This tension has relevance to modern scholarship on the history of Christian Islamophobia. Often authors paint Christians and Christendom as a single united entity, however, such generalizations ignore the prominence of theological tension within, even during times when one would most expect all of Christianity to be united against an adversary. I hope to have shown how such authors take Christianity as more unified than it was; only by acknowledging and moving beyond this generalization of Christian unity can we have a more nuanced discourse. History instead shows that perhaps a foreign religious enemy is better than a co-religious enemy.

XREF: Parallels broader historiographical critiques of treating any religious tradition or civilization as monolithic — applies to scholarship on Islam, the West, etc.

Ali Qureshi, The Fall of Constantinople, loc. 62