y is not necessarily logical; and indeed history may be far more powerful in its imagined form than in the approximation of facts that ends up in textbooks. But the Muslim response today is also shaped in some part by the experience of the collapse of the last two great Muslim empires, the Ottoman in Eurasia and the Mughal in South Asia. If the Ottoman became the “sick man of Europe” in the nineteenth century, then the Mughal became the “sick man of India” in the eighteenth century. Both lost their eminence to the rising power of Western-Christian colonialism, led principally by Britain, with France taking its share of the spoils in the Middle East and Africa, and Russia seizing Central Asia.
The rise of Christian power was not simply political and economic; it also had a cultural component that left deeper wounds. In an echo of the rhetoric of the original Crusades, Islamic civilization was denigrated as barbaric and bigoted, and the Muslim turned into the caricature of the rapacious, sex-starved Turk in drama, poetry and that much-read Victorian invention, salacious pornography. In India we saw how, for instance, the kings of Awadh were vilified when the British needed to destroy what was left of a self-destructive, decadent nobility. But the caricature of kings was nothing as compared to the vilification of the Prophet (peace be upon him) himself.
Nothing could have been more hateful to the Muslim consciousness than this. Interestingly the most vicious of the Prophet-baiters came from a country that was never able to defeat the Muslims militarily and perhaps found some impotent sustenance in pseudo-intellectual viciousness. This was Italy. The Italian Roman Catholics became the worst and most abusive of the Christian communities who defamed the Prophet. The best example is available in the poetry of the man who is the Homer of Italy, and whose work is still at the heart of Italian literature and the Italian intellectual experience, Dante. I cannot, in all honesty, even begin to repeat what Dante wrote about the Prophet, and these are lines that are savoured by Italians to this day.
The combination of political defeat and religio-cultural insult has left a deep resentment among Muslims against what they see as Christian imperialism. Muslims never fail to point out that there is no instance whatever in Muslim literature, thought or consciousness of any disrespect to Jesus. Indeed, there cannot be, since Muslims revere Jesus as a Prophet, and the Quran confirms the virginity of Mary although it denies Jesus the status of a son of God.
Perhaps the Muslim attitude towards Christianity might have been tempered if both the Mughal and the Ottoman empires had not been eaten up by the British-European advance. If, to take a hypothetical instance, the Marathas, with Ibrahim Khan Gardi in their van, had defeated the Awadh-Rampur alliance led by the Afghan, Ahmad Shah Durrani, and the Mughals been replaced in Delhi by the Marathas, the Muslim response might have sought less one-dimensional answers. But this was not to be. It is pertinent to point out that nowhere in the Hindu-Muslim relationship was there any attempt by either side to vilify the sacred. Battles may have taken place over the concept of idol worship but Muslim poets — including Iqbal, since Iqbal continues to be a bugbear — never denigrated Krishna or Ram and Hindu poetry never vilified the Prophet. It was just not part of the culture of this subcontinent.
The Americans, and this is their tragedy, have inherited a European history that they did not create and from which they are, as a people, culturally and emotionally distant. In fact, when the European powers coolly distanced themselves from the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia, it was America under Bill Clinton that intervened on behalf of the Muslims to stop the most insane and cruel slaughter of a community in Europe since the Second World War. The United States was after all created by refugees from European religious bigotry, so they do not need lessons on this score. Eve