Karen Armstrong: Holy War

Karen Armstrong: Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World (1988; 1991; second edition, paperback, 2001, Anchor Books)

Karen Armstrong has become my first-call resource for the history of religion. I first saw her interviewed by Bill Moyers, then picked up her The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which seemed like something one should learn a little about these days, even if you basically consider them all a bunch of nut cases. I was pleased enough that I sought out her earlier book, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wanting to pick up a little historical background on the Crusades, I figured this book would be a good place to start. It is and isn't. The sections on medieavel history are spotty, although they do help, but at least half the book is devoted to more current concerns, especially the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even this isn't all that up to date: the book was originally published in 1988, with a post-9/11 preface rushed out for a timely December 2001 reprint. Going back through the quotes, I wish I had marked more old history and less new, but everything below is interesting in its own right. Just doesn't give the proper feel for the book, which despite its jumbledness is pretty dependably on target -- at least for our present interests in this history. It's certainly not the only possible approach to historical context of the Crusades.

(pp. 16-17):

The confidence of the exilic prophets was shown to be justified just sixty years after the deportation to Babylon. The Medes and the Persians had conquered the Babylonians and in the year 538 B.C.E. Cyrus, the King of Persia, gave the Jews permission to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple. The Jews naturally hailed Cyrus as the anointed one of God, but Cyrus was not motivated solely by compassion for the Jews. He believed that, by allowing the subject peoples of his empire religious autonomy, he would ease the burden of rule and administration. Throughout his empire he encouraged the reconstruction of ancient shrines, hoping that their gods might bless him and further his reign. This suggests an essential difference between monotheism and polytheism. In general, pagan rulers did not initiate religious persecution. A pagan like Cyrus believed in many gods and therefore could envisage many solutions and possibilities and this led to tolerance and to religious coexistence. The Jewish monotheists, however, had hitherto been unable to accept the presence of neighboring shrines to gods other than their own. When Cyrus issued the edict of return, they naturally saw him as inspired by their God for their greater glory. Some 42,360 Jews left Babylon and Tel Aviv [a Jewish enclave near Babylon; not the modern Israeli city] and began the long journey home.

Yet -- and this is an important point -- most of the Jews remained behind in exile. They no loner saw physical possession of the Holy Land as essential to the Jewish identity. Furthermore they saw certain religious problems in the return: was it likely that their brothers would create the New Jerusalem of peace and justice foretold by the Second Isaiah? In this view, a physical return to Zion actually endangered the shining religious ideal. It was surely more religious to look forward to a divine intervention in history that would establish the full redemption than to create an imperfect Jewish state. Keeping the return and the redemption in the future tense would ensure that a yearning for salvation did not become muddied by the squalor of politics. The year 538, therefore, marked an important parting of the ways in Judaism that still persists. There are Jews who see the land of Israel as essential to Judaism and consider that living in the physical land is obligatory for all Jews. There are other Jews who think that secular and political hegemony in Israel is dangerous and unreligious, and most Jews have remained in the diaspora. After 538 Babylon remained an important center of Judaism for centuries. There the Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, but kept it as a distant ideal. They were confident enough to develop a very different attitude toward the Gentiles. The Scriptures composed in the diaspora sometimes show the influence of Gentile culture. The Book of Ecclesiastes, for example, has been fruitfully inspired by Hellenic Stoicism. The diaspora Book of Jonah shows real compassion to non-Jews. When Jonah warns the pagan people of Nineveh that unless they repent God will destroy their city, they do repent and the city is spared. Jonah is furious about this and goes off to sulk, but God gently teases him out of this absurdity. The Jewish prophet is to save the Gentiles as well as the chosen people: "Am I not to feel sorry for Nineveh," God asks, "the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, to say nothing of all the animals?" (4:11). The lessons of the Book of Jonah have been important to Christians and Muslims as well as Jews; the goyim have learned far more from this compassionate Judaism than from the Scriptures written in the land of Israel after 538, like the Books of the Maccabees, which speak mainly about new and violent holy wars there. In the diaspora a humanism developed in Judaism that would ultimately enter Christianity through the Jewish Jesus and St. Paul and help to shape the tradition of Western humanism.

(p. 24):

The Roman Empire had destroyed the Jewish homeland and during the second and third centuries it sometimes seemed as though it would also destroy Christianity. From time to time the Roman authorities persecuted Christians who refused to sacrifice to Caesar and seemed a potential political threat. Thousands of Christians were put to death in the Roman stadiums and this trauma stamped itself on the Christian consciousness. It gave to Christians a strong sense that "the world" was against them and would overwhelm the true religion. This deep insecurity led to an aggressive cult of voluntary martyrdom that was not very dissimilar to the spirit of the Jewish martyrs at Masada. The martyr was seen as a perfect Christian, because Christ had said that giving one's life for the beloved was the greatest act of love. The martyr was imitating Jesus perfectly in his death. But this love acquired an aggressive dimension. Christians started to denounce themselves to the authorities, in order to force the Romans to put them to death. This was not because they had a masochistic yearning for pain and for death, nor was it because they wanted to prove their love for Christ. These voluntary martyrs believed that they were taking part in a continuing cosmic battle with evil. The death of every martyr brought the final victory and the Second Coming of Christ nearer and was part of the Last Battle foretold by the prophets. The martyr seemed to be passive in that he allowed violence to be inflicted upon him, but he believed that he was a "soldier of Christ" and that his death was a "victory." The Church tried to stop this passion for voluntary martyrdom, but it never completely died out; it surfaced later in Europe, when Christians felt their identity threatened by the enemies of God, and the martyr impulse would be important during the Crusades.

