Islam Provokes the Crusades
In the words of an expert warrior, “War is all Hell.” That’s why the notion of a Christian holy war is fraught with contradiction. Christ’s teaching is silent on the virtues of snappy swordplay and yet early Christians were threatened by powerful enemies against whom they occasionally struggled. Were they offending God? By the Eleventh Century the Church fathers had worked out a doctrine which allowed that under certain circumstances God would condone the use of armed struggle and possibly even encourage it.
One fine afternoon in 1095, while touring France, Pope Urban II gave a sermon in Clermont in which he urged Christians to sally eastward and reclaim the Holy Land from the infidels who had captured Jerusalem four centuries earlier. For good measure he threw in some fanciful imagery about Muslims raping Christian women, defiling Christian altars and using Christians for archery practice. He called the infidels “A race absolutely alien to God.” By the end of the sermon the Muslims had been thoroughly “other-ized.” In the ensuing months, at gatherings across Europe, as many as one hundred thousand Christians volunteered to “take the Cross.”
Thus began the first of five crusades over the following two centuries. The up side of this campaign for Pope Urban was a strengthening of the Papacy in Europe and an enhanced European tranquility as feuding nobles turned their attentions eastward, united in a holy purpose. The campaign would also project European influence into the Byzantine Empire, the home ground of the Greek Orthodox Church, which had broken with the Western Church in 1054.
Our understanding of the Crusades has been clouded by three much later social phenomena: the Nineteenth Century fondness for romantic literature, the ideological struggles of the Twentieth Century, and the rise of a post-World War II left-wing academia. To folks in the Nineteenth Century almost all things medieval were heroic, spiritually pure and delightfully exotic. The Crusades, with their pleasant admixture of orientalism, were especially appealing. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and The Talisman transported readers to a world of brave knights, elaborate pageantry, intense devotion and romantic love. This literary imagery was colorfully supplemented by an outpouring of romantic oil paintings. Romanticized versions of the Crusades were also popular with the promoters of Nineteenth Century liberation movements who were eager to cast off foreign hegemony. Giuseppi Verdi’s grand opera I, Lombardi appears to be all about brave knights and a heroic struggle against scimitar-wielding infidels but its subtext is all about the Lombards’ struggle against the Austrians, not the Saracens. In both versions, Verdi was rooting for the Lombards.
Over time, the Christian West has come to use the word crusade more broadly to include any great struggle in a worthy cause. Thomas Jefferson had used it to advantage as had the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. It was in this same sense that British Prime Minister Lloyd George titled his collected speeches of the First World War The Great Crusade and in which Dwight Eisenhower titled his memoirs of the Second World War Crusade in Europe. It was also in this sense that President George W. Bush chose to characterize his struggle against terrorizing freelance Muslim warlords as a crusade. He did this five days after one of these warlords slaughtered thousands of his fellow citizens in the heart of America’s premier city. It was only because Mr. Bush made this allusion well after the ascendancy of the left-wing academics that he was excoriated for using it. How dare he suggest that any Western crusade was ever anything but an ignominious descent into depravity?
The liberals heaped on the abuse. James Reston Jr., a “senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars” supplied the Los Angeles Times with the politically-correct template for reinterpreting the Crusades, right down to a witless defense of Islamic jihad. Reston chided the president: “In using the word, Bush scratched a raw sore of Arab resentment and handed Muslim fundamentalists a great gift: They could now use the U.S. president’s own words in casting the struggle as another Western crusade against Arab lands and Islam itself. Bush’s gaffe ensured that the terms of the conflict between the West and the East were defined at the outset: Christianity against Islam, Western materialism against Eastern spiritualism.” Wow. Coming from a guy who bills himself as a “senior scholar” at a “Center for Scholars” this is a remarkably stupid load of crap.
First of all, the gushing slaughterfest of September 11th, 2001 was in its planning stages for years. These Muslim bigots had attempted to topple one of the World Trade Towers against the other with a subterranean bomb blast in 1993 that injured thousands of civilians and murdered six people. All of these jerks had long ago convinced themselves that they were engaged in a holy war against the West, against modernity, against everything that did not comport exactly with their interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad’s Big Memo. Their restricted version of Islam is what “senior scholar” James Reston Junior calls “Eastern spiritualism.”
Let’s be real: from its earliest moments Islam was a political as well as a religious mass movement. What Reston calls “Arab lands” were occupied by Christians and Jews and animists long before Muhammad’s acolytes arrived – weapons at the ready.
