Posted on 10/16/2001 8:12:34 AM PDT by SocialMeltdown
On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was riding through St. Peter's Square in Rome, on his way to announce that he wanted to create a dialogue on Catholic theology and modern thought.
Before he could make that announcement, a Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca shot him. The would-be assassin's reason, written in a letter, was to kill the "supreme commander of the Crusades." While the pope was turning toward modernity, the Turk was still fighting a war that began almost 1,000 years earlier. And now, because of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, America has been drawn into the same war.
The evil hatched by Osama bin Laden and his followers has its roots in an ages-old clash of religions that was most clearly marked by open warfare between Christians and Muslims starting in the 11th century.
It all boils down to one very powerful word: "crusade." The Saudi financier-turned-terrorist-backer bin Laden has been singled out as the prime suspect in the attacks on U.S. soil. To him and his followers, the thousand-year-old clash between Islam and Christianity is still ongoing. To be an American (or a Westerner) is to be a "crusader."
A treatise against the West attributed to bin Laden in the late 1990s was titled "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders." The author speaks of the 1948 creation of Israel as an act committed by a Jewish-Crusader alliance. He goes on in stark terms to describe his followers' mission: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al Aksa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim."
Muslim thought
As Mark Hadley, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Western Maryland College, says, this form of radicalism is not a part of traditional Muslim thought.
"While classical or medieval Islam in the Sunni tradition developed this notion of "jihad,' it was heavily qualified in ways similar to Western notions of just war: there must be a just cause, right intent, a reasonable hope of success, and a competent authority to declare war. . . . "Obviously, there are groups within Islamic countries such as Islamic Jihad or Hamas, and perhaps Osama bin Laden himself, who have appealed to notions of jihad to justify various acts of violence," Hadley says. "However, this is radically at odds with mainstream Islam and the everyday practices and beliefs of Muslims here and abroad. By any ethical measure, Islamic or otherwise, (Sept. 11's) actions were acts of mass murder."
Bin Laden, then, represents a radical segment of the Muslim world, and scholars take pains to stress that the religion is not inherently warlike. But experts on the Middle East say that on the streets of Cairo or Amman, the common term for American is "cowboy" or "crusader."
Meaning softened
Meanwhile, in the West (particularly the United States), the concept of a crusade has softened. Rather than being a fight for Christendom, a crusade is a way to get people to stop smoking, or get voters to the polls on Election Day. These are surely noble causes, but somewhat less than a defense of religious faith.
The most recent example of Western casualness in regards to the power of the C-word in the Muslim East was President Bush's comments on Sept. 16 that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while."
A presidential spokesman wisely backtracked by saying: "I think what the president was saying had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join."
If the West has largely forgotten the particulars of the Crusades, Osama bin Laden has not.
In Afghanistan, which has been bin Laden's home of late, the rulers reign in a fashion that might not be that different from the Muslim defenders of the Holy Lands of a thousand years ago.
In a race to out-fundamental the fundamentalists, the ruling Taliban bans movies, television and even kite-flying. Since the mid-1990s, it has taken the country even deeper into the Dark Ages by ending schooling for girls, destroying ancient artworks that offended official religious sensibilities, and even making it a crime punishable by death to convince someone to reject Islam.
(Two American aid workers face just such a possibility for bringing Christian literature into the country.)
It is not so surprising that Islamic fundamentalists would cling tightly to concepts a thousand years old while an opposing microwave society would so quickly lose the foundational concepts held so dear by their rivals. In the beginning
Although historians put the year 1095 as a clear starting for the Crusades, the seeds of conflict can be traced back to Genesis 12, when God promised to make Abraham a great nation.
Muslims, like Christians and Jews, trace their lineage through Abraham to Ur of the Chaldeans. The Jews and Christians claim the line of Isaac, produced through Abraham's wife Sarah, while the Muslims take the line produced when Abraham had a son, Ishmael, by a servant named Hagar.
(While Hagar was pregnant, the Lord promised that her descendants would be many, but also that Ishmael "shall be a wild man; his hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him.")
