On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 01:25:36AM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > The Christian Bible ought to be OK by most Islamic scholars - it's the > Crusader history that has caused most of the problems - but you
After 9/11 I saw a fellow named Tariq Ramadan on C-Span, and one of his books was the history of Occidental peoples written from an Oriental perspective -- in other words, what they thought of us "way back then." At the time the Crusades were a border skirmish of only middling interest. Most of Islam hardly knew about them. It wasn't until the Ottoman empire in the 1800s and attempts at inciting nationalistic fury to support various pan-Arab movements that they got trumped up into such a big huge deal. A lot of the minor princes made friends with the invaders. After all, we have Christian Syria and Christian Lebanon out of it. It's really shocking to hear what kind of mouthpieces some people are on the left for what some shady egyptian cleric in 1910 wrote.
