Sad to say as time passes, it looks like I got the "heat" too early from the thread:
Message 16335782
The Crusaders' Giant Footprints
To Arabs, They Aren't Ancient History
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page C01
Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher, wrest that land from the wicked race . . .
-- Pope Urban II, 1095
The average American probably thinks of the Crusades -- if he thinks of them at all -- as a dimly recalled page in a high school history book, possibly overlaid with images from the 1935 Cecil B. De Mille film epic starring Jason Robards Sr. and Loretta Young.
In the Islamic world, it's not like that.
Arab societies "have a very fluid sense of time," explains Mary-Jane Deeb, adjunct professor at American University and a Middle East specialist. "For them, events like the Crusades, a thousand years ago, are as immediate as yesterday. And they are very, very powerful events in the Arab mind. A lot of Islamic rhetoric revolves around the crusaders."
The reasons why are part history, part culture, part linguistics. When President Bush on Sept. 15 declared that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while," Muslims were stung.
The president was using "crusade" in its Western sense of "any vigorous action in behalf of a cause." But many Muslims, particularly Arabs, recognize no such usage. To them "crusade," even uncapitalized, is a profoundly loaded term. It evokes not just a war against their people, who were hacked apart, man and child, 1,000 years ago, until the streets of Jerusalem and other cities ran deep in blood. It evokes an unprovoked war against their religion and their every way of life -- a war they see mirrored today in the steady corrosion of Islamic values by a globalizing Western culture they believe undermines their families, trivializes learning and profanes their God.
When Islam is under attack, the Koran justifies a jihad, or holy war, against unbelievers. To many in the Muslim world, Islam has been under attack by the West at least since the 11th century and the First Crusade.
"It's not simply a matter of religion as Westerners understand it," Deeb explains. "Conservative Muslims see the West imposing an entire system of economic, political and social values which strike at the heart of the Islamic way of life. Westerners would consider most of these values secular, but to conservative Muslims almost nothing is secular. The Koran governs everything, including banking and politics. All is Islam."
To appreciate the sense of cultural violation many Muslims feel toward the West, it helps to remember that Islam, in its early centuries, was quite tolerant of Christians and Jews.
In 622, 400 years before the Crusades, a founding document of Islam called the Constitution of Medina defined Jews and Christians as dhimmis -- "people of the Book" who also believed in one God. So as long as they paid a yearly tax to their Muslim rulers, they were permitted religious freedom. Such religious tolerance was strikingly unusual at the time, and it continued for centuries after Muhammad's death in 632, even as Islam spread north and westward from Arabia into the crumbling remnants of the old Roman Empire. Midway through the 8th century, Arab forces had conquered most of the Middle East and were on their way to Spain.
Europeans during these years were occupied primarily in fending off Attila the Hun and other invaders and in warring among themselves. But a trickle of European Christians had been making pilgrimages to the Holy Land since the 4th century. Generally they were unmolested, but things underwent an abrupt change in 1009, when the caliph of Egypt, in a fit of madness, ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where Christians believe Jesus was entombed. For much of the rest of the century Christian pilgrims were sporadically set upon, first by Arabs, then by Muslim Turks who replaced the Arabs as rulers of Syria and Palestine.
It was in this context that Pope Urban II in 1095 issued his famous call to European Christians to proclaim their faith by recapturing Jerusalem from such "infidels." In addition to making Jerusalem safe for pilgrims, he hoped to halt the feudal warfare within Europe, and possibly even heal the centuries-old breach between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Urban's call "Deus lo volt!" (God wills it) electrified Europe. Knights and minor nobles, yeomen and archers, opportunists and thieves all dropped their mundane lives and set out to follow the cross, as much for adventure and plunder as for God.
On all sides sprang up disorganized, undisciplined, penniless hordes who surged eastward by the thousands, foraging and looting as they went. Some made side trips through German cities to murder Jews as a sort of warmup for the infidel Turks.
Led by figures with names like Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, they reached Constantinople in August 1096, then crossed the Bosporus to Asia Minor, where they were almost all slain by Turks.
The more organized wing of the First Crusade reached Constantinople the following year, continuing toward the Holy Land into what is now Iraq and Syria. With more than 25,000 troops from throughout Europe, they besieged cities, stormed their walls and hacked their way through Arab defenders.
"The Arabs were shocked," writes David Lamb in "The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage." "They couldn't understand what they had done to offend the Christians, and they could not comprehend the behavior of the crude foreigners who did not bathe or wear silks or walk on fine carpets."
For if Western Christendom was sunk in the Dark Ages of violence, ignorance and superstition, the Arabic world of Islam was in its golden age. Baghdad was the most cosmopolitan city in the world -- the Baghdad of Aladdin, Sinbad and "A Thousand and One Nights" -- with gilded mosques and unrivaled centers of learning.
Muslim scholars made important and original contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine and literature. They advanced agriculture and engineering, and their poets sang in the streets. In Spain, the Arab city of Cordoba had a population of 500,000, compared with Paris's 38,000, and boasted 700 mosques, thousands of palaces, 70 libraries and 900 public baths, plus the first streetlights in Europe.
The Arabs looked on the crusaders much as the ancient Romans must have looked on the barbarian hordes. And when the crusaders entered Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, those suspicions were confirmed. The crusaders plundered and defiled Islam's hallowed Dome of the Rock, and carried out such a wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Jews that a chronicler of the time wrote of crusader horses splashing through bloody streets where "heaps of heads and hands could be seen."
The First Crusade touched off 400 years of warfare between Islam and the Western world, sometimes divided arbitrarily by historians into eight major crusades and several minor ones. The crusaders set up a number of "crusader states" in Syria and Palestine, over which they fought intermittently with Arabs and Turks in recurrent bloodbaths. Both Arab and Christian chroniclers almost glory in cataloguing the number of bodies cleaved in two, or beheaded, or hurled from catapults or burned alive.
In 1187 the crusaders were evicted from Jerusalem by Salah-ad-Din Yusuf ibn-Ayyub, the charismatic and legendary Iraqi-born warrior known in the West as Saladin. Having attached himself to the Syrian army at 14, Saladin soon rose to become commander in chief and vizier in Egypt. But he was celebrated as much for his personal qualities of kindness, patience and tolerance as for his military prowess.
He fought the crusaders with great skill for 10 years, but achieved as much by diplomacy as he did with the sword. He sent gifts to crusader generals even while opposing them and, according to legend, once ordered his horsemen to carry ice down a mountain to comfort Richard the Lion-Hearted when the British crusader king was ill.
Muslim history has immortalized Saladin as a paragon of Islamic virtues, and Western historians have tended to agree. Yet for Muslims, the glory of his victories carries a gnawing question: How could the Arab world have shriveled so in subsequent centuries compared with the infidel, then-uncivilized and now-triumphant West?
"Given the Arabs' belief in divine predestination," writes Raphael Patai in "The Arab Mind," "this reversal . . . is put on the Arabs themselves, primarily in terms of moral, that is, religious shortcomings. Or, in an illogical but emotionally much more satisfactory manner, the [crusader] West is held culpable for all that befell the Arabs."
Patai's book was first published in 1973, but its truths would appear to live on. In his 1996 declaration of jihad, Osama bin Laden stated, "the crusader forces became the main cause of our disastrous condition."
In a videotape released earlier this year to his supporters, he said, "I envision Saladin coming out of the clouds. . . . We will see again Saladin carrying his sword, with the blood of unbelievers dripping from it."
There is nothing on the tape about bearing ice down the mountain.
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