ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the role that historical notions of religion and religious enmity between Islam and Christianity continue to have in relation to the manifestation and expression of today's socio-political Islamophobia. Ziauddin Sardar sees Islamophobia as characterising both historical and contemporary relationships and encounters between Islam and the West. Drawing on the qur'anic doctrine of transforming the world through direct action in it, the spread of Islam was concerned not only with conversion but also with transformation: of people, their cultures and the way they were governed. Damascus and Baghdad were two of the major places where theological dialogue between Muslims and Christians took place in the early centuries of Islam. Although Islamophobia is a contemporary socio-political phenomenon, it is shaped and informed by those normative truths that were constructed and embedded centuries ago. Today's Islamophobia is therefore inspired by some of the very earliest religious and theological encounters and interactions that have taken place between Islam and Christianity.
