Many parts of the Muslim world are dangerous places for Westerners to visit today.
They could be captured, tortured, killed or at best ransomed. In one sense history is repeating itself.
In the centuries between 1480 and 1830 up to one and a quarter million Westerners were captured by North African pirates - the Barbary Corsairs - who terrorised European and American shipping, raided European islands and coastal towns, including the British Isles, and even as far north as Iceland to steal Christians for slavery in Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis. Corsairing was partly a reaction to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 and thereafter (especially in 1610, as Milton observes, p.12), p. xxv, 'creating an implacable enemy', and so there was 'always an element of revenge'. The expellees 'reinvigorated' North Africa. Perhaps this is a warning against Islamophobia.
