A Thousand Years of the Same Lie: Inside the Christian Playbook Against Islam
By Daisy Khan
In 1095, Pope Urban II stood before a crowd of European Christians and called Muslims "of the accursed race," granting divine permission to seize their land by force. Nearly a thousand years later, American politicians use almost identical language to justify military incursions, surveillance programs, and immigration bans targeting Muslim communities. The words changed slightly. The playbook did not.
That unsettling continuity sits at the center of a new book, Confronting Islamophobia in the Church, written by Rev. Dr. Anna Piela and Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf, a married clergy couple who co-founded Challenging Islamophobia Together Chicagoland. Both ordained American Baptist pastors serving as Co-Associate Regional Ministers for the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago, they have spent years in interfaith spaces watching well-meaning Christians repeat tropes that trace back to medieval monasteries. In this episode of WISE Women with Daisy Khan, host Dr. Daisy Khan sits down with the couple to trace how those tropes traveled across centuries and what it will take to finally dismantle them.
The urgency is not academic. In October 2023, six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was murdered in a hate crime near Chicago. When Anna and Michael organized a memorial event in May 2024, the response from Christian communities was, in Anna Piela's words, "very lukewarm." That silence became the turning point. A single event would never be enough, and that conviction produced both the book and the initiative that now anchors their ongoing work.
The First Quran Translation Was Designed to Fail
The Christian misreading of Islam did not begin with cable news or social media algorithms. It began with monks. John of Damascus, a Syrian monk writing in the 8th century, produced the first recorded Christian commentary on Islam and framed it not as an independent faith but as a defective offshoot of Christianity, a heresy rather than a religion. That classification set the template for everything that followed.
Centuries later, Peter the Venerable, abbot of the Benedictine Order at Cluny, commissioned an English priest named Robert of Ketton to translate the Quran into Latin. The result was less a translation than a strategic distortion, a paraphrase laced with additions designed so Christians could argue against Islam on rigged terms. The text would not have been recognized by any Muslim of that era if rendered back into Arabic. Yet it shaped Christian perceptions of Islam for generations.
Martin Luther deepened the damage by writing the preface to the first printed edition of that translation, placing Christian refutations alongside the Quranic text so readers absorbed the rebuttal before engaging with the source. When Islam had to be recast as an existential military threat, the infrastructure was already in place. The renaming of Palestine as the "Holy Land" gave European Christians a territorial claim, and Pope Urban II supplied the moral permission to act on it. Anna Piela connects the arc to the present: the same tropes that launched the Crusades resurfaced in rhetoric surrounding American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These narratives persist because they deliver political capital to those who deploy them.
Progressive Allies Still Harbor "Soft Islamophobia"
The most visible anti-Muslim hostility in the United States comes from the political right, but the subtler and in some ways more corrosive strain lives among progressives. Anna Piela names it "soft Islamophobia," and the couple's survey of American Baptist clergy brought it into sharp focus. Respondents rated the role of women as the area of least theological overlap between Christianity and Islam, implicitly positioning Christian women as liberated and Muslim women as constrained without engaging the actual lives of Muslim women in America.
Before entering ministry, Anna Piela spent years as a scholar specializing in Islamic feminism, conducting research that centered on Muslim women's agency. One study focused on women who wear the niqab in the West. The 40 women she interviewed were eloquent, well-educated, and had chosen the practice with full awareness of the social cost. Transitioning into congregational life, she was struck by how entrenched the opposite stereotype remained, even among clergy who considered themselves allies. The conclusion: clergy who hold these views must not have real partnerships with Muslim communities because anyone who did would know that Muslim women are among the most driven and outspoken people in the United States.
Michael Woolf identifies three misconceptions that surface most consistently in Christian spaces:
Islam is inherently violent
Muslim women are subjugated and lack agency
Islam is incompatible with Western democracies
These claims blend theological arguments with secular anxieties in ways tangled further by white Christian nationalism. The book dismantles each one, but the perception of Muslim women remains most stubborn because it allows progressives to feel enlightened while reinforcing the very bias they claim to oppose.
