Islam, the West and why I think Sir Max got it wrong
MAX HASTINGS’ view of Islamic and Western history cannot go unchallenged. He says ‘the West has fought the Muslim world for centuries’ and goes on to excoriate the Crusades. He quotes a ‘local historian’ as saying the great Krak des Chevaliers fortress in Syria was ‘a bone in the throat of Muslims’ and asks: ‘What on earth were these Christians doing there?’ This view of the Crusades as unprovoked Christian aggression ignores the 300 years of Islamic conquests of previously Christian lands in the Middle East, across North Africa and into Spain. The remnants of Christianity in Iraq, Syria and Egypt, which saw the first Christian communities, are still persecuted. Islamic expansionism into Western Europe was defeated by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. In the East, it continued with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 amid horrific scenes as the inhabitants were butchered and enslaved. It was halted only in 1683 when a Turkish army was destroyed at the gates of Vienna by Christian forces under Polish King Jan III Sobieski. Muslim forces had more success at empire-building elsewhere. Their conquest of India was described by historian Will Durant as ‘the bloodiest story in history’. Untold millions died. Hasting’s view of the Bible as more bloodthirsty than the Koran is disingenuous. There are at least 109 verses in the Koran calling Muslims to go to war on non-believers for the sake of Islamic rule. These overwhelmingly outweigh more pacific ones. Nowhere in the New Testament, which Sir Max fails to mention, does Jesus call for those who oppose him to have their heads and fingers chopped off or to be killed wherever they might be hiding. He tells us to love our enemies and to forgive those who wrong us. Sir Max says Christianity has mostly adapted itself to modernity, but he forgets to mention that without Christianity, there would be no modernity. Western civilisation as we understand it, including individual rights, representative democracy, empirical science and the Enlightenment, are all by-products of Christian doctrine.
COLIN BROUGHTON, Theydon Bois, Essex.