101practice of slavery. But as you know, Muslims, too,
practiced slavery in Africa, and Western slavers
appear to have learned a good deal from them. In
fact, Muslims regularly enslaved white Christian
Eu ro pe ans. For hundreds of years, to live or travel
anywhere on the Mediterranean was to risk being
captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. It
is believed that more than a million Eu ro pe ans
were enslaved and forced to work in North Africa
by Muslims between the sixteenth and eigh teenth
centuries.
I don’t think anything of substance turns on this
history, because we have to deal with the world as
we fi nd it today. But I reject the idea that jihad and
a hatred of infi dels are modern phenomena. As you
know, many people make this claim because they
want to hold the West and Israel responsible for all
the vio lence we see in the Muslim world— even,
somehow, for the internecine confl ict between
Sunni and Shia. But the prob lem we must grapple
with— and must inspire millions of others to grapple
with—is that, what ever other historical and po liti cal
factors are involved, the reality of martyrdom and
the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controver-
sial under Islam as is the resurrection of Jesus under
Chris tian ity. It is not an accident that millions of
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