Mediterranean And Mussulman

The Merman's Children, Book Two.

The Mediterranean is:

"...a narrow sea divided between Christian and Mussulman with naught of Faerie surviving." (IV, p. 94)

Islam is:

"...a faith which kindled still more zeal against Faerie than Christendom generally did." (I, p. 75)

Again, this narrative is much closer to that end of Faerie that Poul Anderson had predicted at the end of his FOREWORD to The Broken Sword.

I read, and might still have somewhere upstairs after a house move (in fact, it is here), a nineteenth century work of Roman Catholic apologetics by an American clergyman who:

described the Paris Commune as a "many-headed monster";

said that the Holy Land was "profaned by the foot of the Mussulman";

accused Protestants of "monstrous ingratitude" because they accept the Bible but not the early Church that formulated the Christian canon of scripture;

accepted a literal Adam and Eve and Annunciation by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary.

This demonstrates what I was told as a trainee Religious Education teacher in Manchester, that there is no unchanging religious tradition. A city centre Church incorporated a Centre for the Study of Religion in the Urban Environment which printed documents for different religious communities. We, a group of students, were taken on a tour which included a synagogue. We had access to nineteenth century Christian missionary material which, however, was not on public display because some of it was regarded as offensive. Nowadays, where they exist, Pagans are just another religious group.

Traditions will have changed again in the kinds of futures projected by sf writers.