Nasser and Saladin were the heroes of another Arab nationalist leader—the self-proclaimed “Lion of Syria,” Hafiz al-Asad, president of the country from 1971 until his death in 2000.111 He was also keen to develop Arab unity and to defeat the “neo-crusaders” in Israel. While he chose to portray himself as a devout Sunni Muslim, some high in the regime shared his roots in the minority heterodox clan of the Alawites, regarded by many Sunnis as heretics. Indeed, in 1983, Asad brutally crushed the potential challenge of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood by killing around thirty thousand of their supporters in the city of Hama. He also encouraged a tremendous cult of personality. On the main coast road north a monumental statue of him welcomes visitors to his home district and countless banners and pictures of him adorned the shops and offices (now often found alongside the image of his son and successor, Bashar). Given this level of self-promotion the creation of other statuary was rare, although a notable exception stands proudly in front of the citadel of Damascus. First set up in 1992 this monument shows a triumphant Saladin on horseback, preceded by a Sufi holy man and a jihad warrior, while trailing behind him slump disconsolate, defeated crusaders.112 The message is clear: just as Saladin defeated the West, so will Asad. He could invoke jihad rhetoric too—in the run-up to the 1973 struggle with Israel he called the conflict a holy war. Saladin’s achievements were of prime interest, however; the anniversary of his death was usually marked with public ceremonies and the castle named Saone (Zion) in the north of the country was renamed Qal’at Saladin in honor of the medieval hero. Visitors to the president were reminded of history because his office was adorned with a massive picture of Saladin’s victory at Hattin. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger went to Damascus in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war and he reflected: “The symbolism was plain enough: Asad frequently pointed out that Israel would sooner or later suffer the same fate.”113 Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Asad in 1984 and wrote: “As Asad stood in front of the brilliant scene [the picture] and discussed the history of the crusaders and the other ancient struggles for the Holy Land, he took particular pride in retelling tales of Arab successes, past and present. He seemed to speak like a modern Saladin, feeling that it was his dual obligation to rid the region of all foreign presence, while preserving Damascus as the only focal point for Arab unity today.”114
One further example of a nationalist leader who embraced the legacy of Saladin and also invoked jihad is Saddam Hussein.115 The Iraqi president made much of the fact that he shared Saladin’s birthplace, the village of Takrit. Given Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds, presumably no one felt inclined to point out that Saladin himself had been of Kurdish stock but, that historical inconvenience aside, the president emphasized the emir’s recovery of Jerusalem and his resistance to the West. Saddam’s methods of making these connections ranged from a colloquium—“The Battle for Liberation—from Saladin to Saddam Hussein”—to a children’s book on the two men (although Saladin’s career was dealt with in a perfunctory fashion) in which the modern-day leader was called Saladin II Saddam Hussein. A mural on his palace wall depicted the medieval sultan watching his horsemen, while next to him Saddam admired his tanks rolling forward—in both cases, the onlooker imagines, to victory against the West. In the course of the First Gulf War and the coalition invasion of Iraq, Saddam was able to argue that—like Saladin—he was engaged in a defensive jihad. In the context of Muslim history and culture, this was understandable, although to the West it may have seemed cynical for such a secular ruler as Saddam to invoke religion. Even after his defeat in Kuwait, Saddam was able to claim that, in ghazi tradition, he had attacked Israel and had managed to hold on to power, showing he possessed some aspects of baraka (divine blessing).116 The liberation of Palestine was a prominent motif in Saddam’s political discourse and in 2001 he announced the creation of a “Jerusalem army” to take back the city and claimed that huge numbers of recruits had been trained for this purpose. In the buildup to the Second Gulf War he again brought up the defeat of the crusaders, although a mention of the Mongols—who devastated Baghdad in 1258—proved prescient if, from his perspective, ultimately inappropriate.
