War has its roots in the Crusades: U.S. has been drawn into a conflict that began 1,000 years ago

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

You are very ignorant in claiming that Arab monotheism began with Mohammed. A significant part of the Arab world was either Orthodox Christian or Monophysite Christian in Mohammed's time. Archeological digs have found Orthodox Churches on the shores of the Persian Gulf. My bishop's family came from a valley in Syria whose Arabic name means "The Valley of the Christians" because its in habitants have held out against the Jihad from the beginning. St. Ephriam the Syrian and St. John of Damascus were Arabs. The Nestorian Church (predating Mohammed by ~300 years) still exists in Iraq.

Mohammed himself consciously rejected the Gospel which many of his fellow-Arabs had embraced. He had a Christian wife, Mary, whom he abused for refusing to convert to his false doctrine (perhaps we should venerate her as a confessor). I have said it before on other threads, at its roots, Islam is antichrist in the sense the Holy Evangelist and Apostle John the Theologian used the word in his epistles.

Adonai and Elohim are not proper nouns or names, they are common nouns or titles. Even the Bible uses the same words to refer to other gods, false pagan gods. (I'm not sure whether Elohim is used this way, I think it's restricted to the One True God.)

As others have pointed out, allah is and was the common noun in Arabic for god. Capitalized as Allah, it is a direct translation of our word God. What difference does it make that a term formerly used to refer to a pagan god is now applied to God? The terms used in the NT for God were titles or common nouns used to refer to the pagan gods. Does that mean that the NT somehow was not referring to the One True God?

Similarly, Mohammed makes very plain that when he uses the term Allah he means the One True God Creator of the Universe. I happen to not agree with his claim to inspiration by this God, but he certainly was not referring to any other.

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.

This war started as an aggressive attempt on the part of Catholics to roll back Protestant gains and essentially wipe outsProtestantism. It escalated into possibly the worst war in history, despite serious competition, eventually reducing the population of Germany by 50-75%. Both sides massacred opponents. By the end of the war, the "Protestant" side was led by the Catholic French. It is just silly to talk about this crucial conflict as mainly about Protestants attacking Catholics. Essentially everybody attacked everybody else and massacred them. The most famous massacre of the war was by the Imperial Catholic army. They killed every living thing in the Protestant city of Magdeburg.

Or the massacres perpetrated by the Calvinist Cromwell in Catholic Ireland.

Cromwell was not a nice person. Much of the fury of his army was due to their belief that they were avenging massacres of Protestants by the Irish. These massacres were probably not as widespread as Cromwell's army believed, but they certainly happened, with apparently about 3,000 English settlers slaughtered. Cromwell's massacres have been greatly exaggerated by Irish sentimentalists. Much greater damage was done to the native Irish by the Penal Laws which were enforced for the next couple of centuries.

Or the slaughter of Polish Catholics by the Protestant Teutonic Knights.

I'm really curious about this one. What are you talking about? The Teutonic Knights were a Catholic religious order similar to the Knights of Malta. They conquered an extensive area on the Baltic. Eventually one of the their grandmasters converted to Protestantism and secularized the Order, which basically went out of existence. Their domain formed the center of what eventually became East Prussia.

But most of the killing of Poles was done while they were still Catholic. They pretty well exterminated the pagan Prussians and warred against the Poles, claiming they weren't really Catholic.

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.

Catholics were persecuted to various degrees in England, there's no denying that. However, for most of this time they were adherents to a foreign power that really was aggressively attempting to overthrow the English monarchy. They were viewed by other Englishmen, rightly or wrongly, in much the same way that Commies were viewed in America during the 50s and for much the same reasons.

Servetus was not a Catholic. His views were considered by both Catholics and Protestants. He was actually under sentence to be burned by a Catholic court when the Genevans caught him. He was burned by Protestants because they caught him before the Catholics did. I cannot think of another case of Protestants burning someone for heresy. The Spanish Inquisition and other Catholic institutions did it for centuries.

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'd be interested in seeing your statistics on this. With the primary exception of Ireland, most Catholic minorities were comparatively well-treated in Protestant countries after the first flush of enthusiasm had diminished. In most Catholic countries, there were centuries of persecution of Protestants.

Actually, I don't consider myself either Protestant or Catholic, although as a non-Catholic professed Christian I assume you would class me as Protestant. I wonder why you so angrily reject the possibility that "your people" may have done some evil in the past, believing that it was God's will. My understanding is that Pope John Paul II has no such difficulty.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.