The New Crusades by Emran Qureshi

Author:Emran Qureshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Islam/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Europe’s Perpetual Crusade: From “Chasing the Turk Out of Europe” to “Ethnic Cleansing”

What follows may be seen as problematic on more than one account. Before I continue I want, therefore, to briefly state what I think I am doing in the coming pages. I string up names of writers, clerics, and statesmen and quote their views on the “Turkish question.” The selection is arbitrary, as any selection is bound to be. I am aware of the amount of the material I could add to that presented here. Methodologically even more problematic is that the context in which the opinions I cite were uttered is scarcely indicated. That is all this limited space allows me to do. But the voices I cite actually form a specific community of discourse and a specific context of their own. It is this anti-Muslim discourse that is, almost as a rule, missing in different accounts of European history. These voices speak out that which is so often silenced in historical accounts of Europe. As such, my selection of historical material is tendentious. But so is the suppression (or, at best, marginalization) of material such as that I present here in what passes for a history of Europe.

I hope that my tendentiousness is justifiable. I am aware that the views on the “Turks” I present are unlikely to find respectable defenders in today’s academic or political circles, at least in public. In fact, these views are quite embarrassing from the point of view of political culture in an age of liberal and democratic triumphalism. But my intention is not to put Europe’s dirty linen on display, or to irritate colleagues by showing their intellectual heroes at their “least admirable.” Nor is it my intention to debunk Christianity (for I do not discuss religion but rather its use or abuse for worldly purposes). It should be clear from what and how I write that I sympathize with neither historical hostility toward the Muslims nor our contemporary anti-Islamism. I hope, however, that I will not seem to be arguing that Europeans ought not to have hated the Muslims. The world might be a better place if they had not. But they did, as the material I present shows. We have to acknowledge and face the fact that there is a long history of deeply rooted hostility toward the Muslims in European history. I believe that this hostility is not separable from Europe’s most cherished ideals of liberty, rights, justice, peace, etc. It is, rather, part and parcel of the same complex web of thought as those ideals. If the existence of anti-Muslim ideas and sentiments is not acknowledged, the complexity of what is called European thought gets lost, the ideals of liberty, peace, etc., cannot be taken seriously, and their realization, either willing or enforced, is going to keep playing havoc with the world.

Let me now go back to my narrative, turning first to Erasmus of Rotterdam. As the most influential of the so-called Christian humanists, Erasmus was

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