God's Battalions (29 page)
Authors: Rodney Stark,David Drummond
MUSLIM MEMORIES
Karen Armstrong is one of the many who would have us believe that the Crusades are “one of the direct causes of the conflict in the Middle East today.”
18
That may be so, but not because the Muslim world has been harboring bitterness over the Crusades for the past many centuries. As Jonathan Riley-Smith explained: “One often reads that Muslims have inherited from their medieval ancestors bitter memories of the violence of the crusaders. Nothing could be further from the truth. Before the end of the nineteenth century Muslims had not shown much interest in the crusades…[looking] back on [them] with indifference and complacency.”
19
Even at the time they took place, Muslim chroniclers paid very little attention to the Crusades, regarding them as invasions by “a primitive, unlearned, impoverished, and un-Muslim people, about whom Muslim rulers and scholars knew and cared little.”
20
Moreover, most Arabs dismissed the Crusades as having been attacks upon the hated Turks, and therefore of little interest.
21
Indeed, in the account written by Ibn Zafir at the end of the twelfth century, it was said that it was better that the Franks occupied the kingdom of Jerusalem as this prevented “the spread of the influence of the Turks to the lands of Egypt.”
22
Muslim interest in the Crusades seems to have begun in the nineteenth century, when the term itself
23
was introduced by Christian Arabs who translated French histories into Arabic—for it was in the West that the Crusades first came back into vogue during the nineteenth century. In Europe and the United States “the romance of the crusades and crusading” became a very popular literary theme, as in the many popular novels of Sir Walter Scott.
24
Not surprisingly, this development required that, at least in Britain and America, the Crusades be “de-Catholicized.”
25
In part this was done by emphasizing the conflict between the Knights Templars and the pope, transforming the former into an order of valiant anti-Catholic heroes. In addition, there developed a strong linkage between the European imperial impulse and the romantic imagery of the Crusades “to such an extent that, by World War One, war campaigns and war heroes were regularly lauded as crusaders in the popular press, from the pulpit, and in the official propaganda of the British war machine.”
26
Meanwhile in the East, the Ottoman Empire was fully revealed as “the sick man of Europe,” a decrepit relic unable to produce any of the arms needed for its defense, which highlighted the general backwardness of Islamic culture and prompted “seething anger”
27
against the West among Muslim intellectuals, eventually leading them to focus on the Crusades.
Thus, current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation,
28
prompted in part by “post-World War I British and French imperialism and the post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.”
29
It was the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire to rule with absolute authority, Abdülham
d II (r. 1876–1909), who began to refer to European Crusades. This prompted the first Muslim history of the Crusades, published in 1899. In the introduction, its author, Sayyid Ali al-Hariri, noted: “The sovereigns of Europe nowadays attack our Sublime Empire in a manner bearing great resemblance to the deeds of those people in bygone times [the crusaders]. Our most glorious sultan, Abdulhamid II, has rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us.”
30
This theme was eagerly picked up by Muslim nationalists. “Only Muslim unity could oppose these new crusades, some argued, and the crusading threat became an important theme in the writings of the pan-Islamic movement”
31
Even within the context of Muslim weakness in the face the modern West, Islamic triumphalism flourished; many proposed that through the Crusades the “savage West…benefited by absorbing [Islam’s] civilized values.” As for crusader effects on Islam, “how could Islam benefit from contacts established with an inferior, backward civilization?”
32
Eventually, the image of the brutal, colonizing crusader proved to have such polemical power that it drowned out nearly everything else in the ideological lexicon of Muslim antagonism toward the West—except, of course, for Israel and paranoid tales about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
CONCLUSION
The thrust of the preceding chapters can be summarized very briefly. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God’s battalions.
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