If the predominantly secular principles of Arab nationalism dominated relations with the West during the latter decades of the twentieth century, in the new millennium, religion and jihad have stepped up the agenda considerably. Jihad is a concept with a wide spectrum of interpretations and meanings. As we saw earlier, its origins lie in the Koran and it stands, therefore, as a fundamental tenet of Islam. There is the greater jihad for purity of the soul and the lesser jihad to fight in the world, although some fundamentalists dispute this hierarchy. Just as crusading can be used in a more secular sense, jihad can also be linked to good causes; thus a jihad al-tarbiya for education. An emphasis on the defensive aspect of the jihad formed an integral part of Islamic holy war. Saladin used such ideas in the medieval age and this defensive duty, as stated in the Koran, has been frequently invoked by nationalists and Islamists alike. If Muslim lands and/or Islamic belief were attacked, then it is a religious duty to resist—if too few of the faithful are present to do so, then neighbors should assist: “Yet if they ask you for help, for religion’s sake, it is your duty to help them” (Koran 8:72).
More radical Muslims, however, hold that jihad should be expansionist and, at its most extreme, must bring the entire world under sharia law; jihad is a permanent revolutionary struggle for the sake of mankind. This would not require forced conversion, but would topple regimes that were un-Islamic and followed man-made laws. If there was a situation in which Muslims were endangered it would be justifiable to remove such an authority and to bring about a moral regeneration from within. Some Islamists fear that one day their lands will become secularized and their faith as marginalized as Christianity has become in Europe. They argue that proper religious practice will bring God’s blessing, military success, and a change for good.
One country where such a drastic program surfaced was Egypt, where radical thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, exerted a huge influence—hence his execution by the government in 1966. Egyptian defeat in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war advanced the fundamentalist cause and, to some extent, discredited the ruling nationalist and socialist regimes because it was possible to argue that poor religious observance had brought about divine disfavor. After the 1973 war a paradox emerged: more religious imagery was used to encourage a sense of Muslim fraternity in Egypt, yet for wider political reasons President Sadat engaged ever more closely with the United States. One consequence of this was President Carter’s Camp David agreement, a peace accord between Israel and Egypt, which marked the most serious attempt to date to bring lasting solution to the troubles in the Middle East.117 Sadat persuaded religious scholars to issue fatwas that declared the agreement legitimate in Islamic law to try to assuage concern over a deal with Israel and the West. Yet wealth within Egypt was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small elite and western culture had become ever more invasive; fertile ground for radicals. Islamic groups had, to some extent, been tolerated because they offered ties with other Arab countries (the oil states in particular) but in the circumstances outlined here, several of the Islamist parties became radicalized.118 Some groups were outlawed but the Jihad Organization set out to assassinate President Sadat. Their aims were laid out in a document, The Neglected Duty, in which they argued that while the Jews were the more distant enemy, the rulers of Egypt were closer and, in accordance with the Koran, should be dealt with first.119 Egypt needed an Islamic ruler rather than an impious one, and the existence of Israel was the fault of bad Muslim rulers. The text used the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), a Syrian theologian and jurist whose fundamentalist views brought him into trouble during his own lifetime. Ibn Taymiyya stressed the moral duty of the jihad and the need for a ruler to govern according to sharia law. He had issued fatwas against the Mongol rulers of Persia, who, although they professed to be Muslims, continued, he believed,
to venerate Chinggis Khan, their world-conquering ancestor; they also made alliances with unbelievers and preferred the Mongol legal code, the yasa, to sharia law. The Neglected Duty drew attention to the similarity between Mongol rule and modern Egypt: “Therefore the rulers of these days are apostates. They have been brought up at the tables of colonialism, no matter whether of the crusading, the communist or the Zionist variety. They are Muslims only in name, even if they pray, fast and pretend to be Muslims.”120 Sadat was an apostate and according to sharia law had to be killed; thus the deed was justified and in October 1981 the assassins struck, although they proved mistaken in their belief that his murder would be followed by a popular revolt.