When the persecutions stopped and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, there was a gap in the Christian life. How were you to be a perfect Christian when there was no longer any possibility of martyrdom, voluntary or otherwise? The answer that some fervent Christians found was very similar to the solution of the Jewish Nazirites or Essenes. Radical Christians fled "the world," which they felt was destructive of the Christian life, and took refuge in the wilderness. They were inspired to make this exodus in order to witness to true Christian values, and just as the Jewish sectarians saw themselves as the only true Jews, so too these monks, who had escaped from the contaminating world, persuaded other Christians to think that they were the only perfect Christians.

(pp. 73-74):

Count Emich of Leiningen persecuted the German Jews of SHUM for quite different reasons. He believed that he had a special, apocalyptic and imperial destiny. He was that mythical Last Emperor foretold by ancient prophecy. He would fight Antichrist in Jerusalem and be crowned there and his reign would last for a thousand years. These dreams of imperial glory and of a thousand-year Reich continued to haunt Germany Crusaders and, as I shall show in Chapter 11, became absorbed into popular mythology long after Crusaders stopped marching to the Holy Land. Ever since Charlemagne had dragged Germany into his Christian empire at sword point, the Germans had been obsessed with visions of empire and massive political dreams of world conquest. This myth of the Last Emperor gave Emich a special view of the Jews. St. Paul had said that before the Second Coming of Christ all the Jews would be converted to Christianity, so, as Emich marched east to bring about the Last Days he proceeded to make sure that Paul's prophecy was fulfilled. In May and June of 1096 he systematically attacked all the Jewish communities in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Regensburg, Cologne, Trier and Metz. His massive army must have looked like the terrifying armies of the apocalypse. The Jews were given the option of baptism or death. A few submitted to baptism but most chose death. Fathers killed their wives and children rather than allow them to abandon the precious faith of their fathers. In each community, synagogues and Torah scrolls were destroyed so that all visible signs of Jewry were erased before Emich marched east toward what he firmly believed would be a glorious destiny and a major step in the salvation of the world. Jews as Jews could have no part in these glorious events: they had to be destroyed in order to bring about Western dreams of fulfillment and world conquest.

(p. 74):

Every time a Crusade was preached there was a fresh outbreak of pogroms. Sometimes people who could not go to the East felt that they were taking part in the expedition by killing Jews at home. The Crusades were the first cooperative and collective act of the new Europe in their struggle for a new soul, and the first thing that the Cursaders did, whenever they set out in one of these massive, international expeditions, was to kill Jews. The Crusaders made anti-Semitism an incurable Western disease, which persisted long after the Middle Ages, as I shall show in Chapter 11. The only change in this terrible tradition was to greater intransigence: the Jews of SHUM could have saved themselves in 1096 by becoming Christians, but Hitler sought to kill all the Jews, whatever their religious beliefs. He could not have done this had not Christians in Europe become accustomed to seeing Jews as absolute enemies in a tradition that had lasted for nearly a thousand years.

The Present Conflict (pp. 87-88):

The Zionists of the Second and Third Aliyahs were also dismissive of a form of religious Zionism that had established itself in the Holy Land. This movement called itself "Mizrachi" or spiritual center. Under the leadership of Orthodox Jews like Rabbi Abraham Kook, they sought, as their name implies, to create a religious focus for Jewish aspiration. They did not want a modern democratic state, as Herzl did, nor did they want Ben-Gurion's socialist society. they wanted to rebuild the ancient Temple and to create a religious society, based on the Torah. Religious Zionists like Rabbi Kook, however, did not recoil in disgust from Ben-Gurion and his followers. He saw that, without knowing it, they were in fact working for the religious Messianic redemption. He and his Orthodox followers were convinced that once the Jews were living again in their own land they would of necessity return to the Torah and abandon their inferior secular dreams. When that had happened, the Messiah would surely come. For their part, Ben-Gurion and the Labor Zionists tolerated the Mizrachi settlers; they were convinced that these religious Zionists were anachronisms who would, like those corrupt institutions religion and the state, also disappear in the clear light of the socialist millennium. Both Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Kook felt that they were in the grip of a providential destiny larger than themselves. The Mizrachi were only a minority but in their religious settlements, side by side with the kibbutzim, they were nursing quite contradictory visions of the New Israel. Because the Mizrachi seemed so insignificant and outmoded, the Labor Zionists ignored them. But, as we shall see in Chapter 7, this was shortsighted, for religion seems to be a tougher plant than socialist philosophy allows.

(pp. 92-93):

During the last days of the Ottoman Empire young groups of Arab nationalists had begun to plan for their eventual national independence. In 1909 the first meeting of the Young Arabs took place in Paris and by 1915 Ben-Gurion became aware that nationalism had spread to the Arabs of Palestine. "It came upon me like a blow," he recalled years later. "I said to myself 'So there is an Arab national movement here (and not just in Lebanon and Syria).' It hit me like a bomb. I was completely confounded." The Zionists realized that they had to confront a people who, like themselves, were seeking a new independence and dignity.

