IN THE LAST ISSUE, WE HIGHLIGHTED SOME GENERAL aspects of Islam to demonstrate the nature of misunderstanding about Islam in the West. In this issue, we draw our reader’s attention to some roots of this misunderstanding. Next month, we’ll focus on the history of Islam.

Europe first confronted Islam’s political, military, and religious challenge the 7th century. European Christianity had already possessed a rich and colourful stock of interpretations, symbols, and myths, and had constructed a set of categories that determined the religious other amidst its brutal conflicts with corrupted Judaism, perverted heresies, and paganisms. Islam was now to be fitted into the existing categories of Jew, pagan, and heretic. Elements that didn’t fit in these schemes were to be ignored. Christianity’s early knowledge of Islam, therefore, was governed by a theological model that regulated the image and position of the other within Christian theology. George Bernard Shaw, the celebrated British dramatist and intellectual, once said, “The Mediaeval Ecclesiastics either through ignorance or bigotry painted Muhammadanism (Islam) in the darkest colours. In fact, they were trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them he was anti-Christ. I have studied him, the wonderful man, and in my view, far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the saviour of humanity.”

To many Christian theologians, Islam was “the work of devil,” the Qur’an “a tissue of absurdities,” and Muhammad (on whom be peace) “a false prophet,” “an imposter,” or “antichrist.” The Muslims were some sort of brutes with hardly any human qualities.

This image of Islam continued throughout the crusade period, but the Arabs were replaced by the Turks following the expulsion of Muslims from Spain in the 15th century. George Sale, an early 18th century translator of the Qur’an, wrote in the introduction to his translation: “I imagine it almost needless either to make an apology, or to go about to prove it a work of use as well as curiosity. They must have a mean opinion of the Christian religion, or be ill-grounded therein, who can apprehend any change from so manifest a forgery… But whatever use an impartial version of the Koran may be, in other respects it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too favourable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually to expose the imposture.”

The imposture view of the Prophet continued to modern times. Professor Phillip K. Hitti, a contemporary historian of the Middle East, writes about the very recent past: “Unfortunately during the last decade or two, in particular, the impact of the West has not been all for the good. There is a striking contrast between the humanitarian ideas professed by Western missionaries, teachers and preachers, and the disregard of human values by European and American politicians and warriors; a disparity between word and deed; an over-emphasis on economic and nationalistic values. The behaviour of the so-called advanced nations during the last two wars waged on a scale unknown in history; the ability of Western man to let loose these diabolic forces which are the product of his science and his machine and which now threaten the world with destruction; and with particular relation to the Near East, the handling of the Palestine problem by America, England and other nations – all these have worked together to disillusion the man of the Near East who have been trying to establish an intellectual rapprochement with the West. It is these actions of the West which alienate him and shake his belief in the character of the Western man and his morality on both the private and the public levels.”