When condemning the hideous acts of ISIL, many politicians have trotted out a familiar line: The terror group is ‘medieval.’ So, is it?

At least one medievalist, Bruce Holsinger of the University of Virginia, says no. To make the comparison to this “garden-variety medievalism represents a failure of historical imagination,” Holsinger writes in an op-ed in the New York Times. As others have noted, ISIL adheres to a brand of Islam that’s not in accord with centuries of mainstream religious jurisprudence. Its fanatics may subscribe to an idealized Islamic past, but their gains and strengths are rooted in far more contemporary phenomena: The reach of the Internet, for example. More importantly perhaps for Holsinger, harping on the jihadists being agents of some sort of “medieval” order is unfair to, well, medieval history. Rather than invoking the medieval world for its brutality, we should remember that epoch for the birth of the university, he says. Or for the multi-ethnic civilization of medieval Spain, for forming a “culture of tolerance” among Muslims, Jews and Christians.