The Glory of the Crusades (43 page)

Those who embrace this myth believe that the Crusades have long been remembered in the Islamic world. Akbar Ahmed, chair of the Ibn Khaldun Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., summed up this claim when he commented, “The Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today—the memory of a long European onslaught.”
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Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and self-described “freelance monotheist,” asserts that the Crusades are “one of the direct causes of the conflict in the Middle East today.”
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The historical reality is far removed from the picture painted by Ahmed, Armstrong, and their supporters. The Crusades were largely ignored as an important part of Islamic history soon after the fall of Acre in 1291, and were then forgotten in the Islamic world until the late nineteenth century, only receiving prominent attention in the twentieth.

A “Remembered” History

The Arabic word for the Crusades,
harb al-salib
, was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1899 the first Arabic history of the Crusades was written by the Egyptian Ali al-Hariri.
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It was a time when the Ottomans were forced to recognize the independence of most of their former Eastern European territory. Seeking to find a rationale for the disintegration of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire, al-Hairi, in his book, placed blame not on the internal failings of the sultans and their policies, but rather on the historical “boogeyman” of the Crusades.
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It is easy to understand why for hundreds of years Muslims did not remember the Crusades, since they represented a small and insignificant portion of Islamic history. The Holy City of Jerusalem was only in Christian hands for eighty-eight years (from 1099–1187), and the Crusader States survived for less than two centuries. The goal of the Crusades—the permanent liberation of Jerusalem and recovery of ancient Christian territory—was not successful, and therefore Islamic historians neglected the Crusades.

The modern Islamic attitude toward the Crusades began in the twentieth century as a reconstructed memory of these events and was presented to Muslim communities that had been impacted by European colonialism. Ironically, then, it was the European colonial powers—especially the “nineteenth-century French vision of the Crusades as proto-colonizing expeditions”
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—that laid the foundation for the modern Muslim interpretation of the movement. Through Western colonization, Enlightenment intellectuals from the very nations that once took the cross birthed the modern Arab re-remembering of the Crusades.

Arab nationalists thus used the Crusades as a scapegoat for the ills in the twentieth-century Islamic world. The Crusades were presented as the first European colonial efforts, and modern Middle Eastern poverty, corruption, and violence were blamed on these initial European “invasions.” The modern state of Israel was likened to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, a foreign presence in the midst of Islam. Cultural traditions rooted in this false narrative of the Crusades were reinforced through education in Muslim schools, as “generations of Arab school children have been taught that the Crusades were a clear case of good versus evil,” and the myth that “rapacious and zealous Crusaders swept into a peaceful and sophisticated Muslim world leaving carnage and destruction in their wake” was reinforced.
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The Forgotten “Hero”

A perfect example of this Muslim neglect and “re-remembrance”
via Western European assistance can be found in the figure of Saladin, the Muslim general who united the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates and conquered Jerusalem in the twelfth century. Despite his achievements, in the Islamic world Saladin was mostly forgotten in the centuries after his death. Instead, the great Muslim military hero against the Christians was the Egyptian Mamluk sultan Baybars the Merciless. Baybars succeeded in stopping the Mongol advance, and he fostered the destruction of the Crusader States by sacking the city of Antioch. His complete destruction of Antioch, and the killing of the city’s inhabitants, was the worst massacre in Crusading history. His efforts ultimately led to the razing of Acre in 1291, and the end of the Crusader States. In Islam, Baybars was remembered and Saladin forgotten, but in the West it was the opposite.
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Saladin was remembered almost with fondness in Christendom through popular literature, especially in the works of Sir Walter Scott; he was presented as the “perfect heathen.”
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He was seen as a man of virtue and military brilliance, akin to great Christian monarchs such as Richard I the Lion-Hearted. Saladin’s name was even a popular choice for the parents of boys in medieval Venice.
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His reemergence in the Islamic world came about through the visit of a European ruler to the city of Damascus at the end of the nineteenth century. Kaiser Wilhelm II of the German Empire was an admirer of Saladin’s. Raised with stories of Saladin since his boyhood, the kaiser earnestly desired to see the tomb of the great general during his Syrian journey in 1899. He was shocked by what he saw. He expected to find a huge ornate tomb to the greatest Muslim general, but what he found was a dilapidated structure in a state of extreme disrepair. He laid a wreath at the tomb with a banner that read “to the Hero Sultan Saladin.” He also provided funds for the complete restoration and upgrade of the tomb with a bronze wreath emblazoned with the words, “From one great emperor to another” to show his admiration for Saladin and to commemorate his involvement in the project.
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The kaiser’s visit to Damascus and Saladin’s tomb stirred interest in the Muslim general in the Islamic world. Within twenty years of the German emperor’s visit a university opened in Jerusalem bearing the name of Saladin. As the twentieth century came to a close, the remembrance of Saladin, and his appropriation by Arab nationalists, was in full swing.

