Dismissing criticism of the creed that spawns so many fulminators, fanatics and public dangers as mere prejudice ignores Islam’s history, its embarrassment in failing to fulfill Divine admonitions to dominate and a scripturally endorsed contempt for rival religions. Hotheads and moderates alike, this is what Islam believes-the former simply exalt their faith with action
* * *Between people formed within “Western culture” and those in “the world of Islam” there is and has long been much fear, mistrust, anxiety and resentment -some of it born of incomprehension (and therefore “remediable” simply by the provision of facts, mere information), and some, even much, of it born not so much of an ignorance (that simple facts can dispel) as a vague memory of an adversarial relationship, even of hostilities.
On both sides, non-Muslim and Muslim alike are heirs, although differently, to a long history of historical rivalry for world ascendancy between civilizations representing the second and third “successor” variants of the unfolding Abrahamic faith tradition of ethical prophetic monotheism. For a thousand years these two rivals, these two organizing frameworks for world order, faced each other across the Mediterranean – and for much of that time the world of Islam was the more powerful, far-reaching and culturally accomplished.