COLUMN: MUSLIMS SHAPING EUROPE.

• Position: Column

Those of us who grew up during the last years of the British Raj had little choice if we wanted a decent education but to go to Christian schools with such names as St Francis Xavier, run by Catholic priests.

There, by the time we matriculated, we were brainwashed to be in awe of the religion of our rulers and to think of all things English as superior. Of the textbooks we were obliged to buy, the major ones were imported from Britain, beautifully illustrated with portraits of English kings and queens, all shown to be remarkable souls.

We knew all about the British Queen Elizabeth and nothing about the Indian Emperor Asoka. Their religion produced adorable saints and a noble aristocracy, ours a bunch of barbarians who were invaders and looters. They ennobled their military aggression, calling it a holy Crusade, led not by cruel murderers but by 'defenders of the faith', with such endearing names as Richard the Lionheart.

They presented the Muslim defenders as raiding thieves, labelling them 'Saracens' - a word meant to instil in the public imagination the idea that they were pagan infidels who plundered the land of others. For the Christian nations, their cathedrals - from England to all the way to the contested Middle East - were tributes of original architectural grandeur, unlike any seen before, while the more ancient non-European houses of prayer, though prefiguring Christian design, were dismissively neglected.

The Christian Crusaders' label 'Saracens', projecting the idea of Muslims as looters, was the old ideological perversion whereby one political power sticks upon its opponent the evils of which it is itself guilty. History provides us with any number of such examples; happily, history also provides us with a re-establishing of truth. And here is one: the historian Diana Darke telling the truth in her book, ironically titled Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe.

In her 'Introduction', Darke states how the 2019 fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France, inspired her to write her book. The Notre Dame fire aroused the flames of the Christian faith in the heart of the country: the old cathedral was the grandest symbol of the Catholic faith and, like all the great Gothic cathedrals, proclaimed Christian superiority. However, Darke asks: 'Are we ready ... to acknowledge that a style so closely identified with our European Christian identity owes its origins to Islamic architecture?'

Her challenging...