Further, the colonial powers themselves seemed uncertain about their policy in Palestine at this period. Between 1915 and 1918 Britain and France had issued a series of completely conflicting pledges and promises in relation to the fate of the country. The Hussein-McMahon correspondence had promised the Arabs independence in return for their support of the British against the Turks in 1915; this independence had generally been considered to apply to Palestine as well as to Syria and Saudi Arabia. In 1916 the secret Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Middle East between Britain and France; France took Syria, of which Palestine was considered a part. The following year Britain modified Sykes-Picot and awarded Palestine to itself; later in 1917 came the Balfour Declaration; finally in 1918 the Anglo-French Joint Declaration appeared to promise self-determination and independence to Syria, Iraq and possibly to the Palestinians. At this time no less a person than Arthur Lord Balfour himself made this famous statement: "so far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate." With these conflicting plans for Palestine, it was inevitable that both the Jews and the Arabs should regard the land as having been promised to them at some stage; both could claim to have had their desire for independence sanctioned by the powers-that-be and neither could place very much reliance on the British, who established their mandate in Palestine in 1920.

(p. 103):

The future state of Israel, [Vladimir Jabotinsky] argued, would need an army. It was no use hoping that the Palestinians would meekly acquiesce in the Zionist plan. "They are not a rabble but a nation," he pointed out, "perhaps somewhat tattered but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions only when there is no hope." Whether the Laborites liked it or not, Zionism was a colonial activity and no colony had ever managed to impose itself against the native majority without force, so the Jews must now build "an iron wall of Jewish bayonets" instead of kibbutzim, "which the native population cannot break through." That, he insisted, was the only possible Zionist policy toward the Arabs. [ . . . ]

The Revisionist quickly became very popular in Eretz Yisrael and the diaspora. Volunteers flocked into Betar and Jabotinsky defiantly trained them on the Mount of Olives under the very noses of the British. Zionism was acquiring the militant image that it would never lose. Even the Laborites now had their defense corps, the Haganah, which would develop its commando wing,t he Palmach. Under Jabotinsky's influence, the Haganah became more professional,a nd after his death in the diaspora in 1941, it would, as we shall see, be his disciples who would play a key and ruthless role in the creation of the state of Israel. Jabotinsky used to say that Judea has fallen in blood and fire and in fire and blood it would rise again. His disciples fulfilled that prophecy.

(p. 104):

Even the laborites were now for a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. This meant that the Arabs became more of a threat than ever: "There is no hope that this new Jewish state will survive to say nothing of develop, if the Arabs are as numerous as they are today," said the veteran Zionist Menachem Ussiskin, who thirty years earlier had been afraid that settlements in Erezt Yisrael would provoke fresh wrath from the goyim. The Laborite propagandist Berl Katznelson was more tolerant about Arab presence in the future state: "I am willing to give the Arabs equal rights," he said, "if I know that only a small minority stays in the land." He proposed a plan for a new state that included a provision to force the Palestinians to leave. "Development means evictions," said Joseph Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund. If the land was full of Arabs, how could they possibly accommodate the millions of Jewish refugees whom they hoped to rescue? Weitz wrote in a report that the deportation of the Palestinians from a Jewish state "does not serve only one aim -- to dominish the Arab population. It also serves a second purpose by no means less important, which is to evacuate land now cultivated by Arabs and thus release it for Jewish settlement." Weizmann dreamed of buying a lot of land over the border in the Arab countries and pushing the Palestinians into it. He wanted Britain and America to put pressure on the Palestinians to go quietly, but if necessary, he wrote in his diary, "we must be prepared ourselves to carry it out."

(pp. 107-108):

However one chooses to interpret these events of 1948, it is true that the creation of the state of Israel has meant a long history of subsequent suffering for the Palestinian people. It has also added a deep complexity to the new Israeli identity. Zionism had done great things for the Jewish people. It had proved that the Jews were not timid weaklings, religious anachronisms or hopeless aliens. The Israeli Jews were tough pioneers, brave soldiers and creative farmers. The state of Israel had brought the Jews firmly back into the family of the nations and, instead of being seen by anti-Semites as relics of the ancient world, the Jews were now vanguards of progress in the Middle East. The state of Israel must be one of the most extraordinary achievements of the twentieth century, a monument to dedication and resolution. The Zionists had turned an abstruse theory into an established fact. But entwined with this positive Israeli image was the image of the suffering, homeless Palestinians, who to this day claim that they have a right to their own land. The two peoples have been bound together in a history of suffering and violence which continues to escalate.

Back to the Crusades, starting in 1096 (p. 178):

On July 15, 1099, the Crusaders forced an entry to the city and conquered it. For two days they fell upon the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem. "They killed all the Saracens and the Turks they found," says the author of the gesta, "they killed everyone whether male or female." The day after the massacre, Crusaders climbed to the roof of al-Aqsa and in cold blood they killed a group of Muslims to whom Tancred had granted sanctuary. The Muslims were no longer respected enemies and a foil for Frankish honor. They had become the economies of God and were thus doomed to ruthless extermination. They were polluting this Holy City and had to be eliminated like vermin, and from this point in the jargon of crusading the word given to Muslims is "filth."

