> My guess is the Islamic world would have happily continued selling us rugs if we weren't busy calling crusades against. How do you think there came to be an

> My guess is the Islamic world would have happily continued selling us rugs if we weren't busy calling crusades against. How do you think there came to be an "Islamic world" in the first place? Anatolia was Christian centuries before Muhammed was born. Persia was Zoroastrian centuries before that. The early Muslims were colonizing and building empires long before Europeans started crusading. You could just as plausibly castigate Islamic architects for "culturally appropriating" the Byzantine Christian design of the Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople for mosques. But it's a limited, misleading, and uninteresting way to think about history.