Hafez Asad, ruler of Syria, commissioned a huge equestrian statue of Saladin in 1992 that displayed Christian warriors groveling at the feet of the great Muslim general. The statue was erected less than a hundred yards from a massive portrait of Asad himself in an apparent attempt to link the two rulers, at least from a propaganda perspective. Saddam Hussein, the cruel dictator of Iraq, referred to himself as the “new Saladin,” and liked to draw attention to the fact that they were both born in the same town of Tikrit. In an action designed to link the two men even further, Hussein changed his birthdate to that of Saladin’s. It was sadly ironic that Hussein would use biological weapons against the Kurds, who tried in vain to rid Iraq of the despot—since Saladin was ethnically Kurdish. But as with all tyrants, propaganda trumped truth.

Further contributing to the false narrative of the Crusades, and cited as a source by liberal Western intellectuals to validate the myth that the Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West, is the book,
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes,
by the Lebanese-born novelist Amin Maalouf. In it he attempts to provide an Arabic narrative of the Crusades using Islamic sources, an effort made difficult due to the “paucity of contemporary Arab scholarship.”
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In seeking to provide an Islamic narrative of the Crusades, Maalouf merely succeeded in illustrating Islam’s reliance on Western research and scholarship of the Crusades.
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His myth-supporting book ends with an exaggerated statement indicative of the popular false narrative of the Crusades: “[T]here can be no doubt that the schism between these two worlds [Islam and the West] dates from the Crusades, deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.”
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The false narrative of the Crusades, created by Europeans and furthered by Arab nationalists, changed in the 1970s. During this time, the Islamic animus against the Crusades was portrayed in religious terms, and was used by
jihadis
who turned their hatred and violence away from secular Muslim regimes and toward the West.

Hijacking the Crusades

The politicization of the Crusades in the Islamic world was greatly amplified by the rise of Al-Qaida and the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. Those heinous actions in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania thrust the Crusades into the minds of modernity precisely because Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, cited the Crusades as an excuse for his despicable actions.

The Arabian peninsula has never . . . been stormed by any forces like the Crusader armies, spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. This is a battle of Muslims against the global Crusaders . . . our goal is for the nation to unite in the face of the Christian Crusade . . . This is a recurring war. The original Crusades were brought by Richard from Britain, Louis from France, and Barbarossa from Germany. Today the Crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.
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Despite the propaganda of Osama bin Laden or other terrorists, the Crusades are not to blame for the September 11 attacks, or for the resurgence of militant Islam. Instead we should point to the “artificial memory of the Crusades,” fashioned into “an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.”
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This false presentation of the Crusades has been trumpeted as a convenient rationale for Islamic terrorists in their desire to fulfill Mohammed’s command to “fight all men until they say there is no God but Allah.”
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What if . . . ?

History is replete with examples of “what if” scenarios. The history of the Crusades provides many examples for this question, some of which we have already noted. The question of the resurgence of Islam weighed heavily on the mind of Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, who wrote extensively on this issue in the early twentieth century. Even though he wrote at the time when the major Islamic countries were subservient to European colonial powers and the mighty Ottoman Empire had finally succumbed, Belloc foretold the rise of Islam. He firmly believed that the grandchildren of his generation would witness the rebirth of Islam and its spread throughout the world. In his book
The Crusades
, Belloc posited the quintessential “what if” question on the subject, opining that had the Second Crusade succeeded in capturing Damascus, Christendom would have triumphed, and Islam would have perished:

That story [the Crusades] must not be neglected by any modern, who may think, in error, that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved—to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus.
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Unfortunately, the question is moot. The French and German Crusaders did not succeed at the walls of Damascus in 1149. They were defeated, and although the Crusading movement continued on for another 600 years, the chance to achieve ultimate victory had passed, and the contest between Islam and Christendom persisted and grew.

The Crusades and the Church in the Modern World

The Crusades have always been controversial, but since the Reformation their memory has suffered from the creation of false narratives and mythistory designed to attack the Catholic Church generally and the papacy specifically. Despite the significant work of Crusade historians and scholars over the last generation, the authentic story of the Crusades remains, for the most part, locked within academia. There are many reasons for the sustainment of the myths about the Crusades, since “misconceptions about the past can persist for centuries, despite the diligent work of historians, either because vested interests benefit from the distortions or because the fanciful version is more fun.”
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But the time has arrived to change this narrative and present to the modern world the authentic story of the Crusades.

For that to occur, Catholics must first learn for themselves the authentic story of the movement that was an integral part of the Church’s history for six centuries. Too many see the Crusades as an aberration in Church history, a sin that should be forgotten and never discussed, swept into the dustbin of history along with equally misunderstood historical cases such as the Inquisition, Galileo, and Pius XII and the Jews. For many Catholics, “the wars of the cross have become like a lingering bad smell in a lavishly refurbished stately home.”
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The Crusades were an inherently Catholic undertaking. They were promoted by the papacy, encouraged by the clergy, and fought by Catholic warriors. An authentic understanding of the Crusades, rooted in a contemporary perspective, is best achieved by those who believe today what the Crusaders believed.
Catholics
are uniquely positioned to understand the glory of the Crusades, and to help those outside the Church begin to see it.

The false narratives about the Crusades, so deeply ingrained in the modern world and for too long ignored or blindly accepted by Catholics, can only be overcome by study and knowledge, charity and courage. It is time to reclaim the true story of the Crusades and of the Catholic Faith. The fate of the Church, the West, and the world depends on it.