One Thousand Roads to Mecca Quotes

“The years between Roger Bacon’s birth, in 1220, and Uthred’s death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek.”
― Michael Wolfe, One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage

“From its early days, Islam remained a European measure of what real heresy was all about. In the fifteen and sixteenth centuries, however, after most Muslims had been expelled from Spain and as real knowledge of them dwindled, the European image of Islam grew more distorted, becoming a colossal parody of Catholicism. From a well-defined other, its face was recast as a monstrous double, a reverse image of Christianity in all its virtue: the face of the scapegoat. This was not due to new thinking on the subject. Rather, cultural propaganda from the Crusades was simply dusted off and reapplied to the Inquisition. In the intellectual history of the West, Islam was delivered full circle, back to the demonizing portraits enshrined in the Old French epic of Roland. A Muslim became everything a good Christian was not. Islam was reduced to a set of self-referential signs and symbols.”
― Michael Wolfe, One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage