44. Have Christianity and Islam exchanged views of each other?

One thing to keep in mind here is that the Shaykh mentions “Christianity” and “Islam” having ‘views’ of each other, rather than Christians and Muslims. I can’t wrap my head around what that means exactly, if anything.

So one way to approach this contention is to think of it in terms of views of each group towards each other. To understand this contention I think it’s best to write down how both groups viewed each other early on and then consider how they view each other today.

This article by Soumayya Ghannoushi, “Western view of Islam: A troubled history” is useful in this respect:

She writes:

To medieval Christianity, Islam was the point of intersection of all these categories, the Other par excellence: a corrupted Judaism, perverted Christianity, and wild natural paganism all at once, both the enemy within and without
…
To the reformists, Islam was synonymous with the whole deviation and moral corruption of the papacy: pride, greed, violence and lust for power and possession. But in order to demonize the new ideas of its enemies, who were rapidly growing in popularity, the Roman Catholic Church could not find a worse charge than Muhammadism.

Now that the Muslims are in a much less imposing position, it seems that the Shaykh’s contention rings true. The attributes of pride, greed, violence, and lust for power and possesion have all been recalled within Muslim hearts when thinking of Christiandom. This is especially in light of the war in Iraq and other actions taken to protect oil interests.

We now need to determine what was the view of Muslims towards Christianity. Without having any direct sources in this subject, I would throw out some suppositions. I believe the early Muslim view towards medieval Christianity would have been one of “lacking enlightenment”, “misguided due to error”, “backwards”.

This is certainly a view which has exchanged positions as well.

Feel free to share other ideas in this regard.