Stark treatment of the Crusades

Revisionist history is probably as common as it is unethical. There are lessons to learn from the past, but if the past is distorted for the sake of present-day lessons, then it is no longer serving honest inquiry, but has become propaganda.

The destruction of the World Trade Centre by Muslim terrorists has spawned in the West a new fear of Islam, as well as a new desire to understand Islam. At the same time (and rather strangely and illogically), it has spawned new attacks upon Christianity. For example, the event in New York motivated Christopher Hitchens, one of the ‘new atheists’, to speak against religion as a damaging force in the world. So what began with some Muslim extremists was generalized to all religion, and then (it seems) particularized by a renewed and increased attack upon Christianity. Go figure.

Rodney Stark notes that in this post-9/11 environment, “frequent mention was made of the Crusades as a basis for Islamic fury” (God’s Battalions, HarperCollins, New York, 2009, p. 4). This is propaganda based upon recently generated myths.

With the first Crusade being called for in 1095 and their last city (Acre) falling in May 1291, the Crusader kingdoms survived for almost as long as the USA has been a nation, and certainly longer than Australia has been. However, it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that the Muslims showed much interest in the Crusades. Instead, they looked back on them with indifference. Even as they were happening, Muslim chroniclers regarding them with little interest, for they were simply the invasions of primitive and unlearned people. Most Arabs dismissed them as attacks upon the hated Turks, and so were of little interest. In fact, to some, the European occupation of Jerusalem was considered advantageous as it blocked Turkish influence on Egypt.

According to Stark, it was the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulhamid II (who reigned 1876–1909) who first began to speak of the Crusades of yesteryear, and he did so to serve his criticism of the European attacks on his own Empire. His remarks prompted the first Muslim history of the Crusades (1899). The theme was quickly picked up by Muslim nationalists, and the anger was fuelled further by post WWI British and French imperialism and by the post WWII creation of the state of Israel. “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” (ibid., p. 247-8).

And (to extend Stark) of course, for those not exactly in favour of Christianity, here was a windfall: the Muslim memory and anger about the Crusades, which Stark claims to be a 20th-century creation, provided a new weapon for 20th-century opponents of Christianity. Here was yet another opportunity to blow some smoke in the air to try to choke the good news of Jesus Christ. The memory of the Christian Crusades has (supposedly) brought the world to the brink of a clash of civilizations: ‘Christian’ versus ‘Islamic’. When Muslim terrorists attack the West, it then became time for the West to attack Christianity.