In Iran this week, a young woman named Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee was sentenced to five years in prison. Her crime? She had “insulted Islamic sanctities.”
Iranian authorities had ransacked her home, and inside they discovered an unpublished fictional story that apparently frowned on the ancient practice of stoning people to death.
It appears Iraee will begin her sentence 445 years to the day after Christian forces vanquished the last great military threat to Christendom. Her prison sentence demonstrates the deep ideological divide that still separates the West and the Islamic world, and is a reminder of why that victory was so important.
The Battle of Lepanto (1571) is considered by many to be the battle that saved the West from Muslim rule. At the time, Christendom was deeply divided. Martin Luther had been dead for a generation, but his Reformation still reverberated.
Meanwhile, the empire of the Ottoman Turks was swelling. The Turks had seized Constantinople in 1453, destroying the last remnant of the Roman Empire and beginning a century-long expansion (some historians refer to this period as the Pax Ottomana).
This article continues at [Intellectual Takeout] Why Lepanto Still Matters