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The history of Muslim-Catholic relations is one of both confrontation and dialogue.

U.S. President Calvin Coolidge once said, "Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil; our great hope lies in developing what is good." As creatures of the modern age, most of us take great consolation in the idea that, however dismal the contemporary scene may appear to be, we are constantly improving on the track record of our ancestors.

Perhaps this is true when it comes to matters of technology. When it comes to matters of morality and human relations, however, "progress," as Coolidge defines it, may well be far more elusive than we would like to think.

From a modern Catholic perspective, it is tempting to think of the history of Christian-Muslim relations as one that, at least in recent decades, has been gradually moving from a pattern of confrontation and conflict to one of dialogue and cooperation. After all, with the Second Vatican Council's 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, the church called for a new era of dialogue in its relationship with "non-Christian religions."

But in truth the history of Christian-Muslim relations, from its very beginnings until today, has simultaneously unfolded and continues to unfold along both of these major story lines-confrontation and conflict as well as dialogue and cooperation-sometimes running parallel and often intersecting.

Early clashes
The story of confrontation and conflict roughly begins with the period of early Muslim expansionism (c. 632-750 C.E.), during which Muslim armies from the Arabian Peninsula gradually advanced westward into North Africa and southern Spain; northward into Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia; and eastward into the Iranian plateau. No wars of conquest are without bloodshed and oppression, and neither was the Islamic political expansion in this period.

Still, the mass conversion to Islam in these regions was not "by the sword." It took place over nearly three centuries and involved, among other things, the fact that sharing the religion of Muslim rulers had its advantages.

As for the violence, Arab Muslim forces did not establish their control of this great swath of the known world through mass butchery. The Muslim conquests of the great cultural and urban centers of Byzantine Christendom, such as Jerusalem and Damascus, took place largely by armies meeting and fighting outside the city precincts, and by the victors negotiating a truce with the vanquished that protected the lives and property of the latter on the condition that they accept the legitimacy of their new overlords.

Among Christians, the socio-political reaction to the early Muslim conquests was varied. For many Christian communities, being relegated to the second-class status of ahl al-dhimma, or "protected peoples", under Muslim rule was a decidedly unfortunate turn of events, involving the loss of many rights and privileges they had taken for granted under Byzantine Christian rule.

There were other Christian communities, however, that viewed the Arab Muslim forces as liberators. Assyrian Nestorian and Egyptian Monophysite communities, for example, were deemed "heterodox" by the church of Constantinople and were therefore subject to persecution. These churches appeared to enjoy more freedom and autonomy under Arab Muslim rule than they had under the rule of their Christian brethren.

Heretics and infidels
Christian theological reaction to the coming of Islam seems to have been generally negative. From the perspective of certain eighth-century Christian theologians, Islam was not just another religion among the many others that had come and gone. It had all the markings of a Christian "heresy."

These Christian thinkers knew enough about Islam to know that it affirmed the veracity of the biblical prophetic heritage, recognizing Moses as the authentic bearer of the divine Torah and Jesus as a virgin-born messenger of the one true God, who preached the Good News and performed miracles. They also knew that Islam denied the most central doctrines of the Christian faith: the Incarnation and the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

St. John of Damascus (d. 749), who, living within Muslim domains, had the freedom to write against the heresies of Byzantine iconoclasm, which at the time was the official policy of the patriarchate in Constantinople, also apparently had the freedom to write against Islam. He deemed Islam the 101st Christian heresy and characterized the entire Islamic movement as the diabolical "forerunner of the Antichrist."

There can be no doubt that any community or tradition that seeks to define itself according to a set of normative beliefs, values, and practices needs a way to determine what lies within its norms and what does not. In this sense, the language of "heresy" has had a legitimate role to play in the history of both Christianity and Islam, each of which has seen the other as having strayed significantly from the truth.

Analogous to classical Christian condemnations of Islam as "heretical" and "diabolic" are classical Islamic interpretations of Christianity as a "corrupted" version of the original message of Jesus, who preached islam or "submission" to the one God and who never claimed divinity for himself.

But there is an apparently irresistible tendency to use concepts such as "heresy" to brand challenges to one's religious worldview as an intolerable form of otherness. Rather than simply being used to set legitimate limits on what a tradition deems to be the truth, the language of heresy has, with rare exception, been used to interpret difference as "deviation," and thus to demonize and treat as subhuman those who differ from the norm.

Unfortunately there is no more glaring example of this application of the language of heresy on the Christian side than in the theology of the Crusades (1096-1271). On one level, the Crusades were part of a longstanding Christian response to Muslim expansionism, which, it turns out, would not rest until it had taken Constantinople itself-the heart of Eastern Christendom-for Islam. It was the Byzantine loss of so much of the Eastern Christian heartland of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks in 1071 that prompted Emperor Alexius I to seek help in his fight against the Turks from his estranged Christian brother in the West, Pope Urban II.

On another level, however, in his monumental preaching of the First Crusade, Urban went far beyond the parameters of traditional Christian "just war" discourse. His words were as controversial in his own day as they are completely rejected by contemporary Catholic teaching. Urban argued that war against the Muslims was not only "just" but "holy" as well.

From the time of St. Augustine onward, Christian theology recognized warfare as an evil that, at certain times and under certain conditions, could become a moral necessity to stop a greater evil. Urban radically augmented this line of theological reasoning by claiming that, in the case of fighting the Muslim "infidel," warfare could actually be a sanctifying and redemptive penance for the Christian warrior. There was a direct causal connection between Urban's theology and the wholesale massacre of between 40,000 and 70,000 Jerusalemites-Jews, Christians, and Muslims; men, women, and children-by the European Crusaders in 1099.

In preaching the Second Crusade, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian mystic, abbot, and Doctor of the Church, took Urban's controversial theology yet another step further and argued that killing Muslims fell under the category of "malicide" (the killing of evil) rather than "homicide."

Although there are few Christian theologians today who would not be horrified by Bernard's contention, some still insist on branding Islam as an intolerable form of religious otherness. In November 2001 the Rev. Franklin Graham declared Islam to be an "evil" and "wicked" religion. In June 2002 the Rev. Jerry Vines described the Prophet Muhammad as a "demon-possessed pedophile."

Add the reality of this rhetoric to the severe political and social conflicts involving Christians and Muslims in many different parts of the world, and we can see that the history of Christian-Muslim relations is still comprised of significant confrontation and conflict. Although the roots of these conflicts have more to do with questions of nationalism, economics, the colonial legacy, and current policies of Western powers than they do with matters of religion, the dynamic of confrontation and conflict between Christians and Muslims has continued and in many ways has taken on new life in the modern period.