The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  In 1004, the sixth Fatimid caliph, Abu Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985–1021) turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother and uncles (two of whom were patriarchs) and ordered the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years, thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim gave his most spectacular anti-Christian order: he commanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh century after the Persians had burned an earlier version, marks the traditional site of Christ’s burial. Al-Hakim commanded that the tomb inside be cut down to the bedrock. He ordered Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks (and Jews heavy blocks of wood in the shape of a calf). He piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the order that Christians accept Islam or leave his dominions.94

  The erratic caliph ultimately relaxed his persecution and even returned much of the property he had seized from the Church.95 Nevertheless, Christians were in a precarious position, and pilgrims remained under threat. In 1056, the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.96 The disaster at Manzikert followed a decade and a half after that. The Byzantine Empire’s subsequent loss of Asia Minor made it all the more urgent, as far as Pope Urban II was concerned, for the Christians of the West to act to defend their brethren in the East. It was a necessity born of charity.

  Outside of the Reconquista in Spain, which would not fully realize its goal for three hundred more years, the Crusades were the first significant attempt to reverse the gains of the jihad.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE VICTIMS OF JIHAD STRIKE BACK

  Jihad in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

  I. THE CRUSADES

  Calling the First Crusade

  Pope Urban II called the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, saying that without military action, “the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked” by Muslim forces:

  For your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania [the Greek empire] as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George. They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends.… Moreover, Christ commands it.1

  The Pope spoke of an “imminent peril threatening you and all the faithful which has brought us hither”:

  From the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople a grievous report has gone forth and has repeatedly been brought to our ears; namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God, ‘a generation that set not their heart aright and whose spirit was not steadfast with God,’ violently invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part…they have killed by cruel tortures. They have either destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of their own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness.… The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and has been deprived of territory so vast in extent that it could be traversed in two months’ time.… This royal city, however, situated at the center of the earth, is now held captive by the enemies of Christ and is subjected, by those who do not know God, to the worship [of] the heathen. She seeks, therefore, and desires to be liberated and ceases not to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially she asks succor, because as we have already said, God has conferred upon you above all other nations great glory in arms.2

  He invoked the Muslim destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher: “Let the holy sepulcher of our Lord and Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially arouse you, and the holy places which are now treated with ignominy and irreverently polluted with the filth of the unclean.”3

  The People’s Crusade

  The Crusades initially came together as pilgrimages: Crusaders embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, intending to defend themselves if attacked. Many took religious vows. Indeed, the first Crusader foray into Muslim lands, the so-called People’s Crusade, was more religious revival meeting than military force. It began with preaching, as a charismatic preacher known as Peter the Hermit traversed France and Germany with a scorching message of hellfire and redemption and the necessity of the Crusade.

  As Peter preached, he began to attract followers—women and children as well as soldiers. The “People’s Crusaders” crossed Europe and arrived in Constantinople in August 1096, by then thirty thousand strong. Entering the domains of the Turks, they were quickly massacred near Nicaea, while Peter the Hermit was still in Constantinople discussing strategy with Alexius Comnenus. The principal Crusader force of actual military men had not yet even arrived in the region.4

  As the People’s Crusaders crossed Europe, Peter the Hermit became famous and attracted imitators. Many of these new Crusade leaders, however, were not interested primarily in defending the Christians in the Middle East, but in lining their own pockets at the expense of the Jews of Germany. In Mainz, forces under the command of Count Emicho of Leiningen found the Jews under the protection of the local bishop, who had heard that they were coming and brought the Jews in the area into his palace. Undeterred, these “Crusaders” stormed the bishop’s palace and massacred the Jews inside it.