More than 500 years after the death of Jesus Christ and the spread of Christianity, Mohammad ibn Abdullah was born in Mecca. In 610, Mohammad claimed he had received revelations from Allah. He "insisted that his was not a new religion but the ultimate revelation of the Jewish-Christian tradition," writes Karen Armstrong in "Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World."
"Islam," meaning "submission to God," was the name of this religion. His followers became "Muslims," meaning "those who submit."
Islam spread rapidly across the Middle East and North Africa, including countries that had been devoutly Christian. Its spread began to crowd the boundaries of the West, which was becoming solidly Christian.
"It was very threatening to the Christian identity to see this younger, energetic religion that claimed to have superseded Christianity actually transforming the map and absorbing Christians into its empire," Armstrong wrote. Very quickly the West grabbed on to the Muslim concept of jihad, using it as a way to rally Christians to defend their homelands and their faith.
In 732, Sultan Abd al-Rahman attacked northward from Spain into southern France. Europe saw this as an Arab desire to control and thus convert all the world. The East, meanwhile, scoffed at why anyone would want to invade such a backward and harsh place as Europe.
Legend tells of a sign in France that gave warning to Muslims: "Turn back, sons of Ishmael, this is as far as you go, and if you do not go back, you will smite each other until the day of the Resurrection."
In the 730s, Charles Martel became a Frankish hero known as the "Hammer" for turning back the advance of the Muslims deep in the heart of France in the city of Tours, less than 150 miles southwest of Paris.
Pope entered fray
As Muslims and Christians continued to clash at the edges of their dominions, the end of the first millenni um drew many pilgrims from Europe to the Holy Land, anticipating the return of Christ. But the Holy Land was firmly in the hands of Muslims.
Resentment stewed until a group of Byzantine Christians in what is now Greece sent out a plea for help in 1095 and spawned what is known as the Crusades.
The Byzantine plea to remove the harassing Turkish armies of Asia Minor led Pope Urban II to make an impassioned speech in France in which he called on Christian believers to come to the defense of their brothers in faith.
"It began as an errand of mercy reacting to Turkish conquests of Asia Minor," says St. Louis University historian Thomas Madden. "People were going to fight the Muslims, and so doing they would liberate the Christians." Many historians say it is unclear if Urban intended more than a defense of the Byzantines, amid an already strained church relationship that would eventually sunder into a clearly divided Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.
But he got more.
Pilgrims massacred
Urban intended to inspire European nobles from all Christendom to stop their infighting and unite in a holy pilgrimage. What he initially got was a fired-up rabble that stormed headlong across Europe, without provisions or planning. Once they crossed into Asia Minor, they were met by Muslim Turks, who cut off their heads and left their bodies to rot in open fields. Western historians for many centuries neglected this astounding defeat because of the poor message it sent: How holy can your pilgrimage be if it ends in awful defeat?
What officially became known as the "First Crusade" was a better-organized army of European nobles who swept into the East to eventually reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom.
One factor in the nobles' success may have been the easy defeat of that first wave of ill-equipped peasants. The Turkish Muslims may have underestimated the battled-trained Europeans who poured into the region and soundly defeated them.
On July 15, 1099, this wave of Crusaders conquered Jerusalem. For two days, they massacred Muslims and Jews. The accounts of this siege talk of streets flowing with blood up to the knees of men on horseback and decapitated heads and limbs piled high.
"The Muslims were no longer respected enemies and a foil for Frankish honor. They had become the enemies of God and were doomed to ruthless extermination," writes "Holy War" author Armstrong.
Centuries of conflict
Pope Urban died two weeks later, but his call would resound throughout Europe for another two centuries.
Flush with success, the Christian conquerors divided the Holy Land into states and even made plans for further conquests, although those ambitions were never realized. Their success also brought waves of more pilgrims from the West and more conflicts around the region between Muslims and Christians.
In this time, the church encouraged believers to make the trek - either over land or by boat - to the Holy Land, the trip itself being a test of devotion. Regional conflicts in the East would flare up, and popes would make appeals for new crusades, stretching to an almost comical number.
Muslims continued to hold out hope for a strong leader who could reclaim what had been lost.
Such a warrior emerged in the 1160s in the form of a Kurd named Saladin. Ultimately, the occupiers - so far removed from their original homeland - could not hold on; the last Christian outpost, the city of Acre, fell to the Muslims in 1291.
