rom the grasp of non-Christian infidels, who happened at the time to be a mixture of Muslims, Jews and Christians who generally co-existed peacefully. The first great surge of Islam through the Arab conquests of the 7th through 13th centuries threatened the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire and encompassed Spain, which remained under Muslim rule until the reconquista, which finally led to the fall of Granada in 1492. The Ottoman Empire eventually conquered Anatolia and most of Eastern Europe and was only narrowly repelled at the gates of Vienna by Christian princes in 1683.
In most respects, the great Muslim Empires of these earlier periods were superior technologically, economically and culturally to the West which engendered in the West, a mixture of envy and fear. According to Pipes (1990), from "634 until the Suez crisis of 1956, military hostility . . . defined the course of the Christian-Moslem relationship" (p. 29). Anti-Muslim sentiment was deeply embedded in Western literature, in, for example, the French Chanson de Roland and Miguel Cervantes' novel of the adventures of Don Quixote.
The extension of Western colonialism to the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries, Western acquiescence in Jewish immigration to Palestine after 1917, the establishment in 1948 with Western, especially American, support of the state of Israel on formerly Muslim-owned and occupied territory, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s, the taking of American hostages in Iran by the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979-1980 and numerous terrorist incidents in the Middle East and elsewhere which followed further embittered relations between the West and the Islamic world. In the meantime, the West and much of the rest of the world became dependent on Middle Eastern petroleum as its principal source of energy.
Webster defines a stereotype as "a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a gr...