The problem with this quotation isn't the inaccuracy of the Emperor's observation but the opening it provides to allow Islamic apologists to take us back once more to the days of desperate and deadly Muslim-Christian competition in the late Middle Ages. For instance, Anas Altikriti, writing in the British leftist journal "The Guardian" under the headline "An Insufficient Apology" seized the opportunity to remind his readers that "whilst the Catholic church was cementing the barbarism of Europe's dark ages," the Muslims were "busy writing literature, philosophy, art, architecture, medicine, chemistry, physics, biology, algebra and music." He goes on in lyrical terms to hail the "vast and illustrious universities and libraries of Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, Seville and Cairo" and "the 100 years of glorious co-existence among Muslims, Christians and Jews" in Spain.
Mr. Altikriti is right, of course, about the long-ago glories of Muslim civilization but the Islamic enlightenment of six centuries ago only makes their present predicament more perplexing and appalling. Non-Muslims should never engage in useless arguments about the relative merits of Islamic and Christian civilizations in the fourteenth century. Focusing on these by-gone conflicts makes Christendom look far worse than it is today and allows Islam to appear far better than it is today. That's why President Bush rightly apologized after he used the term "Crusade" to describe America's mission in the War on Terror. For Muslims, that term invokes images of an age in which Christians often proved harsh, bloodthirsty and barbaric, while their Islamic ancestors could arguably represent the more enlightened contender. Worst of all, the era featured a world-wide conflict between two powerful civilizations who fought for world dominance on a more-or-less equal basis.
Any recollection of medieval Christian-Muslim struggle therefore feeds the insane Islamist fantasy that today's battles amount to another "clash of civilizations" -- a laughably absurd notion when one considers the vast gulf separating Islamic nations (which now represent some of the earth's most backward, dysfunctional, violent and regressive societies) from the countries of the West (which constitute nearly all of the world's most dynamic, productive, powerful and enlightened states). The current battle hardly amounts to a war of civilizations, but rather constitutes a war AGAINST civilization by forces of barbarism and primitivism.
The hysterical response to the Pope's harmless if clumsy citation of a Medieval quote only underscores the point. The Dark Ages thinking that prevails in nearly all Islamic societies produces logic that suggests that the best way to rebut the ancient charge that Islam is inextricably intertwined with violence is to provide alarming displays of new violence. The public relations masters in Mecca and other centers of Islamist "thought" have concluded that they can prove that they do indeed honor reason and persuasion more than force by fire-bombing churches, killing nuns and issuing statements (even in London!) demanding the Pope's assassination.
The stupidity remains so obvious and so striking that it only underscores the need to keep our focus on contemporary conflicts, rather than giving the Islamist cheerleaders any opportunity to obscure the wildly uneven nature of the current struggle by looking, nostalgically, to the more balanced battles of the dim and distant past.