In the condescending tone of the all-knowing liberal academic, James Reston Jr. tells us that “In the West, it is hard to grasp why events that happened nearly a millennium ago still dominate Arab perceptions of Europeans – and, by extension, Americans. There were five principal Crusades in medieval times, stretching over 200 years, and all aimed at ‘liberating’ Christianity’s holiest sites from Muslim control. And although each was unique, they had one thing in common: In one way or another, they were all failures.”
This is nonsense. It isn’t at all “hard to grasp why events that happened nearly a millennium ago still dominate Arab perceptions.” The Arabs are married to ancient tribal cultures; their psyches are stuck in the Seventh Century. That is why their collective inventive contribution to the modern world is disproportionately smaller than their percentage of the world’s population. Furthermore, non-Muslims have been second-class citizens in every place dominated by Muslims from the Seventh Century to the present. So why does James Reston Jr. feel the need to strap quotation marks onto the word “liberating” when he mentions the attempts by Christians to repossess their holiest sites?
Reston is correct that all five of the Crusades failed to achieve a lasting Christian control of holy sites overwhelmed by the Muslims. So the Muslims won; shouldn’t they be celebrating their victory instead of pouting over it?
“Many Arabs,” Reston continues, “put great faith in a mysterious process they call ‘the forces of history.’ Western armies may commit aggression in the sands of the Middle East. They may kill many Arabs, and they may stay for years, even decades. But ultimately they will leave or become absorbed.” There is plenty of precedent for this perspective, but let’s be clear: the Crusaders did not journey eastward to conquer Islam but to secure their holy sites. Furthermore, the Arab notion of “forces of history” is very much akin to the Nineteenth Century American myth of American Manifest Destiny, the idea that it was obvious to any intelligent person that our nation would inevitably include all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Muhammad’s big plan for our planet was nothing less than global Islam. It is noteworthy that the very same academics who decry the high cost of the mythic idea of American Manifest Destiny that was paid by the paleo-Americans, are now defending the advocates of global Islamic Manifest Destiny who are striving to convert all of the world’s people to a single religious perspective.
Reston offers up some boilerplate about how the first Crusaders wrested Jerusalem from an armed force Reston calls “its defenders.” He laments that “with the streets ankle deep in blood, the victors repaired to the Holy Sepulcher and dropped to their knees in piety and self-congratulation. The Christian God, they said, had guided their hand.” It’s a lurid image, but is it true?
Thomas Madden is a medieval historian at St. Louis University and the author of A Concise History of the Crusades. He reminds us that throughout most of the Middle Ages Christians were on the receiving end of pugnacious Muslim aggression. The Middle Ages were a time during which Christians, Jews, animists and everyone else lost ground to the conquering professional armies of a triumphalist Islam. Ever since the self-anointed representatives of Islamic Manifest Destiny slaughtered nearly three thousand of what they considered sub-human non-believers in lower Manhattan one bright September morning, people have been asking Thomas Madden what it was about the Crusades that justifies the behavior of contemporary jihadists. “My response,” said Madden, “is that it has nothing to do with the real Crusades but rather the way the Crusades have been packaged.”
Thomas Madden recalls a speech that Bill Clinton gave in October of 2001. In that public address Mr. Clinton, a veteran critic of Western civilization, declared that “Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless” for the mass murders of September 11th in Manhattan, in Washington and in Pennsylvania. Clinton rambled on about the Christian West’s terrible guiltiness for its successful capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Clinton’s chatter mimicked that of James Reston Jr. exactly: “The contemporary descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”
Thomas Madden says of Clinton’s lurid characterization that “It originates from people in the West who were not at Jerusalem when it fell in 1099 but were eager to describe for Christians a kind of ritual purification of the city.” The number of dead did not exceed that of the jihadist attack on Manhattan. The majority of Muslims were allowed to leave the city, according to Madden. Clinton and his fellow liberals are careful not to mention the Muslim penchant for slaughtering every man, woman and child in Crusader cities. Habitual critics of the West are silent about Muslim atrocities. The late Peter Jennings of ABC News was a typical apologist: “Many people in the Middle East are actually aware of the slaughter and the violence that happened during the Middle Ages when the Roman pope sent Christian crusaders against Islam.”
In truth, the small forces sent eastward from Europe were on a mission to repossess Christian holy sites. Medieval Christians wanted these particular Muslims to stop molesting Christians; they had no other interest in Islam as such.
By contrast, Christian Egypt and Christian Syria were overwhelmed by an armed Muslim stampede: the Muslims conquered Spain and moved threateningly to the gates of Paris and Vienna. Their declared purpose was to throw Christian Europe into the Atlantic.
