A Critique of Professor Arnold G. Toynbee’s Understanding — Page 21
21 Karen Armstrong, in her biography of the Holy Prophet notes: “Finally it was the West, not Islam, which forbade the open discussion of religious matters. At the time of the Crusades, Europe seemed obsessed by a craving for intellectual conformity and punished its deviants with a zeal that has been unique in the hist ory of religion. The witch hunts of the inquisitors and the persecution of Protestants by the Catholics and vice versa were inspired by abstruse theological opinions which in both Judaism and Islam were seen as private and optional matters. Neither Judaism nor Islam share the Christian conception of heresy, which raises human ideas about the divine to an unacceptably high level and almost makes them a form of idolatry. The period of the Crusades, when the fictional Mahound was established, was also a time of the great strai n and denial in Europe. This is graphically expressed in the phobia about Islam. ” ( Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet , page 27).