(p. 183):

In particular three learned monk-historians, who had not been on the Crusade, wrote accounts which adopted all the popular ideas of the Crusaders and showed that these had quickly been accepted by the establishment. Written within ten years of the conquest of Jerusalem, they show that the Christian Crusade had become a classic holy war. These historians -- Guibert of Nogent, Robert the Monk and Baldrick of Bourgeuil -- see the Crusade as a full-scale biblical war. For over a hundred years the monks of Europe had been trying to instruct and form the laity, but now the laymen of the Crusade had influenced the monks. In this canonization of holy violence, there is no longer any vagueness about the Muslims. They are a "vile" and "abominable" race, "absolutely alien to God" and meet only for "extermination." After standing out so long against war and hatred, the official Church had accepted the violence of Joshua and canonized it. This "holy journey of our men to Jerusalem" had been an event in salvation history, writes Robert the Monk, making the astonishing claim that there had been no more holy event sine the creation of the world and the Crucifixion. The journey to Jerusalem is described by these monks in terms of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt: just as the Crusaders had seen themselves as being led along the way step by step by God like the Israelites, so too did he lead and guide the Crusaders, wrote Guilbert.

(p. 187):

Baldwin had spent the last two years in Edessa, establishing a Western presence there. He and his knights ruled the city but used the Armenian people as high officials of the government and the civil service. Baldwin himself married an Armenian princess and adopted the lifestyle of an oriental ruler. It was a wise policy and helped the Armenians to adjust to this Latin rule. When Baldwin came to Jerusalem in 1100 he had no scruples about being crowned king. With his greater taste for luxury, he abandoned holy poverty and lived richly in a style that the Muslims could understand and appreciate. Egyptian delegates after the Battle of Askelon had been astonished to find Godfrey sitting on the floor of his tent, bareheaded. Baldwin's autocratic manner, his strong rule and luxurious court were far more in the oriental mode than that of feudal Europe. Baldwin and his court began to adopt Middle Eastern dress, and slowly the Franks of Palestine learned how to adapt to life in the East, learned to take baths, to build in the Arab fashion, and learned important lessons of Arab hygiene. These Western colonists were in the unusual position of having settled in a country that was far more culturally advanced than their own. The Crusaders who had been trying to acquire a new Western identity would in the East acquire an oriental one.

(pp. 194-195):

Nur ad-Din's jihad was not against Christianity as such: the Koran had urged Muslims to respect the People of the Book and the above quotation shows that synagogues and churches as well as mosques were to be respected by Muslims. This jihad was a holy war of self-defense. The Koran forbids Muslims to initiate war and strike the first blow (2:191) but goes on to say that "persecution is worse than killing" and oppression must be stopped. For fifty years the Franks had massacred Muslims and driven them from their homes. The Muslims had done nothing to provoke this gratuitous Western aggression and their apathy in the face of this scourge had only made matters worse. A Muslim leader had a clear duty to protect his people from such an enemy and any Amir who did not join Nur ad-Din's jihad against the Franks was no true Muslim.

(pp. 218-219):

Hostility to Byzantium had long been crucial tot he Western identity but during the Second Crusade it reached new heights. Odo's measured and elegant pen drips venom every time he mentions the Greeks: he was convinced that the West should send out another Crusade to attack Constantinople. Odo seems to hate the Greeks more than the Muslims. As the West was apparently gaining in confidence and acquiring a rich and unique culture, it was also growing in intolerance. Not only were Western Christians finding it impossible to live beside people of other religions; they now wanted to destroy their great Christian neighbor, and one day they would succeed.

Eventually, after much agonized discussion, a decision was made which was a crime against the crusading ethos. The army was to proceed by sea from Attalia in ships provided by the Greeks. There was not enough room for everybody, so only the knights, the noblemen and some of the infantry could sail. The rest of the foot soldiers and the huge mass of French and German pilgrims were abandoned with their wives and children outside Attalia. They thus disappeared from history, betrayed by their brothers. All were killed by the Turks or were taken into slavery or else starved to death. To abandon the poor may have been necessary for the survival of the Crusade but it gravely damaged its moral integrity. It would be a long time before crusading could attract the poor again and people looked back nostalgically to the vintage days of the First Crusade when a new, fairer world order had seemed imminent. The decision at Attalia was bitter proof the gap between rich and poor was greater than ever.

(pp. 221-222):

The failure of his Crusade was a great blow to Bernard's prestige in Europe and people were right to blame him: by removing the Crusade from the realities of life and seeing it as solely the work of God he had encouraged a suicidal policy in the army. It was also a blow for crusading itself. How could a holy war fail if, as Bernard had promised, it was the work of God? Bernard himself was bewildered by the disaster, and the only explanation he could find was that the Christians had been too sinful so that God had withdrawn his help. But the triumph of the "pagans" over the true faith was for Bernard a cosmic disaster that was, literally, the end of the world. It seemed, he wrote to the Pope, "to point an end almost to existence itself."

