EXTRACT

...year after year, Turkish forces probed Christian defences, crossing the plains of Hungary or churning the waters off Malta with their warships. In 1529 and again in 1683, an Ottoman army almost took Vienna.

Yet that was to be the last great attempt to extend the Caliphate across Europe. The global balance of power was shifting, and nearly a millennium of Muslim preponderance was drawing to a close.

It was the Christians who colonised America, established trading empires that spanned the globe and started the process of industrialisation.  By the 19th century with India ruled by the British Raj and the Islamic Ottoman Empire scorned in Western capitals as 'the sick man of Europe', Muslims could no longer close their eyes to the sheer scale of their decline.

It was they who were now the imperial subjects, and Islam the civilisation looked down on by its adversaries as backward, as Christendom had once been.

Ever since the first days of their faith, Muslims had tended to take for granted that its truth was manifest in its worldly success.

As a result, subordinated to the infidel British or French there were many in the Muslim world who looked to the golden age of the Caliphate for their  inspiration.

The age of Muhammad and his successors, which had seen Islam emerge from desert obscurity tom global empire, was enshrined as the model to follow. Over recent decades resentment at continued Western interventions in Muslin countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq have only burnished the appeal of the glorious past.

Today, according to a poll some two-thirds of Muslims worldwide want to see the

RESTORATION of a CALIPHATE

It is not empires per se they are apposed to -just

NON-ISLAMIC EMPIRES

Hardly surprising then that al-Qaeda and ISIS should be so obsessed by periods of history that to most Westerners are thoroughly obscure.

has been a Muslim city for almost 600 years, that the Crusades are done and dusted and that Europe no longer defines itself as Christendom, barely intrudes on the consciousness of many jihadis.

They inhabit a mental landscape in which the Middle Ages never went away. The menace of this way of thinking is brutally evident-a world in which young people murdered a rock concert, can be cursed as 'Crusaders' is a world on the verge of going mad.

It is not just non-Muslims who are threatened by this imperialist nostalgia.

 'Either you are with the Crusade, 'ISIS has warned European Muslims,' or you are with ISLAM

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