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. But for Martel, Edward Gibbon wrote, ''the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford."Īcross subsequent centuries, in the European memory, Islam posed the great threat to the emerging Christian order. Charles Martel is the hero of primal European romances because he defeated the Muslim army near Tours in 733. 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.
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.
The ''clash of civilizations" seems closer at hand than ever. 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. 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. Where once communists threatened, now Muslims do. Many Europeans fear a rising tide of green, both within the continent and from outside it. 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.
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