The Crusades were ineffectual attempts to reclaim what had been stolen from Christians. The First Crusade held Jerusalem for only eighty years. At best, Christian efforts halted an ever expanding Muslim land grab. Without armed resistance Christianity would have faded away along with the dying Roman Empire; without armed resistance the Muslims would have tossed Christianity into the dustbin of history in exactly the same manner in which they trashed Zoroastrianism, once the preeminent religion of Persia (modern Iran).
The notion that Muslims have been nursing a grudge for nine centuries because of the Crusades is nonsense. By the Eighteenth Century the Crusades were an historical footnote to most Muslims. Their contemporary feelings of victimhood are the result of some very real Twentieth Century setbacks augmented by fanciful Nineteenth Century French and English tales of the Crusades. The present Islamist vision of the Crusades is a hodgepodge of these European fictions which now function as a boogeyman to be trotted out every time the fatwa barking mullahs feel the need to energize their foot soldiers.
No exponent of planetary Islamic hegemony has given Crusade fantasies a greater workout than Osama bin Laden. He described one of his audiotapes as
He went on to “otherize” everyone who might consider resisting his plan for a global caliphate as “infidels” and “allies of the devil.” He rattled on about the “crusader spite of Bush the father” and how to dig fortifications to defeat “the enemy crusade.” He disdained “the ignorant governments that rule all Arab states, including Iraq” and he emphasized his belief that Muslims must unite in a holy war against the West:
He sees one bright happenstance:
Osama bin Laden pours on the crusade references because he flatters himself to be the second coming of Saladin. More recently Osama bin Laden has turned his attention to Darfur, a region in western Sudan where the Muslim government has encouraged the Muslim militiamen of nomadic Arab tribes, known as the janjaweed, to slaughter, rape and torture Christians and animists and to burn their villages. The Muslims have murdered at least 180,000 “infidels” since February of 2003. Some estimates place the death toll at well over 300,000. Three million others are refugees in flight. The bloodletting began when African villagers resisted discrimination and oppression by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum. When humanitarian agencies began assisting the oppressed and beleaguered blacks, Osama interpreted their presence as yet another assault on Allah’s Kingdom.
After a ceasefire was brokered between the Muslim government in the north and the villagers in the south, Osama railed against the agreement, he accused the United States of scheming to dispatch “crusader troops” to overrun Darfur “and steal its oil wealth under the pretext of peace keeping.” He called on every righteous Muslim to journey to Sudan and stockpile weapons for “a long-term war” against the infidels.
If all this had escaped your attention until now it may be because in all of the last year the CBS Evening News gave no more than two minutes of its attention to the anti-Christian genocide in Darfur. Compare that to the 36 minutes that CBS devoted to Michael Jackson. If the West sends any relief to the suffering Christians of Darfur, then that humanitarian gesture will resemble the Crusades of the Middle Ages: the Crusades were attempts by Christians in the West to assist faraway Christians who were suffering under the yoke of Islam.
Misunderstanding the Crusades
The emotional attachment that Western Christians once had to the Crusader idealists of the Middle Ages has been weakened by that generation of academics who were recoiling from the homicidal ideological warfare of the Twentieth Century and whose vision of human history was increasingly refracted by the distorting prism of Marxist theorizing. Once the professoriate had convinced itself that Marxism was “scientific” and a foolproof decoder of all human interaction it followed naturally that a Marxist interpretation of the Crusades must be the correct interpretation. The matter was thusly settled in their minds: the Crusades were all about class struggle and property and pillage and not about ideas and ideals. Once they were locked into their tight and familiar and formulaic theory of all human interaction, the leftist professors were incapable of comprehending how intellectually respectable the Christian theory of positive violence was for generations of medieval activists. This is remarkable because the notion of positive violence was a central theme of the great “scientific” Marxist mass movements in Twentieth Century Russia and China, the ones that swept hundreds of millions of humans to their deaths during peacetime.
Two contemporary scholars of the Crusades, Thomas Asbridge and Jonathan Philips, emphasize that any clear understanding of history requires an unflinching acceptance of the fact that violence was a normal, organic and integrated fact of medieval life. The second underappreciated dimension of medieval life was religiosity which implied a commitment to right conduct and a fear of damnation.
Religiosity was a deeply personal matter for the well-armed knights. Every sermon instructed them that killing was repugnant to Christ; they had no doubt that a host of demons crouched in wait, ever ready to drag the souls of the violent down into the bowels of Hell. The very skills for which the knight was honored were also those that threatened him with eternal damnation. Knights sought to improve their moral stature by undertaking pilgrimages and by donating generously to monasteries. Even so, their unease remained.
