Despite all this, the only conflicts highlighted today include the crusades, European colonialism, and any other Western venture that can be made to conform to the popular view that Europeans initiated hostilities against non-Europeans. Even among less ideologically charged historians, the macrocosmic significance of the aforementioned millennium, when “Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam,” is unintelligible. They talk of “Arab,” “Moorish,” “Ottoman,” or “Tatar”—rarely Islamic—invasions and conquests, even though the selfsame rationale—jihad—impelled those otherwise diverse
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