A eagarthoir, a chara, - Mr Patrick Comerford (30 Nollaig), like so many Western writers discussing the West's incursions upon Islam, fails to give equal prominence to Islam's incursions on the West. Despite the Crusades, and despite its present material superiority, the West has been under direct threat from Islam for longer periods than Islam has been under direct threat from the West.
Centuries before the Crusades, the forces of Islam overwhelmed the Christian communities of the Middle East and North Africa, with the Koran in one hand and a sword in the other". At the beginning of the eighth century Muslim forces invaded Spain, from which they were not expelled till the end of the 15th. In the eighth century, they also advanced into France as far as Poitiers.
They captured Constantinople in 1453, besieged Vienna in 1689, and the present day Muslim communities of Yugoslavia and Albania - serve to remind us that Muslim rule in the Balkans lasted into the 19th century. (Owen Roe O'Neill on his deathbed, in 1649, had expressed the wish that Christians, instead of fighting each other, should join forces to expel the Turks). The location of Christian towns and villages around the shores of the Mediterranean, back from the coast and in defensible strongholds, is testimony to age long descents by Muslim pirates (some of whom took time off, in 1631, to conduct the Sack of Baltimore). This menace was not finally eliminated until the last century; whence the US Marines, in the 1830s, derived their song "To the shores of Tripoli".
It appears that some historians are now coming round to the view surprise, surprise - that the Crusades were primarily religious in inspiration, and that they were a defensive reaction (ultimately unsuccessful) to Muslim aggression. On the other hand, historians who ascribe "the inflexibility of Islam" to Crusader massacres need to explain the conduct of Muslims before the Crusades.
There are mosques in Dublin and Ballyhaunis, but my understanding is that such freedom to practice their religion as Christians enjoy in most Islamic countries is of a very restricted character, and that even this is under threat from movement enjoying wide popular support. The Western media, which gave the fullest adverse publicity to apartheid in South Africa, have displayed no comparable interest in the continuing persecution of Christians in Sudan.
The West, which has in large part concluded that religious belief is of no significance, needs to recognise, even if only as a matter of practical politics, that this view is, most emphatically, not shared by Muslims (nor by Hindus). It is, for instance, unrealistic to consider Turkey's relations with the EU without taking the fullest account of the religious aspect.
The cultivation of goodwill and mutual understanding between Islam and the West is to be welcomed for many reasons, not least because the Islamic family tradition contains valuable elements which the West, in discarding its Christian heritage, has lost. But goodwill. unaccompanied by a full appreciation of the many difficulties to be overcome, is unlikely to achieve its objects. - Do chara,
Bailen Teampaill,
Baile Atha Cliath 14.