The Crusades may be causing more devastation today than they ever did in the three centuries when most of them were fought. Not in terms of lives lost and property destroyed—today’s is a more subtle destruction. The Crusades have become a cardinal sin not only of the Catholic Church but also of the Western world in general. They are Exhibit A for the case that the current strife between the Muslim world and Western, post-Christian civilization is ultimately the responsibility of the West, which has provoked, exploited, and brutalized Muslims ever since the first Frankish warriors entered Jerusalem and—well, let Bill Clinton tell it:
Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with three hundred Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.1 (Emphasis added)
In this analysis Clinton curiously echoed Osama bin Laden himself, some of whose own communiqués spoke of his organization not as “al Qaeda” but of a “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” and called in a fatwa for “jihad against Jews and Crusaders.”2
Such usage is quite widespread. Shortly before the beginning of the Iraqi war that toppled Saddam Hussein, on November 8, 2002, Sheikh Bakr Abed Al-Razzaq Al-Samaraai preached in Baghdad’s Mother of All Battles mosque about “this difficult hour in which the Islamic nation [is] experiencing, an hour in which it faces the challenge of [forces] of disbelief of infidels, Jews, crusaders, Americans and Britons.”3
Similarly, when Islamic jihadists bombed the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in December 2004, they explained that the attack was part of a larger plan to strike back at “Crusaders:” “This operation comes as part of several operations that are organized and planned by al Qaeda as part of the battle against the crusaders and the Jews, as well as part of the plan to force the unbelievers to leave the Arabian Peninsula.” They said that jihad warriors “managed to enter one of the crusaders’ big castles in the Arabian Peninsula and managed to enter the American consulate in Jeddah, in which they control and run the country.”4
“One of the crusaders’ big castles in the Arabian Peninsula?” Why would Islamic jihad terrorists have such a fixation with thousand-year-old castles? Could Clinton be right that they see the Crusades as the time that their troubles with the West began, and present-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as a revival of the Crusader ethos?
In a sense, yes. The more one understands the Crusades—why they were fought, and from what forces within Christianity and Islam they sprang—the more one will understand the present conflict. The Crusades, in ways that Bill Clinton and those who bombed the consulate in Jiddah only dimly fathom, hold the keys to understanding the present world situation in numerous ways.
This book explains why, with its first half devoted to Islam and second half to the Crusades. It will, in the process, clear away some of the fog of misinformation that surrounds Islam and the Crusades today. That fog is thicker than ever. One of the people most responsible for it, Western apologist for Islam Karen Armstrong, even blames Westerners’ misperceptions of Islam on the Crusades:
Ever since the Crusades, the people of Western Christendom developed a stereotypical and distorted vision of Islam, which they regarded as the enemy of decent civilization…. It was, for example, during the Crusades, when it was Christians who had instigated a series of brutal holy wars against the Muslim world, that Islam was described by the learned scholar-monks of Europe as an inherently violent and intolerant faith, which had only been able to establish itself by the sword. The myth of the supposed fanatical intolerance of Islam has become one of the received ideas of the West.5
Armstrong is right in a sense (no human being, it seems, can be wrong all the time): when it comes to talk of Islam, you can’t believe everything you hear—especially after the September 11 attacks. Misinformation and half-truths about what Islam teaches and what Muslims in the United States believe have filled the airwaves and have even influenced public policy.
Much of this misapprehension comes in analyses of the “root causes” of the jihad terrorism that took so many lives on September 11 and has continued to threaten the peace and stability of non-Muslims around the world. It has become fashionable among certain media people and academics to place much, if not all, of the blame for what happened on September 11, 2001, not on Islam and Muslims, but on the United States and other Western countries. A pattern of mistreatment of the Islamic world by the West, say learned professors and self-important commentators, is continuing. It began centuries ago, they say—at the time of the Crusades.
But in fact, the seeds of today’s conflict were planted much earlier than the First Crusade. In order to understand the Crusades properly, and the peculiar resonance they have in today’s global conflict with Islamic jihad terrorists, we must begin with a survey of the prophet of Arabia and the religion he founded. For the Crusades, as we shall see, were fundamentally a reaction to events that were set in motion over 450 years before the battles began.
I intend this book to be neither a general introduction to the Islamic religion, nor a comprehensive historical survey of the Crusades. Rather, it is an examination of certain highly tendentious assertions about both Islam and the Crusades that have entered the popular discourse. This book is an attempt to move the public discourse about both subjects a bit closer to the truth.