Boston Globe ^ | April 4, 2011 | James Carroll
Posted on Monday, April 04, 2011 11:57:53 AM by reaganaut1
... [P]ervasive negative attitudes toward Islam go far deeper into the American psyche even than these manifestations suggest, for contempt toward the religion of Mohammed is a foundational pillar of Western civilization. That it is unacknowledged only makes it more pernicious.
European Christian imagination jelled — as European, as Christian, and as imagination — around the mythic 732 triumph of Charles Martel over "infidel'' Muslim forces in a battle near Poitiers, France. That may seem like an eternity ago and a world away, but still-powerful attitudes that show up in suspicions of widespread Muslim "radicalization'' were generated then. In epoch-shaping chansons de geste celebrating Charles Martel, Islam was portrayed as nothing less than the anti-Christ. So resonant was its defeat, that Charles Martel was empowered as the effective founder of cohesive European social structures, with his lineage (through his grandson Charlemagne) extending even to present-day royalty.
Edward Gibbon famously shuddered at the thought that, but for Charles Martel, the Koran would be taught to the "circumcised'' at Oxford instead of the New Testament. (It seems not to have occurred to Gibbon that, had the Poitiers battle gone the other way, Oxford, which dates to 1167, might have been founded years earlier — by, say, disciples of the great Muslim scholar Avicenna, who died in 1037.) From early on, Western civilization understood itself positively against the negative foil of Islam, a polarity that was institutionalized during the decisive centuries of the Crusades. That Christendom failed to liberate the Holy Land from infidel control only made permanent the fear and hatred of Islam.
Meanwhile, as is always true of bigotry, Europeans knew very little about actual Muslims.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
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