By Robert Sibley
Thousand-year-old events don't
usually make headlines. But when U.S. President George W. Bush used the word
crusade to describe the campaign against Islamist terrorism, suddenly an ancient
conflict became a hot-button topic.
The president was accused of being insensitive to Muslim sensibilities, even
though the Islamists readily denounce western crusaders and their Zionist
puppets. Indeed, long before the terrorist strikes on 9/11, al-Qaeda leaders
issued a declaration of war against the Jews and Crusaders. More recently, Pope
Benedict XVI was accused of trying to revive the mentality of the Crusades after
he gave a speech questioning Islam's propensity for violence. Last month, in
another live-from-his-hole-in-the-ground video, Osama bin Laden said the
republication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad came in the framework of a new
Crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role.
This is standard fare in the Muslim world. What is perhaps surprising is how
many westerners buy into this historical myth.
In January, after John Manley delivered his panels report on what he thought
Canada should do about its military mission in Afghanistan, Green Party leader
Elizabeth May issued a press statement saying: The Manley report fails to
consider that the recommendation of more ISAF forces from a Christian/crusader
heritage will continue to fuel an insurgency that has been framed as a jihad.
This, in turn, may feed the recruitment of suicide bombers and other insurgents.
Like many postmodern westerners, the politician suffers from a peculiar psychic
disturbance western-guilt syndrome that regards the history of the West as an
unmitigated horror show of slaughter, conquest and imperialistic domination. The
Crusades are cast as among the darkest of dark episodes in the history of
European civilization.
Too bad its wrong.
The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event n European history,
says historian Thomas Madden. The Crusades were in every way a defensive war.
They were a direct response to Muslim aggression an attempt to turn back or
defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
The West may now dominate the Islamic world, but that has only been the case
since the late 18th century, when a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, conquered
Egypt and temporarily imposed French rule. This initial European penetration
into one of the heartlands of Islam was a terrible shock to Muslims, says
historian Bernard Lewis. Until then, they had thought of themselves as the
victors in the Crusades.
That assumption is understandable. Muslim rulers held the preponderance of power
as far as Europe was concerned until the 17th century and had done so, more or
less, since the Prophet Muhammad issued Islam's initial declaration of war
against other religious faiths in the seventh century. The Prophet wrote the
Christian Byzantine emperor and the Sassanid emperor of Persia to suggest they
surrender to his rule because, well, their day was done. I have now brought Gods
final message, the Prophet declared. Your time has passed. Your beliefs are
superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or resign or submit ... you are
finished.
This claim propelled the armies of Islam to take on the rest of the world.
Muslim armies charged out of the Arabian Peninsula to conquer Syria, Lebanon,
Palestine and Egypt -- all of which, as part of the late Roman Empire, were
officially Christian. By the eighth century, Christian North Africa was under
Muslim control. Islam soon swept into Europe, grabbing Spain, Portugal and
southern Italy. In the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks conquered much of Asia
Minor, or Turkey.
Christian Europe certainly fought back. In the eighth century, campaigns to
recover the Iberian peninsula began, but it wasn't until the end of the 15th
century that the Reconquista swept Islam out of Spain and Portugal. Other
counterattacks were made, the most famous of which were the war-pilgrimages
known as the Crusades.
In 1095, Pope Urban II called for he First Crusade. He urged Europeans to aid
fellow Christians who were being slaughtered by Muslims. They (the Muslim Turks)
have invaded the lands of those Christians and have depopulated them by the
sword, pillage and fire; they have lead away a part of the captives into their
own country, and a part they have destroyed by cruel tortures.
The Crusader army marched deep into enemy territory to reclaim the ancient
Christian cities of Nicaea and Antioch, and on July 15, 1099, Jerusalem.
Admittedly it wasn't a pleasant reclamation. As was standard practice when a
city resisted, much of population was slaughtered. That, however, doesn't mean
the threat to which the Crusades were a response wasn't real.
The Crusades, says Madden, were a response to more than four centuries of
conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian
world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself
or be subsumed by Islam.
Unfortunately, subsequent Crusades over the next three centuries weren't as
successful. By the end of the 13th century, the Christian Crusaders had been
chased from the Middle East. From then on the concern was no longer about
reclaiming Christian homelands, but about saving Europe.
In 1453, Muslims captured the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople
(or Istanbul, as it is now known). In the late 15th century, Rome was evacuated
when Muslim armies landed at Otranto in an unsuccessful invasion of Italy. By
the 16th century, the Ottoman Turk empire stretched from North Africa and Arabia
to the Near East and Asia Minor. They penetrated deep into Europe, conquering
Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Croatia and Serbia. In 1529, the Ottomans
laid siege to Vienna. Luckily for Europe, the siege failed; otherwise the door
to Germany would have been open. It wasn't until 1572, when the Catholic Holy
League defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, that Islam's threat to the West
finally ended, at least until the late 20th century when the doors to Europe
were once again opened to Muslims.
Islam unquestionably won the Crusades, even though Europe was ultimately able to
reassert itself and dominate the world. The reasons for this success are much
debated, but its reasonable to conclude that the West won the war of ideas.
Notions of individualism and freedom, capitalism and technology, and, most of
all, the West's turn from theology to science, carried the day. Religion became
in the West an essentially private concern. It is on this modern turn that the
anti-Crusade attitude developed.
During the Protestant Reformation, when the authority of the Catholic church was
under attack, the Crusades began to be regarded as a ploy by power-hungry popes
and land-hungry aristocrats. This judgment was extended by the Enlightenment
philosophers, who used the Crusades as a cudgel with which to beat the church.
The Enlightenment view of the Crusades still holds sway. After the Second World
War, with western intellectuals feeling guilty about imperialism and European
politicians desperate to abandon colonial responsibilities, the Crusades became
intellectually unfashionable.
Historian Steven Runciman reflected this attitude in his three-volume study, A
History of the Crusades, published in the early 1950s. He cast the Crusades as
morally repugnant acts of intolerance in the name of God, says Madden. Almost
single-handedly Runciman managed to define the modern popular view of the
Crusades.
The western-guilt syndrome was displayed on July 15, 1999, when a group marked
the 900th anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders by parading
around the walls of the city to apologize on behalf of Christianity to the
Muslim world. It was an act of ignorance. Historian Jonathan Riley-Smith says,
The apologizers were only showing that they did not comprehend the Muslim view
of the crusades (which made their conciliatory gesture empty), and did not
understand history (which made their act of contrition pointless).
This ignorance is so pervasive that many westerners no longer think it necessary
for soldiers to stand watch on the frontiers of the West. Even more worrisome,
though, is that Muslim leaders recognize the western-guilt syndrome and are only
too willing to take advantage of it.
In May 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent an open letter to
President Bush. Many interpreted the letter as evidence of Iran's desire for
better relations. Only a few noticed the closing paragraphs in which the Iranian
leader dismissed liberal secularism as a failed ideal. Liberalism and Western
style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity, he
said. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear
the sounds of the shattering and the fall of the ideology and thoughts of the
Liberal democratic systems. We increasingly see that people around the world are
flocking towards a main focal point -- that is the Almighty God. ... Whether we
like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and
justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.
The New York Suns editorial board pointed out that the letter concluded with a
traditional phrase that Muhammad used in his letters to the Byzantine and
Sassanid emperors. The editors translated this phrase (Vasalam Ala Man Atabaal
hoda) as peace only unto those who follow the true path. In other words, the
president of Iran, like Muhammad before him, believes only Muslims are deserving
of peace.
The Crusades, it seems, are being rejoined. Only this time Islam will have
nuclear weapons.