Back in the early 1980s when she was researching the Crusades, it was the prejudice of friends and colleagues towards Islam which first alerted Armstrong to an old history:
“The Crusades was the beginning of Europe finding its soul. Islam and Judaism became the shadow side, the foil against which we [Christian Europe] measured ourselves. A righteous contempt of Islam was entwined with our anti-semitism. Ever since, our rhetoric about Muslims reflects a blind anxiety about our own behaviour – anxieties about our own capacity for violence are projected onto Muslims, similarly our attitudes towards women.”
Finding these long historical roots to current attitudes towards Islam has given Armstrong a passionate sense of her own personal crusade: “Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition. It is part of a habit of prejudice that made the death camps possible. It’s as if we hadn’t learnt anything from the 1930s.”