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Months before the movie Kingdom of Heaven was to be released, critics lined up to lament how this big-budget film about the Crusades would set back Muslim-Christian relations, leading to a Muslim or Christian backlash, depending on whom you read. But it's not as if this movie is raising an issue long since dead. The question is not if the Crusades are a live memory for Muslims, but why? And how do Christians who minister to Muslims deal with this sad historical fact?

Warren Larson is director of the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University, Columbia, South Carolina. An associate professor of Islam with expertise in Muslim fundamentalism, the Canadian-born Larson was a church-planting missionary in the Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, from 1969 to 1991. (The small church he and his wife worked in remains active in the 99.9 percent Muslim city of Dera Ghazi Khan.)

Today Larson travels widely in the Muslim world. Stan Guthrie, ct's senior associate news editor and author of Missions in the Third Millennium, interviewed him.

The First Crusade began nearly a millennium ago, and yet we often hear that Muslims think about those terrible events as if they happened yesterday. Why?

It's a perception of ongoing Western imperialism. There's a long history of unsuccessful encounters. The Crusades are in there, but also the fact that the Muslims were booted out of Spain in 1492. That's also very bitter for them. And then there was colonialism. Nine-tenths of the Muslim world was under colonialism. They connect all this—including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and other things going on in the Middle East.

Why do so many Muslims continue to see the West as a Christian empire when, in fact, it's become highly secularized and pluralistic in recent decades?

One reason is that there are a lot of Christians here in the West. Muslims are convinced that evangelical Christians won the vote for George W. Bush and that America is quite Christian. Those perceptions, of course, are only partly true. One would hope [Muslims] would understand that the West is post-Christian, but in many ways, it hasn't quite hit them yet.

When we were living in Pakistan, they felt the things that went on in America—the immorality, the immodesty, the drinking—were sanctioned by Christianity.

Sometimes evangelicals in North America, particularly in the United States, say things that are not wise. They're not helping Muslim-Christian relations. In some cases, they have demonized Islam and denigrated the prophet [Muhammad]. They've done it publicly. This news travels far and wide, and Muslims print it in their newspapers. That keeps some of the feeling alive.

Can't we just explain to Muslims the concept of free speech and the open exchange of ideas?

Yes, but saying that Muhammad was a demonized pedophile doesn't seem accurate or fair. Nor is it wise. We have a free press, but we have to use it with discretion.

How do negative Muslim perceptions affect Christian missionaries and local Christians at street level?

In some areas of Pakistan, Islam has been radicalized, and anti-Americanism is higher today than when I was there. Partly as a result, the 500 missionaries who were there have now been reduced to about 100.

Christians have suffered. There have been quite a few attacks in places such as Pakistan. Churches have been burned. Schools have been attacked. Muslim converts [to Christianity], in particular, have suffered and feel quite vulnerable. When I was in Ethiopia recently, the fellow who did my translating was a Somali. He was part of a group of believers, formerly Muslims, who came out of Somalia in 1994 when the U.S. military failed in Mogadishu. Islamists hunted down and killed 14 members of his group. He got out of there by the skin of his teeth.

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June 2005, Vol. 49, No. 6