TS Eliot on the First Crusade

I love what Eliot says about the (first) Jerusalem Crusade:

"In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings."

From his Choruses from 'the Rock'

Madden: Inventing the Crusades

This is a great little article from Thomas Madden, a professional historian of the Crusades. It appeared in First Things 194 (Summer 2009). I love how he approaches the topic. Here are a few select quotes:

“The truth is that medieval Muslims came to realize the Crusades were religious but had little interest in them. When, in 1291, Muslim armies removed the last vestiges of the Crusader Kingdom from Palestine, the Crusades largely dropped out of Muslim memory.” (Madden 2009: 43)

“All the Crusades met the criteria of just war.” (42)

“In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality [regarding the Crusades].” (44)

“The Crusades were a medieval phenomenon with no connection to modern Islamist terrorism.” (41)

Bernard Lewis: Of Crusades and Jihad

The jihad was a sacred mission enjoined by scripture and incorporated into the holy law, to continue until all the world was open to the light of Islam. The crusade was a human enterprise, not enjoined--some might rather say forbidden--by Christian scripture, and undertaken for a limited purpose, to defend, or, where lost, to recover Christian territories.

Bernard Lewis, 'Europe and Islam' in From Babel to Dragomans, 2004.

Kenneth Cragg on the Crusades

The Crusades were served with a devotion that, had it been wise and true as it was fervent and undaunted, would have blessed the Eastern world. [...] The really important matter was not the possibility of pilgrimage but the obligation of witness. Christ's concern was, and is, for men not monuments, for souls, not sanctuaries.

Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret, Third Ed. pp. 238, 9
Oxford: Oneworld 1956, 2000

Chesterton's apologia for the First Crusade

From Ch. 11 of The New Jerusalem:

The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded.

They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.
There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it had already made a difference. The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation suggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so.

Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically, they proceeded to deal with it equally practically. The first division involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last
developments followed out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking the offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base.

Map: Kingdom of Jerusalem

Raymond Lully (Ramon Llull)

Raymund Lull (aka Raymond Lully, in Latin Raimundus or Raymundus Lullus, or in Spanish Raimundo Lulio) is one of my great heroes. There is much to read about him in terms of Christian missions, but due to his philosophical work he is considered to be a pioneer in information theory and also wrote the first novel in the Catalan language. Please read it all and gain courage from his example. In many ways his focus on preaching, conversation, debate, and the use of Islamic sources to reach Muslims, coupled with his disdain for the use of force, was and is the pattern found today among missionaries to Muslims. He was way ahead of his time.

From the Christian History Institute:

Raymond Lull would have seemed an unlikely person to remind the church of its missionary vision. A court gallant (that is, a fashionable ladies' man) and poet, he squandered his life in frivolity, romantic stories, love poems, and seduction. He was thirty before that changed.

But Jesus Christ, of his great clemency,
Five times upon the cross appeared to me,
That I might think upon him lovingly,
And cause his name proclaimed abroad to be...

It is reported that Lull's conversion was precipitated by a shock. He tried to lure a beautiful woman into a few moments of pleasure in bed with him. With quiet dignity, the woman revealed her breast to him--cancer-eaten. In a flash, he saw the futility of his lusts, and later transferred his love to the eternal Christ.

Born in Majorca, Spain, five years after the Island was freed from Saracen rule, Lull drank in Jewish and Islamic lore. He was the first Christian philosopher to study the Jewish Kabbalah (a book filled with mystical and occult knowledge) and one of the first to read the writings of the Islamic mystics known as Sufis. He developed a passion to win Moslems to Christ and took up the challenge of the Grand Mufti of Bugia: "If you hold that the law of Christ is true and that of Mohammed false, you must prove it by necessary reasons,"--that is, by air-tight logic.

Convinced that true reason could produce no results contradictory to true faith, Lull poured his intelligence into philosophy. The result was a philosophy of "combination" by which he thought all knowledge could be derived by combining every idea with every other idea. Although admired for centuries because it was clever, his Ars Magna ultimately proved to be a dead end. But Lull went beyond mere philosophy. His passion was too deep to stop with scholarly games.

The first crusades had failed. Lull crisscrossed Europe, urging kings, popes, and cardinals to develop mission schools and evangelize Islam. "Missionaries will convert the world by preaching, but also through the shedding of tears and blood and with great labor, and through a bitter death," he said. His three-point plan was simple. First, missionaries must obtain a comprehensive knowledge of Arabic and other mid-eastern languages. Then they must study Islamic literature until they could refute any Muslim argument. Finally they must give their lives in witness to Christ. He convinced the pope to allow Christian universities to teach the Jewish and Islamic languages and literature.

Lull followed this plan himself. He established a missionary school and personally studied Islamic lore. Three times he sailed to Islamic countries to reason with Islamic scholars. The first time he was exported just when he had won several Imams (Moslem religious leaders) to request baptism. The second time he was imprisoned for six months. On this day August 14, 1314, when he was in his eighties, he sailed a third time for Islamic North Africa. For a year he preached Christ and the Trinity openly but then was brutally stoned. Christian merchants carried the broken man aboard their ship. Probably he died in sight of Majorca.

Jihad and Crusades? Forbidden Words

From The Brussels Journal. Scary when politicians are banned from using words, isn't it?

A glossocrat whose power is based on words is afraid of words. The EU has drawn up guidelines advising government spokesmen to use "non-offensive" phrases when talking about terrorism. The word Jihad should preferably not be used at all, or should be explained as a misunderstood term meaning peaceful struggle against oneself. These recommendations are being implemented. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in an attempt to avoid offending Muslims, in the summer of 2007 banned his ministers from mentioning "Muslim" and "terrorism" in the same breath, following attempted terror attacks staged by Muslims - including several medical doctors - in Glasgow and London.

To quote Paul Fregosi's book Jihad in the West: "The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300 years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often compared, although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike the Jihad, which is universal, were largely but not completely confined to the Holy Land. Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while a Jihad is still going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact, been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad."

At the same time as the memory of 1300 years of almost continuous Jihad warfare and Islamic aggression is gradually being erased from Western school textbooks, "Islamophobia" is being promoted as a serious challenge. By substituting "Jihad" with "Islamophobia," emphasis is moved from Europeans defending themselves against Islamic violence to innocent Muslims suffering from prejudice and racism. An alternate word thus creates an alternate reality.

The Logic of Islam

I found this interview to be quite fascinating, though it does contain some errors. Specifically:

"Warner: Political Islam has annihilated every culture it has invaded or immigrated to. The total time for annihilation takes centuries, but once Islam is ascendant it never fails. The host culture disappears and becomes extinct."

Actually, Spain was entirely regained for Christendom upon the completion of the Reconquista in 1492 (special year, wasn't it?) Also, parts of the Balkans (like Greece) were purged of Islam--though both came at a great price. Also, both purgings were military in nature, so there are ethical questions involved. Finally, the loss of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was not due to a religiously-motivated jihaad, but to illegal infringements on commerce by the Christian governer of what is now Karak in Jordan. Saladin was protecting his commercial routes. (BTW, Saladin was not even an Arab.)

Nevertheless, the strongest section of the interview is about the two different kinds of logic at play in Islam and Western thought. Because of there are two kinds of logic dialogue is often entirely fruitless

Interview_with_Bill_Warner