Posted on 02/25/2002 8:13:51 AM PST by quidnunc
Since September 11 the crusades are news. When President Bush used the term "crusade" as it is commonly used, to denote a grand enterprise with a moral dimension, the media pelted him for insensitivity to Muslims. (Nevermind that the media used the term in precisely the same way before the "gaff.") Attempting to capitalize on this indignation, the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, crowed "President Bush has told the truth that this is a crusade against Islam." Yet clearly the crusades were much on the minds of our enemies long before Bush brought them to their attention. In a 1998 manifesto, cosigned by the leaders of Islamist groups in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Osama bin Laden declared war against the "Jews and the Crusaders." If you didn't guess, the Americans are the crusaders here. On the day the U.S. strikes on Afghanistan began, in a live-from-a-cave address, bin Laden declared Bush to be "the leader of the infidels" in a worldwide war against Islam. He previously warned that "crusader" Bush would lead the infidel forces into Afghanistan "under the banner of the cross."
So, what do the medieval crusades have to do with all this? After all, doesn't the Muslim world have a right to be upset about the legacy of the crusades? Nothing and no.
The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Ask a random American about them and you are likely to see a face wrinkle in disgust, or just the blank stare that is usually evoked by events older than six weeks. After all, weren't the crusaders just a bunch of religious nuts carrying fire and sword to the land of the Prince of Peace? Weren't they cynical imperialists seeking to carve out colonies for themselves in faraway lands with the blessings of the Catholic Church? A couch potato watching the BBC/A&E documentary on the crusades (hosted by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame no less) would learn in roughly four hours of frivolous tsk-tsk-ing that the peaceful Muslim world actually learned to be warlike from the barbaric western crusaders. No wonder, then, that Pope John Paul II was excoriated for his refusal to apologize for the crusades in 1999. No wonder that a year ago Wheaton College in Illinois dropped their Crusader mascot of 70 years. No wonder that hundreds of Americans and Europeans recently marched across Europe and the Middle East begging forgiveness for the crusades from any Muslim or Jew who would listen. No wonder.
Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.
-snip-
Thomas F. Madden is the author of A Concise History of the Crusades and coauthor of The Fourth Crusade, is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.
To Read This Article Click Here
I hope this article by an undoubted expert helps to correct prior misinformation.
You can get his book on the crusades here.
still waiting...
It would be nice to think the jihadi apologists here on FR are simply victims of a Cliff Notes History Curriculum, but I doubt that is the case. To defend the indefensible, they are forced to resort to tired old cliches and all the usual anti-Western, anti-imperialist claptrap.
Good read, though. Thanks.
What the author says is correct but not complete - his reference to "Crusades" seems to end with the Fourth Crusade, wherein the Franks and Venetians plundered their Greek buddies in Constantinople. There were more, including the infamous Children's Crusade (which populated the Muslim slave markets nicely) and a number of "Crusades" that never left Europe and weren't pointed at the Holy Land or even the Muslims anyhow. A Crusade in this sense is simply the Church offering holy dispensation to its members in exchange for military activities on the Church's behalf - they "take up the Cross," hence "Crusade."
Furthermore, while the Muslims "won" the Crusades, the Arabs did not. It was during this period that political control of the Islamic peoples was wrested from the Arabs by first the Seljuk Turks, then the Ottomans. This control didn't leave Turkish hands until the secularization of Turkey and the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1917, at which time the Arabs marched into the Holy Land behind a fellow named Lawrence. Part of the Arabic grudge against the Christians and the Crusades is that the latter helped the Turks in this regard. It's a grudge half a millennium old, but it doesn't seem to have faded much. To us they're all Muslims, but they don't see it quite that monolithically.
There used to be caliphs (religious leaders) and sultans (political/military leaders); the former remained Arabic much longer than the latter, which term was actually invented to disguise Turkish suzerainty. Now the sultans are gone, and the return of total control to the religious wing in the form of mullahs and ayatollahs (a fairly new term) hearkens back to the earlier, bloodier era of Islam.
Only by the Mass Murder Muslim/Arabprop Tag Team (MMMATT) and their useful idiots.
just call it jihad.
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