The major campaigns of the Crusades may have ended, but the desire to control the region did not. "Even after the Middle Ages, popes would plan, princes would attempt, preachers would propagandize and scholars would draw up Grand Strategies for the reconquest of the Holy Land," writes Ronald C. Finucane in "Soldiers of the Faith."
Within another couple of centuries, the boundaries between a Christian West and a Muslim East became sharper with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in Spain by the late 1400s.
Renaissance in the West
The Muslim world may have successfully defended its turf and won the Crusades, but it lost the larger war of history
to a West on the verge of the Renaissance. "The Arab world had seemingly won a stunning victory. If the West had sought, through its excessive invasions, to contain the thrust of Islam, the result was exactly the opposite. . . . Appearances are deceptive. With historical hindsight, a more contradictory observation must be made," writes Lebanese author Amin Maalouf in "The Crusades
Through Arab Eyes."
"At the time of the Crusades, the Arab world, from Spain to Iraq, was still the intellectual and material repository of the planet's most advanced civilization. Afterward, the center of world history shifted decisively to the West." In a bit of irony, this shift was due in part to the European occupation of a Muslim world that was far more advanced in culture, medicine and technology. "The Crusaders lost the war but brought back a huge infusion of new ideas," says David Cook, an Islamic studies professor at Rice University in Houston.
Capitalism's role
The Muslim world grew more powerful in its own neighborhood and expanded its influence in places other than Europe. The Christian West, though, was changing in such a way as to make a call to pure holy war unlikely. The rise of concepts such as capitalism and individualism caused a revolution of a different sort, and although war would continue to be waged, the fight was now more likely to be over economics. A rising West was also changed by a Reformation that altered the structure of the church as state, and an Enlightenment that challenged old conventions of faith. "Struggle with Islam became irrelevant. The whole idea of the Crusades became bizarre," says Madden.
But this profit-driven, more secular West is no less an enemy to the followers of bin Laden. It's no surprise that the Taliban bans TV, given that many modern Westerners see it as a corruptor of their own children.
In a pluralistic United States, a certain religiosity may be a key component in the defense of the nation, but the overriding motivation is the defense of liberty, not the conquest of alleged heathens. That transition has not been made so clearly in the Muslim world.
"The gulf between bin Laden and his followers and the U.S. is a thousand years," says Madden.
Crusade, a word that is casually thrown around in the West, is a concept stuck in the craw of many fundamentalist Muslims. "The Crusades are a very uncomfortable thing for Muslims," says Rice University's Cook. "It is an embarrassing moment" that exposed an Eastern vulnerability.
So while the West may not see history in such stark terms, it should not forget both the power of the Crusades and their use as a motivator for destroying the United States and its allies. America's cause for conflict is only a month old, while its enemy's has lasted more than 1,000 years.
Sources: "The History of God" by Karen Armstrong (Ballantine Books, 1993); "Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World" by Karen Armstrong (Doubleday, 1991); "Soldiers of the Faith" by Ronald C. Finucane (St. Martin's Press, 1983); "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes" by Amin Maalouf (Shocken Books, 1985); "The Oxford History of Medieval Europe" edited by George Holmes (Oxford University Press, 1988); Arab Historians of the Crusades," edited by Francesco Gabrieli (University of California Press, 1969); "The Crusades" by Anthony Bridge (Granada Publishing, 1980); "Foreign Affairs" magazine, November/December 1998.
BOB DAVIS is Op-Ed/Sunday editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Some Imams have tried to say this but tracing entemology of words and study of ancient Sumerian hyroglyphs pretty much disproves it. That an Arab would claim to be heir to any monotheistic religion prior to Mohammed is laughable anyway.
Genesis 21:12
Genesis 22:2
Genesis 22:16
Matthew 22:31-32
Galatians 3:26-4:31
Why? The Nazis viewed the war as a conflict between Jewish-controlled America and Russia and the Master Race. How would looking at it thru the same distorted lens have helped us defeat them?
Certainly we must understand their view. We don't need to join them in it.