There was no such inner conflict among the Muslim captors of the Christian and Jewish Holy Land. From its first moments Islam was a political mass movement. The Quran is a battle plan for the conquest and subjugation of all non-Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad himself had announced that extremism in the cause of planetary Islam is no vice. The Saracen soldiers in the East were utterly unconflicted in their dedication to the use of violence to capture everything within their reach.
It was not until Pope Urban advised the Christian knights that a struggle to repossess the holiest of Christian sites in the East would win them a remission of past sins were the knights relieved of their inner conflict. By making clear to the knights that an armed struggle to liberate their Christian brethren from second-class status under Islamic hegemony was a righteous cause, Pope Urban created the engine of the Crusades. The knights were finally free to exercise their skills in the service of a cause that would secure their place in Paradise. The concept of positive violence had been embedded in the Quran since the Seventh Century. All of the homicidal Muslim suicide bombers of our time have been smitten with the Quran’s encouragement of positive violence. Islam was wedded to violence from its inception; no agonized theorizing or soul searching hindered Islam’s headlong plunge into the bloodletting that created the Muslim world.
Apologists for Muslim violence, such as James Reston Jr., tell us that “In its purest sense, jihad is defensive. It is written in the Quran: “And fight in Allah’s cause against those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression for verily Allah does not love aggressors.” This is junk intellectualism at its worst. Muhammad gave his followers free license to treat all non-Muslims like dirt. Try for a moment to imagine Jesus telling his disciples that it was permissible to take hostages and hold them for ransom. Muhammad told his followers exactly that, without blinking. Violence created the Muslim world and it was counter-violence that kept the armies of Islam from eradicating Christian Europe the way they had eradicated Zoroastrian Persia.
Liberal “senior scholar” James Reston Jr. gives his best pitch for Islamic jihad: “To defend against Western aggression and occupation is a sacred duty.” Really? Reston is strangely silent about the sacred duty of Christians to defend themselves against the sort of aggression and occupation that left Jerusalem in the hands of the scimitar-wielding Muslims. Pope Urban was not so tongue tied. In an attempt to sweep centuries of Muslim aggression under the rug, Reston wrote in March of 2003:
This is pathetic multi-culti apologetics. The Prophet Muhammad envisioned Islam as a uniting credo that would gather all the fractious and feuding nomadic tribesmen of the Arabian Peninsula under one big tent. It was Muhammad’s intent from the very beginning to project the power of the united Arab horsemen beyond the borders of their traditional stomping grounds. In this sense Muhammad resembles Genghis Khan far more than he resembles Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zoroaster, Buddha, or Jesus.
After the horrendous mass-murder surprise attacks of September 11th, 2001, the armed forces of many countries united to journey to the East and wreck the camps of the jihadists. Their mission, as George W. Bush put it, was to “drain the swamp.” In response to this response a group calling itself the Islamic Research Academy fired off a statement that proclaimed “According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslim’s land, jihad becomes a duty of every male and female Muslim.” These “academicians” called upon “Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to be ready to defend themselves and their faith . . . Our Arab and Islamic nation, and even our faith, are a main target of all these military buildups.” So if we swat the hornet that stung us then we are bad people who are “targeting” Islam. James Reston Jr. and lots of other liberals are in complete accord with this nutty perspective.
Here’s the truth. The surprise attacks of 2001 were in the planning stages for years. The unhappy misfits who carried out the attacks traveled thousands of miles to non-Muslim America where they spent a long time learning to pilot big American airplanes. Then, one bright September morning, these jihadi awoke, said their morning prayers to Allah and headed for the airport. After they had smashed three giant flying fuel bombs into two American cities and were thwarted in their attempt to smash a fourth airplane into the Capitol Building, the democratically-elected leader of the American people sent an armed force to wreck the nest of hoodlums who were hunkered down in the wilds of Afghanistan. Because of America’s provoked and principled response to outrageous acts of homicidal Islamic aggression, the Islamic Research Academy calls America “the enemy” that dares to step on Muslim lands. Well, if you don’t want your neighbor showing up on your doorstep with a baseball bat, then don’t break into his house and murder his children.
This reasoning is totally incomprehensible to James Reston Jr. who quotes the Islamic Academy approvingly. Furthermore, Islam is not under attack. The Christian world wouldn’t give Islam a second thought if Islam could break its nasty habit of molesting everyone who didn’t pray facing Mecca. The mostly-Christian army of the United States has no hostile intentions toward Islam; neither did the Crusader armies of long ago. The West could only hope that the frisky and infantile children of Islam would get their arrogant homicidal bigotry under control and join the rest of the world’s adults in the Twenty-First Century.
