The Pope's Big Mistake: Invoking Past Conflict

Blog Posts:

"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."