Eternal crusade to discover the truth?

August 7, 2008
Hanifa Deen

Years later I enrolled in a medieval history unit at university and after reading Steven Runciman's three-volume The History Of The Crusades, learnt that economics, as much as religion, guided the emperors and popes who called on younger noble sons and common folk to join in a holy war against "the infidel".

Centuries passed and religious ecstasy faded, but greed and the desire for control of rich provinces, ports and trade routes continued to energise this long series of wars that lasted from the late 11th century until their decline in the 14th.

One day, while toiling over an essay on the early Crusades, I remembered the words of my father who, long ago, had talked about Salah ad-Din's chivalry and sense of honour; how the Kurdish prince tried to negotiate with the Crusaders but had been thwarted by their fanaticism.

My father had never heard of Runciman, but in matters to do with Salah ad-Din he would have found himself in good company. The English historian sided with my father and fixed in my mind, once and for all, who were the aggressors and ultimately the losers in the sorry tale of the Crusades.

I can't quite make sense of Ms Deen, presumably she's just another in the long line of religious commentators who never says anything about Islam the ideology, but Robert Spencer makes it pretty clear ...

Virtually all Westerners have learned to apologize for the Crusades, but less noted is the fact that the Crusades have an Islamic counterpart for which no one is apologizing and of which few are even aware. Over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain spoke for many Westerners in Tom Sawyer Abroad when he has Tom explain to Huck Finn that he wants to go to the Holy Land to liberate it from the Muslims.

“How,” Huck asks, “did we come to let them git holt of it?”

“We didn’t come to let them git hold of it,” Tom explains. “They always had it.”

“Why, Tom, then it must belong to them, don’t it?”

“Why of course it does. Who said it didn’t?”

Historical fact says it didn’t...

Islam originated in Arabia in the seventh century. At that time Egypt, Libya, and all of North Africa were Christian, and had been so for hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor. The churches that St. Paul addressed in his letters collected in the New Testament are located in Asia Minor, modern Turkey, as well as modern Greece. North of Greece, in a buffer zone between Eastern and Western Europe, were lands that would become the Christian domains of the Slavs. Antioch and Constantinople (Istanbul), in modern Turkey, and Alexandria, in modern Egypt, were three of the most important Christian centers of the first millennium.

But then Muhammad and his Muslim armies arose out of the desert, and — as most modern textbooks would put it — these lands became Muslim. But in fact the transition was cataclysmic. Muslims won these lands by conquest and, in obedience to the words of the Qur’an and the Prophet, put to the sword the infidels therein who refused to submit to the new Islamic regime. Those who remained alive lived in humiliating second-class status. Conversion to Islam became the only way to live a decent life. And lo and behold, the Christian populations of these areas steadily diminished.

Conventional wisdom has it that these Christians welcomed the invaders, preferring the yoke of Islam to that of Byzantium...

Much later, when Muslim armies resumed their expansion in Europe after a period of relative decline (which most notoriously included the loss of Sicily in 1091, the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099, and the steady erosion of their power in Spain), they held true to this pattern of behavior. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople, the jewel of Christendom, finally fell to an overwhelming Muslim force after weeks of resistance by a small band of valiant Greeks. According to the great historian of the Crusades Steven Runciman, the Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.”

The circumstances of the first Crusade were these: Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being molested by Muslims and prevented from reaching the holy places. Some were killed. This was finally the impetus that moved Western Christianity to try to take back just one small portion of the Christian lands that had fallen to the Muslim sword over the last centuries. “The Crusade,” noted historian Bernard Lewis, “was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war — to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”

Whatever undeniable sins Christians committed during their course, the Crusades were essentially a defensive action: a belated and insufficient attempt by Western Christians to turn back the tide of Islam that had engulfed the Eastern Church. “When accusing the West of imperialism,” says the historian of jihad Paul Fregosi, “Muslims are obsessed with the Christian Crusades but have forgotten their own, much grander Jihad.” The lands in dispute during each Crusade were the ancient lands of Christendom, where Christians had flourished for centuries before Muhammad’s armies called them idolaters and enslaved and killed them. If Westerners had no right to invade these putative Muslim lands, then Muslims had no right to take them in the first place.

Thus if Al-Azhar wants to demand an apology for the Crusades, it should be ready to apologize for the conquest of the Middle East and North Africa.

I presume this is fully explained in Spencer's book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) which Ms Deen would do well to read. "Muslims won these lands by conquest and, in obedience to the words of the Qur’an and the Prophet, put to the sword the infidels therein", and "the Crusades were essentially a defensive action". Not so ambiguous, Ms Deen, if you're prepared to read further. It won't even take an eternity.