In recent times Osama bin Laden’s pronouncements have emerged as the most powerful, notorious, and strident condemnations of what he regards as anti-Islamic policies by the West. He has reached out to the umma, the Islamic community across the world, particularly in Palestine and Kashmir (and briefly in Chechnya too), and urged Muslims to stand up to the humiliations he claims have been imposed by Israel, the United States, and Britain. Other targets of his anger are the Saudi authorities, whom he regards as having “desecrated their own legitimacy” through the “suspension of Islamic law and replacement thereof with man-made laws . . . and allowing the enemies of God to occupy it in the form of the American crusaders who have become the principal reason for all aspects of our land’s disastrous predicament.”121
Bin Laden is a polemicist of the first order whose canny use of Internet and satellite television technology has enabled him to reach an audience no previous antagonist of the West could have dreamed of.122 His language is laced with texts from the Koran, with Hadith, and statements by authoritative scholars, including Ibn Taymiyya.123 Bin Laden’s allure is also based upon his personal piety, generosity, and the sharing of hardships with his men—qualities that, as the former head of the CIA unit hunting him wrote, make him “an Islamic hero, as the faith’s ideal type, and almost as a modern-day Saladin.”124 For many years bin Laden has consistently referred to a Judeo-Crusader alliance against Islam, or a fight between the people of Islam and the global crusaders.125 The religious edge this language provides is important to him and, crucially, signposts the ultimate failure of his enemies—and a parallel to the defeat of the medieval crusaders. Bin Laden has viewed the struggle as a war of religion, rather than one of imperialism, which is a concept rarely mentioned in his speeches. When President Bush so disastrously used the word “crusade” in his unscripted response to the 9/11 atrocities he simply fulfilled the claims bin Laden had been making for years: “So Bush has declared in his own words: ‘crusader attack.’ The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouth.”126 He neatly turned Bush’s words against him: “So the world today is split into two parts, as Bush said: either you are with us, or you are with terrorism. Either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam. Bush’s image today is of him being in the front of the line, yelling and carrying his big cross.”127
Quite what President Bush really understood by his remarks will never be clear—given the intimate relationship between religion and politics during his presidency, a holy war could have formed part of his meaning. On the other hand, while such a statement may have gained currency among far-right constituencies at home, to make such a comment to the world’s media in his position as commander-in-chief of the U.S. forces would have been imprudent to say the least. Perhaps Bush was thinking of a crusade in the more secular sense that is so frequently invoked in modern society (the good cause of cutting a hospital waiting list, or of cleaning streets); or maybe he was drawing upon the notion of a morally worthwhile struggle such as rights for workers, or against corruption. A blurred combination of all the above is, of course, possible. Whatever the answer, it is plain that he had absolutely no inkling of the toxic quality of the word “crusade” in the Muslim world. White House spokesmen issued statements to clarify the president’s words but it was too late. Bin Laden gleefully noted: “people make apologies for him and they say that he didn’t mean to say that the war is a crusade, even though he himself said it was!”128
Bin Laden’s appeal has taken root in terror cells across the world and in the wider consciousness of millions of Muslims. The invasion of Iraq only served to refresh his arguments and the destruction and devastation of that land have given his ideas even greater currency. Countries that supported the war became leading targets, and in March 2004, Spain, with its long history of Christian–Muslim conflict, was hit by a series of train bombs that claimed 201 lives; subsequent al-Qaeda statements duly made reference to the crusader legacy in the peninsula. Likewise, although the British presence in Iraq was the key factor precipitating the July 7, 2005, bombs in London, links were made with the crusading period in subsequent propaganda. To those who take part in such appalling acts, bin Laden holds out the prospect of martyrdom, although as commentators have noted, unlike Islamic polemicists of the past such as Sayyid Qutb, he offers no social program for the future; similarly, the compassion and tolerance so central to Islam are conspicuously absent from his words.129
CONCLUSION
In the Shadow of the Crusades
In one of Winston Churchill’s characteristically pithy observations he declared: “The further back you look, the farther forward you can see.” In the case of the crusades, one might add the (unfair and obvious) rider that the clarity of your foresight depends upon how closely you examine the past. What, on the surface, appears a simple clash between two faiths is, as we have seen, far more complex and contradictory.