(p. 230):

One could say that one of the great problems of ethical monotheism as expressed by Christianity is that it encourages an unhealthy projection. Because it is axiomatic that there is no evil in God, this makes it difficult for Christians to accept what is either evil or what they are told is evil in themselves. They tend to reject this "evil" and, once they have rejected it, it becomes inhuman and monstrous with threatening power. The Devil is the greatest of these projections and is unique in its horror to Christianity. The monstrous Muslim is clearly a similar projection: Christians could not accept their holy violence or their repressed sexuality, so they projected all this onto the enemies they were fighting in the Holy Land, who were already seen as the inhuman enemies of God.

Jumping forward to 1967: Zionism Becomes a Holy War (p. 277):

We have seen that an unexpected victory or a dramatic reversal of fortune has often made people feel that they have a special divine destiny. The Six Day War made a powerful and deep impression upon the Jewish people, who felt that they had been providentially snatched from destruction and given the victory as dramatically as when God had saved the ancient Israelites at the Red Sea. Indeed the philosopher Martin Buber made that very comparison between the Exodus from Egypt and the June victory. Yitzhak Rabin, who had liberated the Old City of Jerusalem, which had been closed to Israelis sine 1948, described it as a moment of religious revelation: it "revealed as though by a flash of lightning truths that were deeply hidden." "It was a truly religious moment," says the Israeli scholar Harold Fisch, "the experience of a miracle. It had a special metaphysical character." The victory also had a profound effect upon the Jews of the Diaspora, just as the Crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem had stirred the Christians of Europe. [ . . . ] Just as the Crusaders had seen their victory as an act of salvation history that had vital consequences for the whole world, some Zionists began to feel that they had a religious mission and were acting out the divine plan. In this exalted mood, there was no question in the minds of many Israelis that they had a right to keep the territories they had conquered from the Arabs, even though in November 1967 the United Nations in Resolution 242 ordered Israel to return to her borders before the outbreak of hostilities.

(pp. 344-345):

However radical the jama'at islamiyya was naturally and inevitably becoming, there were other young Muslims who sought an even more radical answer; a new Muslim underground was being formed, and it sought a more extreme solution than the Muslim Brotherhood, which now cooperated with the regime. Many Muslims had been profoundly influenced by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brother who had in his turn been influenced by the Pakistani Brother Abu el A'ala Mawdudi, who was also being eagerly read by young radicals in Iran. Qutb had been imprisoned by Nasser in 1954 and had read Mawdudi's book, The Four Expressions, while in prison. It had a great effect on him. Mawdudi told Muslims that they must refuse to compromise with the corrupt regimes which oppressed Muslim s throughout the Islamic world and which violated essential Koranic principles. Muslims must be ruled by God alone and must reject the idols of false ideology and values placed before them by the munafiqeen. Sayyid Qutb himself wrote several books which developed Mawdudi's ideas. He returned to the old paradigm of the hijra-jihad. In The Shadow of the Koran and Signposts on the Road he taught that there were two necessary stages in the struggle for a truly Islamic society. First was the period of weakness (istidhaf when devout Muslims were in no position to fight the regime effectively. Instead they should withdraw from the corrupt society as Mohammad had withdrawn from his period of weakness in Mecca and made the hijra to Medina where he gained a new power. Once Muslims were truly separate from the un-Islamic world, they should build an alternative Islamic society where they would recover the strength necessary to end the period of istidhaf and wage a jihad against the infidels.

Back to 1199-1221: Crusades Against Christians and a New Christian Peace (pp. 376-377):

I want to emphasize this point. One of the fantasies that Christians created about Islam at the time of the Crusades was that it was an essentially violent, intolerant religion. This was not true. The jihad was a forgotten practice that was revived only in response to the Western crusading initiative: in our own day a new jihad has arisen, caused at least in part by what has been perceived as Western aggression and interference. Crusading, which was so crucial to the development of Europe, made scarcely a ripple in the Muslim world. Certainly it had obsessed Nur ad-Din and Saladin and their supporters in the Near East, who were the unfortunate neighbors of the Crusader states. But in the rest of the vast Muslim empire the Crusades seemed like unimportant border incidents. The Islamic empire had much greater problems, which troubled most Muslims far more than the Crusaders did. These were major internal upheavals that transformed Muslim and Arab life in the House of Islam during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. first, it will be recalled that in the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks, new converts to Islam in Central Asia, had invaded the Arab Middle East and Byzantine Anatolia. They had ousted the old Arab leaders in that part of the Islamic empir eand in effect taken control: the main opponents of the Crusaders were Turks, not Arabs. Next Arab Bedouin tribes from Upper Egypt invaded what is now Libya and Tunisia, causing immense devastation, and during the twelfth century fanatical, fundamentalist Berber Muslims had seized power for a period in Morocco and al-Andalus in Spain. Hitherto North Africa had been prosperous and a major center of civilization but it never recovered from these disasters. As the great fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote: "all the plains were ruined; whereas formerly from the Negro-lands to the Mediterranean all was cultivated, as is proved by the traces remaining there of monuments, buildings, farms and villages."