Read the Quran Like You Read Your Own Bible
One of the sharpest challenges in the conversation lands on textual generosity. Christians routinely contextualize difficult passages in their own Bible, including those that endorse slavery, using interpretive flexibility to extract meaning they can live with. Yet those same readers approach the Quran looking for confirmation of the threat. Anna Piela adds a pointed layer: the single Bible verse most often cited to argue that Christianity opposes slavery is itself the product of very generous reading. The double standard is not about the texts. It is about the disposition readers bring when they open them.
Michael Woolf frames the invitation simply. Christians must become as generous readers of the Quran as they are of their own scripture. If they approach the engagement as adversarial, with one tradition needing to come out on top, they will find exactly what they went looking for. But humility and curiosity open a different door. The Quran has things to say about justice, the ordering of society, and the nature of God that can deepen Christian faith rather than threaten it. The concept of holy envy, seeing something admirable in another tradition and wanting to bring that standard into your own practice, turns the entire framework upside down. Interfaith engagement stops being dilution and becomes growth.
Don't Burn the Koran, Read It
When a political candidate in Texas burned a copy of the Quran with a flamethrower while claiming to be "powered by Jesus Christ," Anna and Michael responded with a congregational initiative built on a simple motto: don't burn the Koran, read it. They invited Muslim partners in Chicago to their church to recite the Quran in Arabic, read the English translation aloud, and take questions. Congregants came forward with questions they had carried for years but never had a trusted space to ask.
Anna Piela emphasizes that any congregation can replicate this model and encourages those who do to reflect Islam's interpretive diversity by inviting Sunni, Shia, and Sufi voices along with women. Michael Woolf stresses that the window for building these relationships is now. Following October 7th, Christian communities quietly withdrew from Muslim partnerships active for decades, and Muslim partners began asking a question every church leader should sit with: what is the point of interfaith dialogue if it collapses the moment it is actually needed?
The antidote is not more programming. It is more presence. Shared meals during Ramadan's interfaith iftars, joint local advocacy, and a willingness to sit with discomfort long enough to let trust take root. Anna Piela points to the Interfaith Children's Movement in Georgia, where diverse faith communities came together and moved the state up 10 to 15 places in the national ranking for children's welfare. That is what becomes possible when solidarity stops being a talking point and starts being a practice.
Listen to WISE Women with Daisy Khan because every story matters. The qualities that sustain us through difficulty often become the very gifts we offer to the world. For more inspiring stories and discussion, like, follow, and connect with Dr. Daisy Khan.
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Connect with Dr. Daisy Khan:
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Connect with Rev. Dr. Anna Piela:
Website: https://www.annapiela.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-piela/
Connect with Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf:
Website: https://www.michaelcaseywwoolf.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/revmichaelwoolf/
Author Bios:
Rev. Dr. Anna Piela & Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf are a married clergy couple who co-founded Challenging Islamophobia Together Chicagoland, an interfaith solidarity initiative dedicated to confronting anti-Muslim hate. Both ordained American Baptist pastors, they are deeply rooted in the Christian tradition yet believe that learning from other religions enriches and deepens their own faith. Together, they serve as Co-Associate Regional Ministers for the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago. Anna is also a Senior Writer with the American Baptist Home Mission Societies, and Michael serves as Senior Minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston, IL. Equal parts pastor, activist, and theologian, they bring faith to life through public witness and collaboration. inter-religious
WISE Women with Daisy Khan
Where Muslim voices rise, bridges are built, and history's unsung heroines reclaim their light.
WISE Women with Daisy Khan gives voice to Muslims sharing their experiences with anti-Muslim bias, educates non-Muslims to become upstanders against discrimination, and spotlights extraordinary women throughout history whose contributions have been erased. We reclaim faith as a force for good while building bridges between East and West, transforming fear into understanding, one conversation at a time.
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News [Source: CBS Evening News]
A man sent a hateful message to a Muslim candidate. He responded with a call for help in an article by Steve Hartman
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-man-sent-a-hateful-message-to-a-muslim-candidate-he-responded-with-a-call-to-help/
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