Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University. He is also the author of Islam: A View from the Edge and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.

In the following article written for Salem News the Professor reminds western bigots of the positive contribution that Muslims have made to European history.

Handshake Bigots Exposed: What Muslims Did For Europeimage by elektracute

He also calls for a new understanding between Europeans and Muslims that builds on the positives from their intertwined past:

“Distorted by today’s political lenses, European historical memory selectively focuses on past violence perpetrated by Muslims and either forgets Europe’s cultural borrowings from Muslim societies, or regards them as unimportant remnants of a closed chapter in European-Muslim relations.

Fourteen European countries have been wholly or partly under Muslim rule for at least one of the last fourteen centuries. With the exception of Spain, national memory in all of these lands either minimizes this experience or portrays the era of Muslim dominion as one of unrelieved oppression and barbarity…..

…From episodes like this, today’s ideologues concoct a myth of unending and merciless hostility between Islam and the West. But even the military tale is selectively told. Who recalls that France’s Renaissance monarch Francis I allied with the Muslim Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent to fight against his Christian rival Charles V of Spain? Who remembers that many generations of Muslim Tatars fought for Christian Polish kings against their Christian foreign enemies?

Closer to the present, Europeans are slow to recall the tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers from West Africa and India who fought and died on the Western Front in World War I against what the French and the British then thought of as the “barbaric Huns”? And who chooses to remember the reliance the United States placed on Afghanistan’s Muslim warriors in their struggle against the “godless atheists” of the Soviet Union in the 1980s?

Muslims who have fought on behalf of Western political interests have been forgotten. Muslims who have confronted the West militarily are remembered. Not only remembered, but taken as examples of an imaginary eternal opposition between Islam and the West….

…Europe needs to come to grips with its past. This could best be done by a multinational commission charged with reviewing every aspect of the history of Muslims in, and versus, Europe.

The parallel history of Europeans in, and versus, Muslims outside of Europe is of equal importance; but that has already been addressed in hundreds of books devoted to imperialism and its beneficial or baleful consequences.

There are two reasons why this urgent chore needs to be addressed internationally. First, a number of countries — Serbia and Bulgaria come to mind — have built a myth of demonic Muslim occupation into nationalist ideologies that no longer ring true, however serviceable they may once have been during struggles for independence. These myths need to be reexamined outside the nationalist context.

Secondly, Muslims must be granted a role in reconsidering their history within Europe. Modern efforts at reconciliation around the world have amply demonstrated that disputed histories cannot be clarified without participation by the parties concerned.”

(Source: Salem News)

For more on the contribution of Muslims to western civilisation see:

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