Your Excellency:

One Sunday in September, about 60 adults gathered between Masses in the sanctuary of the basilica to hear a professor from our local university speak on the history of Islam.  This speaker, a pale, young man with close-cropped hair, stood at the front of the basilica with the altar at his back and the Blessed Sacrament exposed in the Adoration Chapel to his left.

“I’m here today not as a Muslim, though I am Muslim, but to speak with you about the history of Islam,” he began.  Lecturing with an ease polished by hundreds of classroom appearances, our guest for several minutes examined Muhammad and his religious struggles, his successful conquest of Mecca, and his death.  The professor then told us about the “prophet’s” followers and their subsequent invasions north along the Eastern Mediterranean and west across Northern Africa.  These invasions, he contended, had little to do with religious zealotry and much to do with a desire for plunder and wealth.

Then the lecture changed.  When the professor mentioned “the Middle Ages,” some women on the front row, good Catholics all and dumb as dirt in their knowledge of history, sprang to life.  “The Inquisition!” one of them shouted.

He looked startled, but then nodded.  “Yes, the Inquisition.”

“The Crusades!” another called out.  “Blood and slaughter.”

After the usual intellectual shenanigans—the European knights needed an outlet for violence; the Crusaders launched an unprovoked attack on Constantinople in 1204—the professor declared abruptly that “the Crusades were caused by economics only.”  He then proceeded to ramble, not through history, but through contemporary culture.  He told us that Lebanon remained 50-percent Christian, though he neglected to mention that the Lebanese government has not taken an official religious poll in more than half a century.  He lauded the freedom of Muslim women, who apparently desire the veil for privacy and for modesty’s sake.  (There is a fashion catalog for veiled women.)  He assured us that terrorists constituted only a miniscule part of Islam, that Muslims differed greatly from one another depending on their background and culture, that the West must be patient with Islam.  Encouraged by one of his female allies from the front pew, the professor reminded us that all religions produce terrorists.

At the end of this “lecture,” a man (a stockbroker) rose and pointed out that we in the West frequently held open forums like the present one.  Why, he asked the professor, did Islam seem so closed to the idea of freedom of speech?

“We must let the Muslims settle these things,” the professor said, somewhat incongruously.  “We must let Islam work out its own affairs.”

After the applause, some in the audience approached the professor.  Others left immediately.  The man who had asked the final question wore the look of a dissatisfied student.  A young woman kneeling in the adoration chapel remained as motionless in prayer as ever.

Here, Your Excellency, is what did not happen: No one in an official capacity was present to challenge the professor‘s historical perspectives.  As it happens, I teach history to high-school students.  Despite my low status on the academic totem pole, I do know that, from a.d. 732 until the present, Europe has poured out a river of blood fighting off Muslim incursions.  I know that Muslims over several centuries helped destroy the Church in North Africa.  I know that some Muslims have proved tolerant rulers, others harshly intolerant, just like Christians.  Why was no one present to offer a counterpoint to the professor?

From my teaching experience, I am aware that many young Americans take their ideas about the Middle Ages from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, yet few notice that an attack on the Middle Ages is nearly always an attack on Christianity, specifically on our Catholic Faith.  Someone from the Church should have explained to the vociferous women in the front pew that the medieval Church gave us universities and hospitals, and that the Church more than any other institution has helped elevate the status of women.

Someone might have also pointed out to these fractious critics that, unlike their Muslim counterparts, they were not dragged outside and stoned in the courtyard, or beheaded, or dressed in a veil, or ordered to keep silent.  They were not forced into hiding like Agaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who, along with the murdered Theo Van Gogh, dared call for change in the way Muslim men treat women.

In the crypt of the basilica are reproductions of the beautiful historical paintings by Gloria Thomas.  Here on Panel VII, an Arab horseman waves a scimitar, a representative of the North African conquests of Islam.  Those were the beginning of the halcyon days of Islam, when Muslims conquered half of all Christendom.  The other panels, like the Church today, are strangely silent about Islam.  Every once in a while, however, I look at that horseman, and think, and ponder, and brood.

How about you, Your Excellency?  What do you do?

Joe Ecclesia