Christians have certainly not taken Him to be advocating pacificism or forbidding military expansionism in the name of spreading His Gospel.
I have said many times that Jesus was not a state-builder and therefore we can say that warfare in defence of a politico-religious community is not nearly as central to Christianity as it is to Islam whose founder, like the Old Testament, prophets was a state-builder.
At the same time, many Muslims are capable of detaching themselves from the warlike language of their scriptures just as many Christians are from that in theirs. And if many Muslims do seem to be inspired by such warlike language, we do not do ourselves a favor if we ignore the fact that Western imperialism has been playing a key role in creating the conditions under which Muslims are drawn to militancy.
You seem to prefer a world where the Qur’an programs Muslims to hate non-Muslims, where Muslim hostility towards non-Muslims comes from no other source than Islam itself. For me, that sort of thinking is just evading responsibility.