In the early medieval period the Islamic conquest of the Middle East, Spain, and Sicily brought the two faiths into conflict but it was the launch of the First Crusade in 1095 that transformed the situation because it gave the entire Catholic West reasons to engage in, or to support, holy war. The imperative to free Jerusalem and the desire to secure unprecedented spiritual rewards meant that crusading emerged as an inspirational blend of penitential activity and religious warfare. The polyglot armies of the First Crusade demonstrated the near-universal appeal of Pope Urban’s idea and the capture of Jerusalem startled and exhilarated Christendom. From then on, crusading evolved quickly, both in theory and practice.
Prompted largely by the success of the First Crusade, kings—themselves becoming ever more powerful in the medieval West—began to take part. The launch of the First Crusade had required a partnership between the nobility and the Church, but once kings were involved their military and financial strength changed the dynamic and the papacy started to lose control over its creation. Papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy had exerted some influence over the First Crusade but in many subsequent campaigns the presence of royal power rendered most legates all but invisible. Church authority remained centered upon the preaching of the crusade, and the spellbinding rhetoric of Urban II, Bernard of Clairvaux, and James of Vitry echo down the ages and their efforts did much to convince thousands of men and women to set out for the Holy Land. They generated intense belief in the moral right of the crusaders’ actions, and evoked tremendous faith in the sign of the cross: “the last plank for a shipwrecked world,” as James of Vitry so eloquently claimed. The popular appeal of Jerusalem, Christ’s own city and the place of mankind’s salvation, should never be underestimated and, as we saw during the Third Crusade, the army’s desire to march to the holy city compelled even King Richard to follow its wishes. Papal legislation produced much of the money to finance the crusades, but once underway, there was relatively little the curia could do to steer its prodigy in the manner it desired. The most glaring example of this was the Fourth Crusade’s diversion to Constantinople, but Pope Innocent’s deep disquiet at Simon de Montfort’s territorial acquisitions during the Albigensian Crusade and, most of all, the recovery of Jerusalem by the excommunicate Frederick II in 1229, amply demonstrate the Church’s problem. The secular powers had, quite naturally, their own agendas and while devotion to the crusading cause was
manifest in their taking of the cross and setting out on campaign they could not always put other matters aside, no matter how worthy the cause. Thus long-standing Anglo–French rivalry caused Richard the Lion-heart and Philip to spar and bicker during the Third Crusade, and when the latter departed for home his behavior undoubtedly compromised Richard’s actions in the Levant. Similarly, tensions between the German and French armies were said to have hampered the march of the Second Crusade. Of course, the papacy and the lay powers usually shared the same ultimate aim—to recover the Holy Land—but the former felt morally better equipped to direct a holy war and believed that they were less likely to allow it to be distracted by matters displeasing to God.
Kings and nobles from the Baltic and Iberia asked for the extension of crusading privileges to their homelands, and the flexibility and willingness of the papacy to accommodate this proved vital in the wider attraction and longevity of the movement. Along with a wish to fight the enemies of God, it was the territorial ambitions of the Spanish and Baltic nobility, along with the commercial drive of the Italian mercantile cities, that gave the crusades an energy that faith alone could not provide. Similarly, the chivalric aspects of holy war did much to invigorate crusading across Europe and the Near East and, as the Feast of the Pheasant so vividly demonstrated, it remained an important theme well into the fifteenth century. While this variety gave crusading an extra vitality, it could also cause difficulties. People were unclear where their priorities should lie; in the mid-thirteenth century, for example, the St. Albans–based writer Matthew Paris—a strong critic of the papacy—observed: “the papalists . . . shamelessly harassed people who had taken the cross, urging them under the penalty of excommunication now to set out for the Holy Land, now for the Byzantine Empire, and now suggesting that they attack Frederick . . . and they extorted the necessary funds for an expedition on whatever pretext.”1 In other words, as far as Matthew Paris was concerned, the diversity of crusading had diluted its impact and opened the way to corruption and vice.
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