Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Karen Armstrong, a historian of religion, frequently addresses how medieval conflict shaped enduring Western stereotypes about Islam. This sentence reflects her argument that the Crusades (late 11th–13th centuries) helped fix an image of Islam in Latin Christendom as inherently violent and intolerant, an image later reinforced by polemical literature and political rivalry. Armstrong contrasts that inherited perception with the historical record of the period in which the prejudice formed, noting that medieval Islamic polities often granted protected status to Jews and Christians and, in many contexts, permitted a degree of pluralism that was not consistently matched in contemporary Western Christendom. The remark appears in her explanatory, corrective mode aimed at modern readers.

Armstrong is tracing a long-lived Western stereotype of Islam—“violent” and “intolerant”—to the polemical atmosphere created by the Crusades. Her point is not simply that conflict produced mutual hostility, but that a narrative formed in medieval Europe continued to shape later perceptions, often detached from historical realities. By noting that Islam’s “record of tolerance” was, at that time, comparatively better than Christianity’s, she challenges readers to separate inherited prejudice from evidence. The quote also reflects her broader project: to historicize religious violence, showing how political struggle and cultural memory can harden into enduring religious caricatures.