The Darker Impact of Islam on Europe
O'Neill also relates how most historians are cowed into silence by modern political correctness, avoiding the facts that the Islamic philosophers who did make valid contributions were considered apostates from Islam in their day, and that the real impact of Islamic philosophy is seen in the paranoia of war in Europe:
It is of course widely accepted nowadays that Islam had an enormous ideological impact upon Europe. Historians tend to focus on certain scientific and philosophical ideas, especially those of philosophers such as the tenth-century Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and the later Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who made extensive commentaries upon Aristotle, and who are routinely touted as examples of Islam's benevolent impact upon Europe. But there was a darker, a much darker, side to Islamic influence, the side that modern historians, chained by the bonds of political correctness, do not dare mention. The real ideological impression of Islam was not the enlightened thinking of Avicenna and Averroes, who were in any case rejected and expelled from the Muslim canon, but the darker thinking found in the Koran and the Haditha: the doctrines of perpetual war against non-believers; of holy deception (taqiyya); of death for apostates and heretics; of judicial torture; of slave and concubine-taking as a legitimate occupation. These were the teachings, and not those of the philosophers, which left an indelible imprint on medieval Europe.[243]
A similar and even more detailed analysis of Islam's impact on Europe can be found in Egyptian scholar and historian Bet Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, in which she meticulously documents the destruction of Western culture under the hands of Islamic conquerors.
