Relations between Europe and the Islamic world have often been characterized by vi-olence and conflict. During the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), Muslims occupied Jerusalem, the holy city of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, besieged Constantinople, and penetrated the Iberian Peninsula and the south of Europe. In this first phase of the expansion of the ca-liphate, Islam was facing increasing tensions within its ranks. Shortly after the emergence of Islam, there were differences within the Islamic world, mainly between the dominant Sunni form and the Shiites. European Christianity’s response to the first great jihad was the Reconquest and the Crusades. In the east, the Christian kingdom of Georgia was liberated and ruled over a large terri-tory from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. In the heart of the Mediterranean, Christian conquerors disembarked in Sicily and Sardinia and overtook the area from Muslims. The height of the conflict at this stage were the Crusades. In these wars, groups of Christians from Europe for some time conquered and retained areas in Syria and Palestine. During the Abbasid Caliphate (751–1258) Muslims consolidated borders to the east and even conqu-ered Sicily and Crete, but the Byzantines nevertheless penetrated ever deeper into the area of the Caliphate. During that time semi-autonomous rules emerged in Central Asia. Egypt and Syrian-Palestinian territory fell into the hands of the Fatimid dynasty in 969. Inequality and crisis within the Islamic world were further exacerbated in the 11th century by the Seljuks and then in the first half of the 13th century by the invasions of the Mongols, who finally broke the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. On the border between Muslims and Christians in Anatolia, in the 13th century the Ottoman state emerged. A new holy war ensued. The Ottoman sultans saw themselves as the legitimate successors of the Byzantine emperors. With the conquest of Constantinople and becoming the capital of the Turkish Empire, the invasions of the west followed. During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566), the empire was at its peak. The answer to the second jihad is Europe’s expansion. It is not surprising that this expansion began at two opposite ends of Europe where Muslims had ruled for centuries: in the Iberian Peninsula and in Russia. Particularly Portuguese and Spanish, and later English and Dutch ships, stopped at the shores of Islamic countries and began trading first, then winning stra-tegic points. With the rise of European countries in the 19th century, the United Kingdom, France and Russia in particular, began to gradually occupy the areas of Central and Eastern Asia. There were several reasons for the Islamic world to become the easy prey of European countries and for Islamic civilization to be but a pale shadow of its former grandeur. The most important were corruption and incompetent rulers, the inequality of the Islamic world (Sunnis, Shiites), political instability, slow reforms, general technical backwardness and, of course, the aggressive policies of European countries.
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