The author, Kenan Malik, sometimes a critic of, and sometimes a sly apologist for, Islam, claimed that there was a deep respect in Renaissance Europe for the world of Islam. “Embodied in the Renaissance view is certainly a sense of Islam as the other. But it is intertwined with curiosity, respect, even awe. There is a willingness, too, to reach beyond the otherness of Islam and to see the Muslim world not as demonic or exotic but as a variant of the European experience.”

He states this; he does not prove it. Do “curiosity, respect, even awe’’ adequately describe what the people of Western Christendom felt about the world of Islam as they watched, in horror, as the Muslim Turks steadily conquered all of Byzantium, including, on May 29, 1453, what had been for 500 years (he bullshits here, it was 1,000 years of Christendom) the largest and most splendid city of Christendom, Constantinople? (Read here the rape and sack of Constantinople)

Malik offered as his sole evidence of this “deep connection between Europe and Islam” in art a single painting by Gentile da Fabriano, “The Adoration of the Magi,” from 1423,  or rather, he offered a single detail in that painting, in which, the author claimed, he could detect Arabic writing in the halos of Joseph and Mary. But as Robert Spencer has pointed out, this Arabic “writing” was not “writing” at all, but merely the use of what is called Pseudo-Kufic, a script that the Europeans of that time believed was also used in the time of Jesus.

Pseudo-Kufic was used as a decorative element, in non-Arabic contexts, usually associated with the Holy Family, especially with Mary. And far from being a sign of respect for Islam and the Arabs, it appears that the artists who painted in a bit of Pseudo-Kufic wished to express a cultural universality for the Christian faith, by blending together various written languages, at a time when European Christians entertained hopes for converting the Muslims.