Again, even Fletcher's is a gross overgeneralization about the attitudes of the Byzantines towards Muslims. If he says it's the Byzantine root in Western thought that makes us intolerant of the Muslim world, how does he explain the Byzantine rejection of Rome? In fact, when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, one of the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Orthodox church in Istanbul, fought tooth and nail against the collapse precisely because of the age-old antagonism against Rome and European secularism.