The way to deal with the well-Christianity-had-the-Crusades-and-Inquisition argument

Roger Kimball has a piece today at PJ Media addressing this. His launching point is a look at the basis on which atheist Sam Harris casts a wary eye on Islam:

As the Canadian and (more to the point) former Muslim writer Ali Sina points out in a brilliant article for the Jerusalem Post, the fact that Ben Affleck is wrong about Islam  ”does not mean Harris is right.” Indeed.

Harris is widely considered a critic of Islam.  In his debate with Ben Affleck, however, he simply recycled a well-meaning but pernicious myth about the followers of Muhammed. “Hundreds of millions of Muslims are nominal Muslims,” Harris cheerfully reported, where by “nominal” he meant that they “don’t take their faith seriously,” “don’t want to kill apostates,” and “are horrified by ISIS [Islamic State].”  These are the people, he concluded, “we need to defend,” to “prop them up and let them reform their faith.”

How often have you heard this? I hear it all the time, as often from conservatives as from liberals.  The trouble is, as Ali Sina points out, “reforming Islam the way he envisions it is an illusion.”

Why? Harris’s argument — you’ve heard it a hundred times — is basically this: Christianity was once intolerant. There were the Crusades, for instance, but think also of such episodes as the siege of Béziers, a Cathar stronghold, in the early 13th century. Here were Catholics besieging an heretical sect of their own people.  When asked by a soldier how they could distinguish the good guys from the bad, Arnaud Amaury, a Cistercian abbot who was helping to lead the fight, advised “Tuez-les tous! Dieu reconnaîtra les siens”: “Kill them all! God will know his own.”

But look at Christianity today. It’s all bake sales, bingo, and transgender-awareness retreats.  Maybe the same thing will happen to Islam.

Not likely, as Ali Sina points out. “Even though at one time the religion associated with Jesus had become violent and intolerant,” he notes, “there is nothing violent and intolerant in his teachings. The Crusades were the response of Christendom to jihad, and the Inquisition was the copycat of mihnah, a practice started by Caliph Ma’mun, which means ‘inquisition.’ They have no basis in the teaching of Christ.”

Let’s contrast the example and the teaching of Christ with the example and teaching of Mohammed. Christ is often denominated “the Prince of Peace.” He said things like “suffer the little children” to come to him.  And Mohammed? “He raided villages and towns,” Ali Sina points out,  and

massacred unarmed men, beheaded his captives, raped their women and sold them as slaves. His successors, the so-called “rightly guided Caliphs” and their successors did the same. These are the very things the Wahhabis advocate and Islamic State is doing.

As for Mohammed and little children, there is of course the story of Aisha, the youngest of Mohammed’s wives. She was married to Muhammad at the age of “six or seven”  but she stayed in her parents’ home until the age of “nine or ten.”

Yes, there are people who describe themselves as Muslim “reformers.” They do not want to go back to the original teachings of Muhammed — they look slightingly upon massacring unarmed men, shrink back from beheading folks, and want to have nothing to do with raping women or encouraging slavery.

But they also, Ali Sina points out, want to “acknowledge the legitimacy of Muhammad as a prophet of God.”

Christianity does wish to persuade those not of the faith, out of the conviction that how souls are going to spend eternity is at stake.  Can you really say that the rationale is the same for Islam, when "efforts at evangelizing" consist of death threats?