Why does the establishment insist that Islam had a “golden age”—a time when “the Muslim world was more advanced and more civilised than Christian Western Europe, which learned a huge amount from its neighbour,” to quote from a BBC article.
Perhaps the establishment—academia, media, movie-makers, politicians, etc.—is “altruistically” trying to make Muslims “feel better” about themselves (which Obama once directed NASA to do). Or, more cynically, perhaps the establishment is trying to make Western people more open to and accepting of Islam.
While both are true, there is, in fact, a much deeper and more dangerous motive: “Who controls the past controls the future,” to quote George Orwell in his dystopian novel, 1984 (which has become surreally applicable to our times). The truth of this statement cannot be over exaggerated. It explains why the greatest apologia for politically active Muslims and their “leftist” allies—and the first premise for all subsequent apologias for Islam—is purely historical in nature.
Recall, for instance, the most popular question to arise after September 11, 2001: “Why do they hate us?” Unbeknownst to most, this question presupposed a historical point of view that had been forged over decades and, until the publication of my historical correctives, remained largely unquestioned, even by critics of modern Islam: Because Islam was tolerant and advanced in the past, its current problems in the present—authoritarianism, intolerance, violence, radicalization, terrorism, etc.—must be aberrations, products of unfavorable circumstances, politics, economics, “grievances”—anything and everything but Islam itself.
Simply put, if they didn’t “hate us” before—but were rather progressive and tolerant—surely something other than Islam has since “gone wrong.”
From here one can see the importance of safeguarding and sponsoring the current narrative of a historically “advanced” Islam vis-à-vis a historically “backwards” and “intolerant” Europe.
I myself experienced firsthand—dramatically so—just how important controlling this narrative is for politically active Muslims and their allies in 2019. Sharing that rather telling story may better underscore the significance of all this:
In 2019, the U.S. Army War College invited me to lecture on the first of my historical trilogy, * Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West*. In response, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, “CAIR”—an
On two separate occasions they issued press releases, hysterical petitions (presenting the War College—even me, an ethnic Egyptian—as “white supremacists”), and made several direct calls to and met with the head of the War College—all in an effort to get my talk canceled.
They succeeded.
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