Encyclopedia of Islam

Christianity and Islam

---

success and eventually led to the mobilization of 

a Muslim 

Jihad

 to expel the “Franks.” With their 

foreign ways and crudities so acutely observed 

by Muslim scholar-warriors such as Usama ibn 

Munqidh (d. 1188), the crusaders were always 

unlikely to survive, as indeed they did not. The 

Reconquista, on the other hand, succeeded in 

defeating the Arabo-Islamic statelets that took 

root in Andalusia and expelling Muslims and Jews 

for whom Andalusia was home. Those who stayed 

behind were forced to convert to Christianity.

In the modern period, beginning in the 18th 

century, Europeans, mainly Christians, came to 

rule over vast territories in which Muslims lived 

and that had formerly been ruled by Muslims. 

These included much of the Middle East, all of 

North Africa west of Egypt, the Indian subcon-

tinent, and almost the entire continent of Africa, 

the eastern, western, and northern parts of which 

had large Muslim populations. For nearly 200 

years, Muslims thus lived either in lands directly 

controlled by European countries or in ostensibly 

independent nations whose freedom was often 

held in check by European power (the Ottoman 

Empire, for example, or Iran). In every case, these 

colonial empires were undone by the end of World 

War II, but their impact remains profoundly felt in 

such things as their legal and political institu-

tions, economic orientations, as well as the radical 

Islamist ideologies that have developed in part 

as a response to the European imperial project. 

While the Europeans did not always encourage 

missionary efforts, they also did not stop such 

activities, and thus one of the main encounters 

between Christianity and Islam in the modern 

period has been largely destructive. For one thing, 

this resulted in mutual animosities and divisions 

that have, ironically, made it more difficult (but 

not impossible) for Muslims to engage in the kind 

of critical examination of religious authority and 

knowledge that has had such radical effects on 

the relations between religion, society, and the 

state in the West. The Europeans often justified 

their rule on the basis of their superior scientific 

knowledge. The implicit or explicit blaming of 

Islam for the “backwardness” of Muslims has both 

led to increased Islamic radicalism and to fruitless 

apologetics. But this Christian missionary effort 

from the West has also made the situation of the 

native Christian communities of Muslim-majority 

countries more tenuous than it previously was.

Part of the modern condition is the rootless-

ness and change brought about by emigration, 

both voluntary and forced. A great many African 

Muslims were brought to the New World as 

slaves, and the wounds of this (at least partially) 

Muslim-Christian encounter have not properly 

healed. Voluntary emigration for the sake of eco-

nomic opportunity and religious freedom has also 

been a part of the encounter, however, and this 

St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, Egypt. A 

mosque minaret stands behind the bell tower. 

(Juan E. 

Campo)