No enmity is natural. Each arises from a specific set of historical circumstances. We in the West have fallen prey to the idea that Islam was not just a historical foe but also a natural enemy of Europe and later of the West. It was not so with the "red" enemy. When the Communist threat ended in 1989, the antagonism between the United States and the USSR turned into a quasi-alliance. By the mid-90s there was no longer a red menace; instead, there was a green enemy: Islam. Always lurking in the shadows, it emerged as a real foe during the Iranian Revolution of the late 70s. The band of bearded ayatollahs and their leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, became the clerical counterweight to a secular, pro-Western, capitalist world order. Yet neither Iranians, Libyans, Lebanese, Sudanese, nor Iraqis proved to be the real menace. When September 11, 2001 brought the green enemy out of the shadows and into the headlines, it was a non-state Saudi related group that attacked the United States in the name of Allah. Al-Qaeda seemed to justify the worst fears of crisis managers and civilization watchdogs. There was an Islamic enemy, with a Saudi face and modern weapons that was real and determined. September 11 seemed to confirm the major theories proffered in the aftermath of the Gulf War: Samuel Huntington's clash between civilizations, Bernard Lewis's replay of the Crusades, and Francis Fukuyama's reemergence of fascism with an Islamic face.

Since September 11, the "Clash of Civilizations" theory has dominated and incorporated all others. It seems to explain Muslim-Western hostility as both ancient and irreversible. It is neither. This enmity is made by humans and thus can be unmade by humans. The historical events over the past millennium can and must be retold from a broader perspective that includes multiple interpretations of the same events and their sequels. There is no single Christian view and no single Muslim counterpart; both exhibit an internal variety.

What is needed to advance beyond pseudo-dialectics and interminable warfare is a double critique-internal and external-that must begin with the symbolic event that haunts the memory of Christians and Muslims alike: the Crusades. The Crusades began over 900 years ago and still continue today. Pope Urban II's call for Crusaders in 1095 was not an isolated message from the European Middle Ages, but an awakening of Christendom to the threat of Islam. To quote Pope Urban II, "In our days God has fought through Christian men in Asia against the Turks and in Europe against the Moors." By Crusader logic, Christians must fight on and on, in every continent and in every age, against Turks, Moors, Saracens or their 21st century collective successors: the Muslims.

Protestant and Catholic Crusaders

Who are today's Crusaders? They are both Protestant and Catholic. News headlines have featured the raw provocations of evangelicals, from the Southern Baptist President who derided Muhammad as a pedophile to Franklin Graham lampooning Islam as an evil, misguided religion. Until 1995 the Californian Baptist minister Tim LaHaye was best known for his leadership of the Christian Family movement. He has now become the bestselling author of a whole line of apocalyptic fiction, including Left Behind brigade. LaHaye, of course, does not project Left Behind as fiction but as fact that the end will come. It will come in the near future and it will be marked by a soul harvest. The few who survive the Tribulation, the AntiChrist, and the Armageddon, will be saved, while the rest will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

What does all this have to with Islam? Ostensibly nothing. The goal of the Christian Right is purely religious: to reclaim Jerusalem for the Jewish people, as in the 1999 title of sixth installment of Left Behind: Assassins: Assignment Jerusalem, Target Antichrist. Yet the fact behind this fictional account involves real people. The real people to be targeted are Arabs. It is Arabs who occupy Jerusalem and mark it as the territory of the Antichrist. It is the Arabs who represent the forces of evil. It is Arabs who have to be killed in the Battle of Armageddon. Only with the removal of the Arab/Muslim beast can the Holy Land be reclaimed for the People of God.

By comparison to Protestant doomsday sayers, Catholic sabre rattlers may seem almost anodyne in their view of both the last days and Arab adversaries. But are they? Consider the Vatican. It has often been suggested that the current Pope is well disposed to Muslims in general and to Palestinians in particular. But Papal pronouncements also include beatifications; one recent beatification, announced in April 2003, elevated an obscure Capuchin monk/priest named Marco d'Aviano. Brother Marco is alleged to have inspired the now famous cappuccino coffee, but he was also a seventeenth century Capuchin monk, and he helped to defend Vienna against a Turkish assault in the 1680s. The Turks were Muslims and they were allegedly defeated because Brother Marco rallied both Protestants and Catholics to oppose the Muslim invaders. The Turks, defeated in the 1683 Battle of Vienna, never again besieged Western Europe. In his April pronouncement Pope John Paul II celebrated that moment as a Christian victory. He lauded Brother Marco as a true Crusader, asserting that he had helped defend the "freedom and unity of Christian Europe," reminding today's Catholics that the continent is founded on "common Christian roots." The Holy Father's commendation had an unspoken trailer: "Muslims are not welcome; go home, to Asia or to Africa, but depart from Christian Europe!"

Beyond papal pronouncements there are Catholic polemicists at large. William F. Buckley leads the pack. No sooner had the U.S. completed its invasion of Iraq than Buckley wrote a provocative article for The National Review (27 May 2003). It was entitled "Onward, Christian Missionaries!" echoing the words of the 19th century Anglican hymn, "Onward, Christian Soldiers!" In the article Buckley declared that in present day Iraq, Protestant missionaries are right to tell Christian men and women "to spend their lives, and even to risk them to pass on the word of the Christian faith." A special difficulty, laments Buckley, "is that the moderate Muslim voice arouses the antagonism of the militant, which antagonism seeks satisfaction, from time to time, in mayhem. The wrath of the militants is feared not only by non-militant exegetes of the Koran, entire governments are intimidated." The only safe haven for moderate, as for militant, Muslims is conversion to Christianity.