Plus Ca Change 0
James Carroll, writing at the Boston Globe, looks at the history of Christian prejudice against Islam. A nugget:
Meanwhile, as is always true of bigotry, Europeans knew very little about actual Muslims. The Koran dates to the seventh century, but there was no Latin translation of the sacred text until the middle of the 12th century. The first “approximately objective account of Islam and the prophet,’’ in the phrase of the theologian Hans Kung, did not appear in Europe until the 18th century — a book that was promptly censored by the church. None of this stopped Christians from assuming they knew what Islam was, right from the start.
There seems to be something in human nature that longs to have enemies and perpetuate enmity.
