Historically, it is Islam that has been the imperialist force, versus both East and West.
howardbloom.net
(See the article: "Islam's War Against the West")
extract:
Esposito, like many other writers on the topic, justifies the ferocity of anti-western Islamic sentiments by reminding us that "many in the Arab and Muslim world view the history of Islam and of the Muslim world's dealings with the West as one of victimization and oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power."
There's no question he is right. However the Islamic world held the upper hand in the struggle between the Occident and the Levant for over 1,100 years. The West managed to turn the tables briefly when the Crusaders established a short-lived middle eastern toehold.
<snip>
Nonetheless, according to historian Amin Maalouf, the author of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, modern Arabs tend to see today's world events as a continuation of the Crusades.
For 600 years after the fall of the Crusader states, Islamic forces returned to the attack, capturing Greece and chunks of Eastern Europe, raiding towns in Sicily and the Italian coasts for goods and slaves, preying on Mediterranean shipping, chaining Europeans like Miguel Cervantes to the oars of their galleys, and until 1826 forcing the Christian citizens of Yugoslavia and Albania to give up their children to Moslem overlords (who brought up the males on the Koran, then turned them into soldiers known as Janissaries).
It wasn't until 1798 that Napoleon began to shift the balance between East and West again when he briefly invaded Egypt, from which he was ignominiously expelled by the British and the Turks. But the heavy-handed fertile crescent "imperialism" so resented by the Arabs didn't begin until after the First World War, and it lasted less than 40 years.
Southern Spain remained under the Moslem yoke for 781 years, Greece for 381, and pieces of longtime Christian terrain like St. Augustine's North African homeland and the religious and secular capital that eventually eclipsed Rome in power and splendor--Byzantium--are still in Moslem hands today.
Syria, on the other hand, was only under western control for 21 years, Egypt for 67, and Iraq a mere 15.
If one accepts Esposito's reasoning, Westerners--who were bludgeoned by "an expansive imperial" Islam for well over a millennium--have more right to fear an Islamic revival than Moslems have to hate the West... |