James Reston Jr. managed one moment of clarity:
The high cost of maintaining long supply lines, including a chain of Crusader castles, was the ultimate undoing of the Crusade campaigns. The fractious nature of multi-cultural Christian Europe was also a weakness. The forces of the First Crusade were comprised of four contingents: the northern French, the southern French, the Germans and Lotharingians, and the southern Italian Normans. Each contingent has its own leader and spoke its own language. There was no top-ranking commander. Some of the groups bore grudges against others. There was also a fifth contingent, later nicknamed the People’s Crusade. This group was comprised of simple pious folk and a rustic rabble of adventurers. The People’s Crusade was the first to reach the East, at which time the Turks slaughtered all but a few of them. The better-prepared knights managed to secure Jerusalem and the Christian holy sites, but only for eighty years. All crusader efforts were ultimately frustrated by the long thin line of supply and reinforcement between Europe and the Holy Land.
Muslims have the fondest attachment to the Crusade of Richard the Lionhearted, from 1187 to 1192. In this drama the Muslims are triumphant: The Arab hero Saladin, “the lance of jihad,” crushes the Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Memorials to Saladin decorate the Middle East. The late Syrian President Hafez Assad spiced up his office décor with a gigantic painting of the Battle of Hattin which he proudly displayed to Western visitors. One day, he would say, a new Saladin would arrive.
And what would this new Saladin do? Defend the windswept, sun-blasted deserts of the Middle East? Against what? If it weren’t for the fact that Western people had found a use for petroleum, no one would give the Muslim nations a second thought. To the people of the modern world Islam has all the curb appeal of a Model T rusting in a roadside ditch: It’s an antique, a relic, a throwback to its Seventh Century tribal origins. Ninety percent of American conversions to Islam are undertaken by America’s least-educated black folks. Most of these conversions occur in prisons, which are America’s prime incubators of homegrown Islam.
How Things Are Now
In recognition of the fact that rogue Islamists are now exploiting the secrecy and protection of hardened subterranean facilities, like the uranium enrichment factory buried beneath Natanz south of Tehran, the Bush administration began researching the utility of bunker-busting nuclear weapons in 2003. President George W. Bush included proposed spending for further research of such weapons in his federal budget plan for the 2006 fiscal year at the bargain price of only four million dollars.
The bunker-buster nuclear weapon, officially known as the “robust nuclear earth penetrator,” together with “mini nuclear” bombs with a yield of less than 5 kilotons, would have been the muscle behind the Bush administration’s ready-for-use nuclear policy. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was one of the most vocal opponents of the bunker buster, which she said “sends the wrong signals to the rest of the world by reopening the nuclear door and beginning the testing and development of a new generation of nuclear weapons.”
Congress denied funding for the proposed research and thereby sent all End-of-Days Muslim fanatics a clear signal that America won’t be wrecking their hardened subterranean nuclear weapons factories or their buried stashes of chemical and biological agents with any really big hammers. And besides, it would look “unfair.” If Western democracies have nuclear weapons, then why shouldn’t Islamic theocracies have nuclear weapons? Our public image is at stake here; we don’t want to look like a bully who can’t empathize. And so on . . .
One thing is certain, if the non-Muslim world dithers, then the day will arrive when the cult of the Twelfth Imam will have a rocket standing tall on the launch pad and ready to fly. This arrow of Allah will perfectly express the blind bigotry of fourteen centuries of aggressive Islamic jihad. Going nuclear is just the predictable “next step” for jihadi who dream the dream of global Islamic Manifest Destiny. In Tehran it’s springtime for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Watch out folks, here comes the master faith.
Thomas Clough
“A message to our Muslim brothers in Iraq . . . We are following with great interest and concern the preparation of the crusaders to launch war to occupy a former capital of Islam, to pillage the wealth of Muslims and install a puppet government that follows the dictates of its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv.”
“This crusade war is primarily aimed at the people of Islam regardless of the removal or survival of the socialist government or Saddam.”
“It does not hurt that in the current circumstances, the interests of Muslims coincide with the interests of the socialists in the war against the crusaders . . .”
“In the past 18 months jihad has become just as confused as crusade in the American mind. At first, bin Laden and other violent Arab extremists appropriated and co-opted the concept of jihad. In much of the American press, any Arab with a bomb and a grudge is considered to be on a jihad, regardless of his support among the wider public.”
“In crusades, the war can never be separated from its long and tedious aftermath. In their view of history, Arabs know the Americans will want to go home as quickly as they can. They will not want to bankrupt the American treasury, nor will they want to stay for decades. They will tire of their American crusader kingdom.”
Copyright 2006
June 5, 2006