Thus the eleventh and twelfth centuries were a time of grave crisis in the Islamic empire that had nothing whatever to do with the Crusades. The Turkish sultans, atabegs and emirs in the Middle East created a feudal system in place of the old Arab monetary system: fiefs were given to chieftains of the armies to ensure loyalty and service. The system prevailed until our own century when it was replaced first by the Western protectorates and then by the Arab national states. Landowners suffered because of these nonresident landlords and there was widespread consternation at this social and economic transformation of society. This brought a new desire for security: during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the first madrassas were established, first in Baghdad and then in other places of the empire. These Muslim colleges became bastions of orthodoxy. Hitherto Islam had encouraged a free spirit of inquiry and Muslim scholars had been in the intellectual vanguard of the world. It would take a long time for the new traditionalism to take root but this marked the first step in a process which ended the speculative, rationalist era. The process was naturally accelerated when, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Mongol hordes attacked the House of Islam during the thirteenth century, devastating major cities like Baghdad and destroying libraries, manuscripts and universities as well as slaughtering the population. The Mongol disaster was far more destructive in the long term than the invasions of the Crusaders. Henceforth Muslim scholars became anxious to recover what had been so tragically lost and to conserve what remained instead of experimenting with new ideas. This conservatism, which Western observers often scorned, was not endemic to Islam, which saw learning and discovery as religious duties, but was due to major historical catastrophes. While the West was soaring ahead to new achievements, the Arab and Muslim world was looking back to the past, gradually entering into what could be called their own Dark Age. Muslims were told that the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) had been closed and that they should practice taqlid, emulation of the experts in Islamic holy law.

The Fourth Crusade (pp. 386-387):

The Crusaders attacked the city [Constantinople] on April 6. At first the Greeks fought back energetically but they were demoralized by the years of internal revolution within their empire and the mercenaries quickly became exhausted and could fight no more. Within ten days the city had submitted to the Crusaders, who entered the city in triumph. Boniface and the Doge were installed in the imperial palace and gave their troops permission to loot and pillage Constantinople, which for centuries had filled the Christians of Europe with envy and a burning sense of inferiority. The sack of Constantinople was one of the great crimes of history. For three days the Venetians and Crusaders rushed through the streets, raping, killing and pillaging with a horrible eagerness. Women and children lay dying in the streets and nuns were raped in their convents. The Venetians knew the value of the treasures that they carefully purloined to adorn their own cities, churches and palaces, but the Crusaders from northern Europe simply went on the rampage. In the great basilica of St. Sophia drunken soldiers tore down the silk hangings and trampled the sacred books and icons underfoot, and a prostitute sat on the Patriarch's throne singing bawdy songs. Palaces and hovels alike were vandalized. The chronicler Geoffrey Villehardouin wrote that never sine the creation of the world had so much booty been taken from a city: no one could possibly count the piles of gold, silver and jewels or the bales of precious materials. Nothing could have better illustrated the deep hatred which had always filled Crusaders when they confronted the magnificent capital of the Eastern empire that belonged to the Greeks, whom they had so often accused of treachery, effeminacy and cowardice, but who had really made them feel their own weakness too acutely for comfort.

(pp. 409-410):

At the time of the Fifth Crusade a new movement toward the Muslim world had begun that at first sounds very positive. Before Francis of Assisi left Europe for Egypt, he had sent a party of Friars Minor to preach to the Muslims in Spain and Africa. After the Fifth Crusade other Franciscans went to the Holy Land to preach to the Muslims there. More encounters like the meeting between Francis and al-Kamil would probably have been a very good idea and we are so accustomed to the notion of spreading the faith by means of missionary activity that it seems incredible that nobody thought of this before. A missionary campaign which seeks to explain and share the truth sounds the obverse of the military campaign that seeks to conquer and kill. Yet in fact this peaceful project proved to be a new type of Crusade. The Franciscans went into Islamic lands not to save the souls of the Muslims but to achieve martyrdom. As soon as the first group of friars arrived in Seville, they resorted to the tactics of the Martyrs of Cordova. They tried to break into a mosque during Friday prayers, and when they were driven away they stood outside the Emir's palace and shouted abuse against Mohammad and Islam. They were not reaching out to the Muslims in peace and love but mounting an aggressive assault. The Muslim authorities were forced to arrest them, even though they were reluctant to do so. To avoid publicity, they moved the friars around from one prison to another and eventually had them deported to Morocco. Here the Franciscans went straight into a new offensive, behaving in exactly the same way, and were deported from one area to another on two more occasions by the embarrassed authorities. On one occasion the local Christian community pressured the Muslims to get rid of the friars, because they did not want to be associated with these fanatics and naturally feared that this might cause trouble for them. Finally the authorities were forced to execute the Westerners who were so flagrantly breaking the law of the land. They tortured the friars and offered them wealth and honor if they would repent of their behavior and convert to Islam. Finally they were executed. When Francis heard of their "martyrdom" he is said to have cried: "Praise be to Christ! I know now that I have five Friars Minor!" It seems that even though his peaceful embassy to al-Kamil had not been aggressive he did not disapprove of this other violent missionary offensive. This would prove to be the way the Franciscans would continue to preach to the Muslims.

