AMONG THE factors leading to the French and Dutch rejections of the
European constitution last week, none looms more ominously than the
nightmare of antagonism between ''the West" and Islam. Many Europeans
fear a rising tide of green, both within the continent and from outside
it. Where once communists threatened, now Muslims do. A new wall is
being built.

Muslims, meanwhile, see a flood of contempt in pressures on immigrant
communities in European cities, in restrictions on Islamic expression,
and in openly expressed reservations about Turkey's admission to the EU
precisely because of its Islamic character. Given escalations of the
war in Iraq together with widely reported instances of
Koran-denigration by US interrogators, such trends in Europe make the
global war on terror seem expressly a war against Islam. The ''clash of
civilizations" seems closer at hand than ever.
To make sense of this dangerous condition, it can help to recall some
of the forgotten or misremembered history that prepared for it, from
the remote origins of the conflict to its manifestations in the not so
distant past. As the story is usually told in Europe and America, the
problem began when a jihad-driven army of ''infidel" Saracens, having
brutalized Christians in the ''Holy Land," threatened ''Christendom"
itself with conquests right into the heart of present-day France.
Charles Martel is the hero of primal European romances because he
defeated the Muslim army near Tours in 733. But for Martel, Edward
Gibbon wrote, ''the Koran would now be taught in the schools of
Oxford."

Across subsequent centuries, in the European memory, Islam posed the
great threat to the emerging Christian order. But was that so?
Lombards, Normans, Vikings, forces from the Slavic east, and violent
contests among Christians themselves all wreaked havoc in Europe, even
in Martel's time. As I learned from the historian Tomaz Mastnak, the
threat from the Saracens was one among many. It was defined as
transcendent only with the later Crusades, when Latin Christian armies
set out to rescue that ''Holy Land" and roll back Islamic conquests.
The crusading impulse presumed a demonizing of Saracens that was
justified neither by the threat they actually posed nor by their
treatment of Christians in Palestine. Indeed, chronicles of the earlier
period take little or no notice of the religion of Saracens. Religious
co-existence, famous in Iberia, was a mark of other lands conquered by
Arabs. Europe's initiating ''holy war" with Islam, that is, was based
on flawed intelligence, propaganda, and threat exaggeration.

The poison flower of the Crusades, with their denigrations of distant
cultures, was colonialism. The dark result of European imperial
adventuring in the Muslim world was twofold: first, the usual
exploitation of native peoples and resources, with attendant
destruction of culture, and, second, the powerful reaction among
Muslims and Arab populations against colonialism, a reaction that
included an internal corrupting of Islamic traditions. The accidental
wealth of oil in the Middle East made both external exploitation and
internal corruption absolutely ruinous. The political fanaticism that
has lately seized the Arab Islamic religious imagination (exemplified
in Osama bin Laden) is rooted more in a defensive fending off of
assault from ''the West" than in anything intrinsic to Islam. The
American war on terror, striking the worst notes of the old imperial
insult, only exacerbates this reactionary fanaticism (generating, for
example, legions of suicide bombers).

Having forgotten the deeper history, nervous Europeans seem also to
have forgotten how large numbers of Muslims settled in the continent's
cities in the first place. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turks, Arabs, and
North Africans were welcomed as ''guest workers," taking up menial
labor with the implicit understanding that they could never hope to be
received as citizens of the nations that exploited them. The rank
injustice of a system depending on a permanent underclass was bound to
issue in political resistance, and now it has, but with a religious
edge.

The point is that this conflict has its origins more in ''the West"
than in the House of Islam. The image of Muslims as prone to violence
by virtue of their religion was mainly constructed across centuries by
Europeans seeking to bolster their own purposes, a habit of politicized
paranoia that is masterfully continued by freaked-out leaders of
post-9/11 America. They, too, like prelates, crusaders, conquistadors,
and colonizers, have turned fear of Islam into a source of power. This
history teaches that such self-serving projection can indeed result in
the creation of an enemy ready and willing to make the nightmare real.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
source:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005...