MUSLIMS and European Christians have interacted now for more than 1,400 years in both war and peace, and it goes without saying that both sides have committed what we today call war crimes.

Yet, there is one set of complaints that has always been and will continue to be one-sided: western Christians regularly hurt Muslim religious feelings; Muslims have never — and are not inherently in a position to — hurt the Christians’ religious feelings for the simple reason that “Christian” prophets and the Bible are part of a Muslim’s fundamental beliefs. If a Muslim does not believe Abraham, Moses and Jesus to be true prophets and their books to be revealed, he will be guilty of blasphemy.

The word “Christians” above has been preceded by “European” or “western” to highlight one fact: the Arab Christians do not at all share their white co-religionists’ hostility towards Islam and the personality of the Holy Prophet. In fact, Arab Christians consider themselves an integral part of the Arab-Islamic civilization, and that is the reason why some of the leading defenders of Arab and Islamic causes in the West happen to be Arab Christians — Edward Said, Yvonne Haddad, Philip K. Hitti, Albert Hourani, etc. Today Arab Christians are as much part of the Palestinian struggle as Muslim Arabs — but this is a subject unto itself.

Why do European Christians (“European” in the broadest possible sense) specialize in defaming Islam? Is there something more to it than 9/11? At least two European scholars use the word “formative” in reference to Europe’s collective psyche as it developed and matured during the Crusades.

One of them is Leopold Weiss, a Hungarian Jew, who later became Muslim and is known to us as Allama Assad. His works include, besides the celebrated book Road to Mecca, an English translation of the Quran. Assad gives historical reasons for the western attitude towards Islam and says “the pronounced contempt” which the Europeans have for other religions is not enough to explain Europe’s “deep-rooted and fanatical aversion” for Islam.

Crusades, he says, occurred in “Europe’s childhood”. As in individuals so also in nations, he says, “the violent impressions of an early childhood persevere, consciously or subconsciously, throughout the later life.” In a chapter entitled “The Shadow of Crusades”, in another of his books, Islam at the Crossroads, Assad says these impressions are “so deeply embossed that they can be only with difficulty, and seldom entirely, removed by the intellectual experiences of the later, more reflective and less emotional age. So it was with the Crusades”.

The West may or may not accept Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, he says, but “it will always preserve a balanced, reflective attitude of mind.” However, as soon as Islam is mentioned, “the balance is disturbed and an emotional bias creeps in.” So it was with the Crusades. They produced “most permanent impressions on the mass psychology of Europe...A wave of intoxication swept over the continent, an elation which overstepped, for some time at least, the barriers between states and nations and classes.

“It was then for the first time in history that Europe conceived itself as a unity — and it was a unity against the world of Islam. We can say...that modern Europe was born out of the spirit of the Crusades. Before that time, there existed Anglo-Saxons and Germans, French and Normans, Italians and Danes: but during the Crusades the new conception of the ‘Western civilization’, a cause common to all European nations, was created: and it was the antagonism against Islam that stood as godfather behind this new creation....

“The evil which the Crusades caused was not restricted to the clang of weapons; it was, first and foremost, an intellectual evil. It consisted in poisoning the European mind against Islam, in the misrepresentation of its teachings and ideals to the ignorant masses of the West.”

Assad’s views, especially those relating to the European psyche, find support from what Karen Armstrong, a British scholar on Islam and comparative religion, has to say, though both lived in different times. Assad lived in times when more or less the entire Muslim world was under European rule; Karen, relatively speaking, lives in modern times when there are over 50 sovereign Muslim states and when the inter-action between Muslims and Christians at non-political, non-military levels — street interaction — has never been more ubiquitous. But, unlike Assad, Karen is not a Muslim.

Author of several books on Islam and other religions, Karen says Crusades destabilised the Middle East but made little impression on the Islamic world. But for Europe, the Crusades were “crucial and formative” because Christendom had just begun “to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Age, and the Crusades were the first cooperative act of the new Europe...” In a newspaper article (Dawn-Guardian Service, June 21, 2002), Karen says one of the Crusades’ “most enduring legacies is a profound hatred of Islam”.

Karen also links the European bias against Muslims to Islam’s liberal attitude towards women and slaves and the rights it gave to women in terms of property ownership. “At a time when Europe was riddled with hierarchy”, she says, “Islam was presented as an anarchic religion that gave too much respect and freedom to menials, such as slaves and women.” The Quran, for instance, gave women “legal rights of inheritance and divorce, which western women would not receive until the 19th century”. To Europe, thus, Islam became its “shadow-self”, the opposite of everything that the Europeans “thought they were or hoped they were not”.

These views appear again in Karen’s article written in the wake of the Pope’s speech at the Regensburg University (Dawn, Sept 19). Europe’s “mediaeval cast of mind is still alive and well”, she says. As for the fear of Islam in Europe’s subconscious, Karen seems to be echoing Assad when she says, “The fearful fantasies created by Europeans at this time (Crusades) endured for centuries and revealed a buried anxiety about Christian identity and behaviour”.

As for the charge of “sensualism” against Islam, Karen says that at a time when the popes were encouraging celibacy “on the reluctant clergy, the scholar monks ...condemned Islam — with ill-concealed envy — as a faith that encouraged Muslims to indulge their basest sexual instincts...” To quote Assad again, “It was then that the ridiculous notion of Islam as a religion of sensualism and brutal violence ... entered the mind of Europe and remained there.”

As for purdah and segregation, Karen says this practice emerged three generations after the birth of Islam and was actually borrowed from Greeks and Christian Byzantium which had long veiled their women.

Group memory also finds a mention in British author William Rushbrooke’s book Pakistan, in which he refers to the European peoples’ “dim memories” of early Islamic conquests and of “fierce non-Christian hordes, Turkish ones now, sweeping across the plains of Hungary to the gates of Vienna”.

While an average European may remember “tales of the conquest by Moors of Spain”, he forgets, “if he knew, about the Moorish civilisation’s superiority to its contemporary Christian rivals further north; its splendid arts, the grace and richness of its architecture,...or the crucial role played by Islamic scholarship...as guardian of the heritage of Greece in fostering European renaissance”. But what the average European remembers, says Rushbrooke, is “the tragic collapse, 500 years ago, before Islamic onslaught, of the Byzantine empire” or “delving deep into European group-memorythe disillusioned, ignominious end of the Crusades”. This group memory, he says, “distorts the Westerner’s attitude towards Islam...”

The Muslims’ inherent inability to hurt Christian and Jewish feelings is an asset for the world. In Jerusalem, Christians do not regard Muslim shrines as holy, while Jews do not hold Muslim and Christian shrines in reverence.

It is Muslims alone who venerate the shrines belonging to all the three faiths. For that reason, Muslims alone are entitled to Jerusalem’s guardianship.