This is wishful thinking. The war with the Church in Rome begun by Henry VIII continues to this day in Ireland virtually unabated.
The question of the day should be "Are the Irish terrorists, including those in Boston part of the current war?" I suspect the Brits think yes. The endeavor will take along time we are told. When Osama and Saddam are gone, it will be time for Jerry Adams unless he repents and atones.
Not anti Catholic or anti Irish or pro Brit. Just telling it like I see it.
In the case of the Albigensian Crusade, the Albigensians (who were a cult, not a population) declared war on their king under the leadership of the Counts of Toulouse. The King of France won the war and afterwards executed a thousand or so Albigensians and others whom he considered ringleaders of the rebellion. The Pope's representative, St. Dominic, protested the harshness of the King's response but was overruled by the secular authority. Pope Innocent did not celebrate or endorse the reprisals. He was glad that an unstable and antiChristian movement was ended, however.
The Inquisition was inaugurated by the Spanish crown in order to root out pro-Muslim fifth columnists. The Spanish throne considered Jews to be among this number due to their perceived collaboration with the enemy during the Muslim occupation. No entire populations were killed - 3,000 people were executed over a period of a century for crimes ranging from assassination to apostasy. A good number of these executions were unjust and politically motivated. No Pope celebrated the Inquisition.
Protestants were persecuted in the Netherlands by Philip V because he felt they were plotting against his rule. Similar persecutions of Catholics were undertaken in England against Catholics at the same time - persecutions which were far bloodier and went on much longer. The Pope neither authorized or approved of Philip V's actions, let alone celebrated them. Philip himself considered them an entirely internal matter.
The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, like the Inquistion, the Albigensian Crusade and the repressive policies of Philip was politically motivated. Again, there was no genocide - remarkably almost all of the thousand or so Huguenots murdered were political enemies of the Medici family. The Pope celebrated the event because he was informed that a plot by Calvinist traitors to overthrow the Catholic King of France was successfully foiled. Only later did he learn that he had been manipulated by the Medicis (and not for the last time). The Thanksgiving Mass he offered was not a gravedance over dead Protestants - it was a celebration of the survival of the French monarchy.
No Pope has ever presided over genocide. Protestants such as Cromwell and freethinkers such as Stalin have attempted genocides against Catholic populations. This doesn't give me license to accuse prominent atheists or Protestants of those crimes.
That's the real history - your implied portrait of Popes ordering hits/dancing for joy over people's deaths is highly inaccurate.
Yesssss. I think I garner your meaning within those quotation marks. I would like 'to understand them' better myself. I would like to sort through some of their entrails after puff the magic dragon flew over them and hamburgerized a few of em. I feel a great and persistent curriosity to get a real close look.
But the British crown has treated the Irish rather vilely over the years. Desiring independence is legitimate - blowing up schoolchildren is a repulsive way to go about it.
I would be happy to see the UDF, RH, RIRA, PIRA and Sinn Fein added to the roster of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, etc.
The Pope Innocent III excommunicated the Count of Toluse because he would not commit the murders. Simon de Montfort had no such problem and committed the atrocity.
St Dominic founded the Dominican order that held sway over the Inquisition.
The Pope had blood on his hands
Perhaps you need enlightenment.
ON 24 june 1209, Pope Innocent III unleashed Simon de Montfort
What does "unleashed" mean? The Pope did not command or give instructions to de Montfort. Montfort's campaign was his own idea and his own undertaking. Did the Pope say that the King of France was permitted to use force in order to put down the violent rebellion in Southern France? Yes.
on the Christians of southern France because they did not submit to his orthodoxy.
The Albigensians were not Christians. They did not believe that Christ was divine. They believed that the Creator of the world was the Devil. They rejected the Bible and composed their own Scriptures. They believed that salvation was bestowed by the consolamentum - a laying on of hands by a perfected master. They practiced ritual suicide. I don't know any Christian group that considers this kind of belief system Christian.
He slaughtered 20,000 in their homes and villages.
No historical source can substantiate such a fabrication. The leader of the Albigensians, Count Raimond of Toulouse only claimed 6,000 soldiers (not civilians in their homes) - and he was certainly exaggerating.
Since they were dead, it was no problem to appropriate all their lands and goods.
