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American politics has become positively medieval

Story by Religion News Service • Apr 10

(RNS) — After the European forces of the First Crusade seized Jerusalem in 1099, it didn’t take long for Muslim writers to recognize that the Europeans were engaged in their own kind of jihad. 

In 1105, a Syrian scholar and preacher named Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami presented the capture as the culmination of a Christian assault on Islam that had begun a decade earlier with the Norman conquest of Sicily and the Frankish invasion of Islamic Spain.

“They continued zealously in the jihad against the Muslims,” al-Sulami wrote, “until they made themselves rulers of lands beyond their wildest dreams.” He likewise understood that this assault represented a self-conscious effort on the Christians’ part to recapture territory lost to Islam in the centuries after Muhammad.

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