Nonetheless, the finest moment of this administration, maybe its sole fine moment, was when the president, immediately after the 2001 attacks, urged moderation, and discouraged reflexive hatred of Muslims. He vowed justice would punish the perpetrators. Thanks to his policies, however, the guilty parties are largely beyond the reach of our justice, we have enemies where we had none, and conservatives hawk a grand clash of cultures.
So when Pope Benedict XVI spoke recently about martial tendencies of Islam, it was hard to buy that he was making a narrow scholarly point among former academic colleagues. His predecessor, it is worth remembering, responded to the 2001 attacks by convening an extraordinary conclave of religious leaders, in order to affirm the virtue of tolerance and to assert that God, under any name, neither solicits nor sanctions murder.
But Benedict was, in his way, making a valid point in quoting Manuel II Paleologus. It is no surprise that one of the last Byzantine emperors should find Islam bellicose. The Turks had already reduced the last vestige of the Roman Empire to the walls of Constantinople and would breach them within a generation. They were not the first, though. That distinction is owned by European crusaders, who decided to sack their ally's citadel on the way to the Holy Land.
The Crusades, launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II with the rallying cry, "Deus Lo Volt” (God wills it), offer sufficient evidence that Christianity has left its own trail of blood. But to cite that history is to play into the hands of the right. Each fresh episode, from the dubious Koran desecration at Guantanamo Bay to Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, provides more ballast for conservatives: See what we're up against? Criticize Christians all you want, but speak a word against Islam and people die.
Charles Krauthammer sounded this note last week in the Washington Post. After noting that all religious fanatics lack a sense of irony—"‘How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it' is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge”—he noted that all three monotheisms have violent pasts. "However,” he continued, "the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up.”
This is an important point, because so many of Krauthammer's colleagues on the right seem keen to reverse this fact of history. The unmistakable subtext of the clash of cultures is a clash of religions. Even with Republicans controlling all three branches of government, religious conservatives have seen so little of their agenda enacted that the promise of a purifying crusade is all their cynical manipulators have left.
But Christendom did not "give up” fighting. Its legions simply stopped heeding the papal bull. Europe in particular, weary of centuries of schismatic wars, pushed the Church into the background of tourist snapshots. Although we seem eager at times to renew theocracy, the United States sprang from Europe's embrace of secular government and rational progress.
A few voices from the left have raised the alarm about the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, but ineffectively. Christopher Hitchens has all but spent his moral authority tediously shoring up the Iraq war. Meanwhile, conservatives have branded "freedom” while quietly hacking away at it. Not a few of them would welcome a global religious war in its sullied name. That is why it is crucial for the rest of us to insist that true freedom be preserved.
Progressives have every reason, and every right, to be angry about Islamic extremism. We see no reason to provoke a fight, and every reason to stanch anti-Western resentment by peaceful means. But we cannot ignore or excuse the threat, because its end is the end of enlightenment. If there is to be a fight, let this, not religion, be the reason for it.