(pp. 411-412):

This very strange, aggressive and exclusive attitude was obviously born of the Crusades and it is therefore fitting that the most spectacular crusading venture -- that of St. Francis -- should have happened in the context of a military campaign against Islam. It is surely one of the ways that crusading has survived right up to the present day. We have seen that radical Egyptian Muslims call Western imperialism al-Salibiyya, the Crusade. They also give this name to Christian missionary work. The connection is obvious, When Europeans began their colonizing ventures during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries followed in their train and were encouraged by the colonialists, some of whom had no religious beliefs, as a valuable part of the Westernizing process. I am not decrying the work of all these missionaries, of course. Many were brave and committed men and women, but it must be said that trying to impose Western Christianity and morality on people who had quite different religious and cultural traditions was impertinent in that it often showed very little respect for local traditions. The missionaries believed that they were bringing "the truth" to these lost people; they saw their way as right and the religions and traditions of the people they were evangelizing as wrong. This meant that they were "saving" them. There is an arrogance in this assumption and even an aggression when one remembers the colonial context, with the Europeans' obvious contempt for the "natives." There is in this view much of the spirit of the first Franciscan and Dominican missionaries. European colonialists tended to force their cultural wares on the "natives" whether they wanted them or not, rather like the Franciscans, and were as indifferent to their real needs as the Dominicans, seeking only to advance the cause of their own country and its traditions.

(pp. 416-417):

The Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1216 issued directives which cut people off from Muslims and Jews and forbade normal contact or coexistence. Any Christian who took service in the house of a Muslim or a Jew was to be excommunicated, as was anybody who looked after their children; anybody who traded with Muslims, who took merchandise to Islamic countries and sailed in their "piratical" ships was to be excommunicated and his property confiscated. Only missionaries, whose activities we have seen to be regarded suspiciously, were allowed to eat with Muslims and Jews. Pope Gregory IX, the cousin of Innocent III, who succeeded to the papacy in 1227, issued decretals which added some new prohibitions and reissued the old Lateran decrees. Muslims and Jews living in Christian countries were to wear distinctive clothing to distinguish them clearly from the Christian population. It was a way of isolating and stigmatizing the enemy and looked forward to the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear during the Nazi regime. On Christian holidays Muslims and Jews were not to appear in the street lest they contaminate the holy day and offend the faithful; they must not hold public office in a Christian country and Muslims were not allowed to assail the ears of the faithful by the call of the muezzin.

(p. 440):

Louis himself gives us an insight into the way this insecurity led to an instinctive belligerence. He liked to tell a story about a debate that had been planned at Cluny between Jews and Christians. Staying in the monastery as a guest was a knight who had recently been wounded. He asked the abbot if he might open the debate, and the abbot agreed, with some misgivings. The knight then asked the chief rabbi if he believed that the Virgin Mary was the Mother of God. Not surprisingly, the rabbi replied that he did not. The knight then simply hit him on the head with his crutch and knocked him out. That was the end of the debate. In terror, the Jews picked up their unconscious leader and fled, much to the annoyance of the abbot, who rebuked the knight, telling him that he had been extremely foolish. The knight replied that in his view the abbot had been a much bigger fool for arranging the debate in the first place. Many good Christians might have been deceived by the Jews' lying arguments. Louis entirely agreed: "No one who is not a very learned clerk should argue with Jews," he commented. "A layman, as soon as he hears the Christian faith maligned should defend it by the sword, with a good thrust in the belly as far as the sword will go." The kind of faith that requires an unnatural suppression of normal reasoning processes is inherently fragile. If a Christian hears doubt cast on essential but unnatural doctrines like the Incarnation, he may well feel the "dread" that we have seen in our story to arise from a deep threat to personal integrity and identity. We have seen in other circumstances that a person feeling this threat cannot understand the "other" point of view. A Crusader like Louis, whose mother had seen that he was brought up surrounded only by religious men, would respond to Jews with violent aggression, as a reflex. It would also lead him to be prepared to fight the specter of "Mohammadanism."

(pp. 440-441):

In 1244 Christendom heard the dreadful news that the Christians had lost the Kingdom of Jerusalem once again. The Khwarazmian Turkish dynasty had been dislodged from Central Asia by the Mongol hordes and ran amok, fleeing westward to get as far as possible from the terrifying Mongols, destroying cities in their panic. When they arrived in Syria, 10,000 of them attacked Damascus and then rushed on to Jerusalem, occupied the city and drove out the Franks, before sweeping on to Gaza where, together with an Egyptian army, they defeated the Christians of Palestine in a decisive battle. The loss of Jerusalem was the usual trauma and threat to the integrity of Christendom.

(p. 468):

Thus during the sixteenth century the Jews and Arabs were both, in very different ways, turning away from the intellectual rationalism that had previously characterized both the Jewish and the Islamic tradition. Hitherto, the Christians had been the ones who were prey to emotional and irrational mysticism on the one hand and to an insecure conservatism on the other. But now the position was reversed. The Arabs were succumbing to an intellectual Dark Age, born like the Dark Age of Europe of destructive invasions and social upheaval. The Jews were beginning to abandon the pragmatic rationalism and intellectual austerity of Maimonides. Instead they were turning to a more emotive and unrational faith. Neither had any interest at all in the ideas of the Christian West, which was at one the most important turning points of its history.

