The American Catholic priest Starbuck recognized this when he observed in the nineteenth century, “We know Mohammedanism better and worse than Hinduism or Confucianism or Buddhism. It has been implicated inextricably with Christianity as a tremendously aggressive and intensely hostile force during all the twelve centuries of its existence. This, until our own day, has made objective study of it almost impossible.”

XREF: Connects to modern discourse about how colonial and theological biases continue shaping scholarship on non-Western religions.

Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Common Heritage, Uncommon F…, loc. 124