The myth I referred to was the one, stemming from the Enlightment and repeated by Ms. Kramer, of a Europe submerged in Papist, or more broadly, merely Christian (there was no distinction through most of the period), darkness from roughly the conversion of Constantine the Great until the Renaissance. Ms. Kramer knows her liberal mythology well, and doesn’t miss the opportunity to remind us of how Christendom would have remained in darkness were it not for the lovely, advanced, and oh-so-tolerant Muslims who treasured the full spectrum of Greek achievement while Europeans were living in filth. The truth, as Mr. Larison points out, is somewhat different.

Insofar as the myth originated with the specifically anti-Catholic philosophes, and insofar as it is from them through anti-Catholic liberals of the 19th and 20th centuries that it arrives in the minds and on the fingertips of today’s New Yorker writers, it is not unfair to call it anti-Catholic. But, I can see how I was unclear, and I’d rather not belabor the point. Never mind.

I think Cyrus’ point was that the circulation of the Islamic “Golden Age”/”Islam saved Greek philosophy” idea was the work of philosophes who sought to discredit the intellectual legacy of Catholic Europe by saying that Christians owed everything they knew about the classical tradition to the Muslims. This was not done so much to praise Islam as it was to make the Catholic Church look bad and to undermine its claims to authority. This was combined with Voltairean love-letters, so to speak, to the Ottomans about how tolerant and noble they were. The image that many people have of a generally enlightened Islamic middle ages comes directly from an Enlightenment and deliberately anti-Catholic, liberal telling of medieval history.

Of course, there were moments of intellectual and cultural flourishing in different Islamic centers in Umayyad Spain, just as there were anti-intellectual backlashes under the Almohads and Almoravids; the relatively more cultured Abbasids gave way to the much less cultured Seljuks; the Seljuks then established themselves in Anatolia and became patrons of culture. The Islamic world produced Rumi and the Kharijites–two more opposed types you could scarcely imagine. It is not an undifferentiated wasteland by any means, but with respect to the existence of “rationalism” the story is much more bleak (or happier, depending on your perspective), so it is a little strange that Muslims today want to insist on vindicating what was always a relatively weaker part of their tradition.