THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 249doctrines, they were addressing issues internal to their own society, not
steeling Christianity against some external cultural challenge. In 1517, few
western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing
message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start con-
verting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in
the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks
posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual
health of Christianity.
Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've dis-
cussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argu-
ment for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began
with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of
battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion
and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.
Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to
reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reformers as Ibn
Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was
concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power,
but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down
and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they
had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the
end, absorbing the Mongols as it had absorbed the Turks before them and
the Persians before that.
Conversion to Islam made the Mongols no less bloody {as Timur-i-lang
proved), but at least, under the aegis of the converted rulers, the old quest
could begin again, albeit starting over from the smoking rubble of a ruined
world-the quest to build and universalize the community of Allah.
The same could not be said for the new overlords. The Europeans came
wrapped in certainty about their way of life and peddling their own ideas
of ultimate truth. They didn't challenge Islam so much as ignore it, unless
they were missionaries, in which case they simply tried to convert the
Muslims. If they noticed Islam, they didn't bother to debate it {missionar-
ies are not in the debating business) but only smiled at it as one would at
the toys of a child or the quaint relics of a more primitive people. How
maddening for Muslim cognoscenti! And yet, what could Muslims do
about it?