The land and goods of the Albigensians were not appropriated. The lands of the Counts of Toulouse, who had risen in military rebellion against their sworn sovereign, were confiscated and awarded to Montfort. The heirs of Count Raimond then declared war on Montfort's son Amalric and tried to get the land back. Then the King of France overruled both of them and added it to the French crown lands. The Pope didn't make a penny.
Once the wholsale killing was over,
There was no wholesale killing - the loser alleged 6,000 casualties in ten years of war. That's less than would be expected, let alone wholesale slaughter.
it was only a small step to the Inquisition lasting 300 years or so.
The Inquisition began more than 250 years after the Albigensian Crusade.
I suggest you spend a little more time with the books.
Unlike you, I have a degree in Medieval History and have read the actual primary documents of these historical events in the original languages. I suggest you expand your library beyond poorly-researched hate literature.
A great question Mercy. We would be wise to consider this very topic.
No, they weren't. They denied that Christ is God and that the Bible iss the Word of God. They were antiChristians, not Christians.
The Pope declared them to be heretics
True. They were heretics.
and massacred them.
The Pope did not draw a single drop of blood from anyone. Nor were the Cathars massacred. The garrison of soldiers at Toulouse was put to the sword by the King of France - not the entire Cathar population.
It was genocide.
Maybe you're unaware of the meaning of the word genocide. It means the murder of an entire ethnic, linguistic or religious group. That never happened - there were still thousands of Cathars around after the war ended.
The Pope Innocent III excommunicated the Count of Toluse because he would not commit the murders.
No. Pope Innocent III excommunicated Count Raimond because he (a) had permitted members of the clergy to be killed, (b) violated his oath of fealty to his sovereign and most of all, (c) blasphemed the name of Christ.
Simon de Montfort had no such problem and committed the atrocity.
Simon Montfort killed almost every member of the Count of Toulouse's hostile army. That's not an atrocity - in a declared that's called "winning". If those involved did not want to die, all they had to do was not take up the sword against the King of France.
St Dominic founded the Dominican order that held sway over the Inquisition.
The most prominent administrators of the Spanish Inquisition were indeed Dominicans. But any "sway" over the Inquisition was held by the Spanish monarchy which financed it and did the hiring and firing.
The Pope had blood on his hands
I hope these disconnected statements were not intended to be a syllogism. Your claim was that the Popes ordered and supervised genocide. That never happened - it's a historical fiction spun out of Foxe's brain - the same Foxe who smiled with approval as the British Crown and the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury directly ordered St. Margaret Clitheroe, a pregnant wife and mother, to be crushed to death under a millstone for the crime of allowing a Catholic priest to offer Mass in her home.
This boring antiCatholic propaganda is so ridiculous and makes you look so uneducated and backward. Why don't you read up on the slaughter of German Catholics by Protestant armies during the Thirty Years' War. Or the massacres perpetrated by the Calvinist Cromwell in Catholic Ireland. Or the slaughter of Polish Catholics by the Protestant Teutonic Knights. Or the church-burnings by the Protestant Know-Nothings in the US. Or the Star Chamber and Tyburn in England. Or the burning of Servetus. Protestants have committed more than their fair share of atrocities and far more Catholics have died at Protestant hands than the other way around.
I'm willing to let it lie. Stop fabricating pretexts to set Christians at one another's throats. Christendom should be united against the Muslim menace - meanwhile you champion antiChristian groups like the Cathars.
What you are apparently unaware of is that by the time of Mohammad Jews had ceased using YHWH out of respect for the divine name and used other names like Adonai (Lord) and Elohim.
Delitzsch's etymology of Allah is hotly contested by Semitists like Lambdin, Muraoka and others. The Catholic Encyclopedia, while it is an extremely well-researched work, was published more than 80 years ago. Some of the most groundbreaking work in Semitic studies has taken place since WWII, including the discovery of entirely new Semitic languages and grammars like those of the Nabataeans and Ugarits.
The name El was the name of many local gods in the Middle East, it's true. But many of these gods had compound names in which El was a prefix meaning divinity. Which divinity was "El-Lah"? It's certainly not a name of God used by the Jews.
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