The Protestant Reformation, which was followed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation, was not just a theological dispute.; The new ideas about religion were symptoms of a far deeper change in the consciousness of Europe. It was a period when the West was reforming or reshaping its identity and transforming the way it looked at the world. This was chiefly marked by a greater individualism: each Christian was now exhorted to be responsible for his own salvation and to interiorize his or her religious beliefs at a deeper level. It is easy to see that this would unleash a new type of dynamism in the West, one which would be characterized by greater efficiency and by private initiative. In both the Reformation and the Renaissance, man came to the center of the picture and that would encourage greater confidence in human potential.

(p. 487):

Later in the eighteenth century other British Zionists called for a return of the Jews to Palestine. Nobody considered the fact that the Jews themselves at this point had quite different religious aspirations and would not wish to be deported to Palestine. The existence of the Arab Muslims was ignored as was the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. But the British were beginning to look greedily at the decaying Ottoman Empire and were ready to use the Jews for their own political convenience. Thus in 1790 James Beere, Rector of Sandbrook, submitted a petition to William Pitt asking him to assist in hastening the Second Coming by bringing about the "final restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land." Beere also shrewdly pointed out that this would be economically advantageous tot he British. Once the Jews were settled, they would "stand in need of many manufactured articles, of the necessities of life . . . especially woollens and linens." The return of the Jews would be of benefit to the British trade outposts in the Middle East and would also make the British an important political presence in Palestine. In 1800 James Bicheno published The Restoration of the Jews -- The Crisis of the Nations, which also argued that the return of the Jews would not only hasten the millennium but would also strengthen the British claim to Palestine.

(pp. 520-521):

But given this fundamental contempt for both Jews and Arabs during the First World War, what made the British, against all the odds, stand by the Balfour Declaration during those crucial years of 1920-28? The answer must surely lie in the long and complex tradition of British Zionism, which touched a deep nerve in the English Protestant identity. In 1917, of course, Lord Balfour could be seen as a typically manipulative politician: he hoped that the Declaration would win international Jewish support for Britain during the First World War and he was conscious of the strategic importance of Palestine. But he was also inspired by the Christian Protestant tradition. He had been brought up in the Scottish Church and the biblical image of a Jewish Palestine affected him powerfully: he imagined that there would be a cultural renaissance in the new Israel that would be a light unto the Gentiles. Like all Zionists, he was completely indifferent to the claim of the Palestinian Arabs, who had long been regarded by the British as barbarous and unworthy caretakers. [ . . . ]

Balfour was also a typical Zionist in an uneasy anti-Semitism. In 1905 he had introduced the Aliens Bill in Parliament in order to limit Jewish immigration. He may have wanted Jews to be in Palestine, but he did not want them in his own country, and these anti-Semitic feelings disturbed him. He was aware of the shameful tradition of persecution in Europe and may well have felt that the enthusiastic support he gave to Zionism in some way atoned for his instinctive anti-Semitism. It is significant that his strongest opponents in England were Jewish. Lord Montagu, one of the leaders of British Jewry, opposed Zionism from the beginning and he accused Balfour and his colleagues of promoting a Jewish homeland in Palestine simply to get the Jews out of England. During the discussions leading up to the Balfour Declaration, he submitted a memorandum stating that "the policy of His Majesty's Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country of the world." But his Gentile colleagues were as blind to Jewish objections as they were to Arab objections. As had always been the case, what mattered was what Europeans wanted in the Holy Land.

(p. 522):

British Catholics responded differently. Mark Sykes, for example, who had had a Catholic upbringing, confessed that he had a strong "distaste for Jews" and at first opposed the Zionist project for precisely this reason. He was, however, an ardent nationalist and colonialist and one of the architects of the notorious 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. When the full colonial implications of Zionism were explained to him, he became an enthusiastic convert. He would now see the "Jew" as "our" representative in the barbarous Middle East who was taking possession of Palestine in "our"name. He also saw Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem. Instead of a hybrid, assimilating Jew living disturbingly in the heart of Christian Europe, there would be a new Hebrew nationalist in his own country, reassuringly distant and distinct. Zionists like Balfour and Sykes were still opposed to the idea of absorbing and assimilating Jews into European society, in much the same way as fifteenth-century Spanish Catholics had been. Zionism was a way of deporting Jews without giving way to overt anti-Semitism and banishing them from Europe by offensive persecution.

(p. 527):

His [Senator Henry Cabot Lodge] identification with the Jews made Jewish Palestine sacred to his own identity and blinded him to the claim of the "Mohammedans." He had a double but could not achieve a triple vision, like so many Gentile Zionists before him. Non-Jewish Zionism is a form of Protestant crusading and Senator Lodge felt as great a sense of outrage at the thought of Muslim occupation of Jerusalem as any medieval Catholic Crusader. Americans have continued to feel strongly about Israel and this fervor has increased with with rise of a new wave of American Christian fundamentalism which is aggressively Zionist. Fundamentalsits have become very powerful in America; Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority has had to be courted as a power bloc during presidential elections. They have given strong support to the Jewish lobby, though they do not feel the same sense of identification with the Jews as the more secular American Zionists. Like the Puritans, they believe that the Last Days are at hand and that the Jews will either have to be converted or suffer in hell. But they also passionately believe that the Jews must live in Israel to fulfill biblical prophecy. They have returned to a classical and extreme religious crusading.

posted 2008-07-03