Words Worth Noting - November 15, 2026

“In 1142, its [Cluny’s] great abbot, Peter the Venerable, had crossed the Pyrenees, the better to understand what the Saracens actually believed. Meeting with scholars fluent in Arabic, he had employed them on momentous project: the first translation of the Koran into Latin. Better persuasion than compulsion – such had always been Peter’s model. Sure enough, the translation delivered, he had addressed the Saracens directly, ‘not as our men often do, with arms, but with words, not with violence but reason, not with hate but love’. Yet these emollient sentiments have not prevented Peter from feeling thoroughly appalled by the Qur’an. No more monstrous a compound of heresies, confected as it was ‘from both Jewish fables and heretical teachers’, could possibly have been imagined. Even its vision of heaven blended gourmandising with sex. Cluny it was not. Far from building bridges, Peters translation of the Qur’an had only confirmed Christians in their darkest suspicions of its contents. Islam was the sump of all heresies, and Muhammad ‘the foulest of men’.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World