Western Europe held little interest for Islamic writers, who regarded their own culture as much more sophisticated and advanced; the medieval Muslim felt superiority towards Christianity.
al-Mas'udi goes on to describe Western Europe: As regards the people of the northern quadrant, they are the ones for whom the sun is distant from the Zenith, those who penetrate to the North, such as the Slavs, the Franks, and those nations that are their neighbours.
[2] The Franks were also seen as sexually loose and having no protectiveness towards their womenfolk - while Muslims regarded it important to have pudency among both sexes and women were to only unveil in the place of certain male relatives, Franks were seen as having the two consort freely and women as undressing before complete strangers, which Islamic writers saw as immoral and regarded Frankish men as lacking "proper" marital jealousy by allowing their wives to be seen undressed before other men.
[3] Due to the Islamic belief that climate would influence the character of a given peoples, there was also a view that Franks who settled in the Arab world for extended periods would make them more civilised.
[4] In general the Muslim view of the Franks was one of a people who did not follow civilised pursuits, were unhygienic and filthy, deficient in sexual morality but possessing martial prowess and were courageous and redoubtable in war.
[13] The Partition of the Ottoman Empire was, at the time, popularly depicted as a final triumph in the long history of the crusades against Islam: The London Punch magazine published a drawing of King Richard the Lionheart watching the post-WWI British army entering Jerusalem with the caption, “At last, my dream come true.” [14] In a similar fashion, when the French General Henri Gouraud took command of Syria, he remarked, “Behold Saladin, we have returned.
This, once again, tended to influence Muslim perception of the period, fuelling Arab nationalism and Islamist propagandistic depictions of westerners as hostile invaders: Khashan (1997) has argued that the revival of "crusading" narrative in the west is connected with the end of the Cold War and the search for a new "good vs. evil" dichotomy in which to cast world politics.
Notably, a fatwa signed by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998 called for jihad against "the crusader-Zionist alliance" (referring to the United States and Israel).