  An eleventh-century historian of the First Crusade, Albert of Aix, recounted that they “killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age and sex.”5 A Crusader explained his thinking to a rabbi: “You are the children of those who killed the object of our veneration, hanging him on a tree; and he himself had said: ‘There will yet come a day when my children will come and avenge my blood.’”6

  There is no record of Jesus Christ ever saying such a thing. The Crusader massacres of Jews in Europe were not only an outrageous crime but a disastrous miscalculation. Had the warriors of jihad succeeded in Europe, they would have subjugated the Christians and the Jews in the same way. Had the Crusaders traversed Europe inviting help from the Jews rather than killing them, the Crusaders might have arrived in the Middle East far stronger, and the history of the world would have been different in incalculable ways. But this was not by any means the only time in the history of jihad warfare that the Muslims benefited from disunity and infighting among those who stood between them and their goal.

  The Muslims were disunited as well. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir even recorded speculation that the Crusaders had come only at the bidding of the Fatimid Shi’ites, in order to disrupt the growth of the Sunni Seljuk Turkish domains: “Some say that when the masters of Egypt saw the expansion of the Seljuk empire, they took fright and asked the Franj [Franks, or Crusaders] to march on Syria and to establish a buffer between them and the Muslims. God alone knows the truth.”7

  Crusader Barbarism

  According to Ibn al-Athir, as the Crusaders approached Antioch, the Muslim ruler of Antioch,
Yaghi-Siyan, demonstrated for future historians that he knew exactly what the conflict was about, and it wasn’t about land or treasure: he “feared possible sedition on the part of the Christians of the city. He therefore decided to expel them.”8

  It was to no avail. Antioch fell to the Crusaders, who, lacking adequate food supplies, proceeded to nearby Ma’arra to secure them. Ibn al-Athir said that “for three days they put people to the sword, killing more than a hundred thousand people and taking many prisoners.”9 This is impossible, as Ma’arra likely was home to no more than ten thousand people, but jihad preachers were already finding the exaggeration of atrocity stories and casualty figures to be a useful tool in recruitment efforts.

  The Crusaders, meanwhile, were not finished in Ma’arra. Not finding the stores of food they had hoped to find, and increasingly desperate, they fell to cannibalism. The twelfth-century Frankish chronicler Radulph of Caen recounted: “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.”10 A coterie of leading Crusaders reported less graphically to Pope Urban II: “A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens.”11 Exclaimed Albert of Aix: “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”12

  This ghastly event spread far and wide in Muslim lands, contributing to the popular image of the Crusaders among Muslims that was enunciated by the twelfth-century chronicler Usamah ibn Munqidh: “All those who were well-informed about the Franj saw them as beasts superior in courage and fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.”13

  Even had the horrific events in Ma’arra never taken place, however, it would have been difficult for the Crusaders to make a better impression: the characterization of non-Muslims as akin to animals was not original to Usamah ibn Munqidh, but could be found in the Qur’an itself: “For the worst of beasts in the sight of Allah are those who reject him; they will not believe.” (8:55)

  The Crusaders in Jerusalem

  In any case, the Crusaders scarcely behaved better as they continued their conquests. After a five-week siege, the Crusaders entered Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. An anonymous contemporary account by a Christian recounted what happened next:

  One of our knights, Letholdus by name, climbed on to the wall of the city. When he reached the top, all the defenders of the city quickly fled along the walls and through the city. Our men followed and pursued them, killing and hacking, as far as the temple of Solomon, and there was such a slaughter that our men were up to their ankles in the enemy’s blood.…

  The emir who commanded the tower of David surrendered to the Count [of St. Gilles] and opened the gate where pilgrims used to pay tribute. Entering the city, our pilgrims pursued and killed the Saracens up to the temple of Solomon. There the Saracens assembled and resisted fiercely all day, so that the whole temple flowed with their blood. At last the pagans were overcome and our men seized many men and women in the temple, killing them or keeping them alive as they saw fit. On the roof of the temple there was a great crowd of pagans of both sexes, to whom Tancred and Gaston de Beert gave their banners [to provide them with protection]. Then the crusaders scattered throughout the city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods. Afterwards our men went rejoicing and weeping for joy to adore the sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus and there discharged their debt to Him… 14

  Three principal Crusade leaders—Archbishop Daimbert; Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon; and Raymond, Count of Toulouse—boasted to Pope Paschal II in September 1099 about the Crusaders’ Jerusalem exploits: “And if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.”15 Balderic, a bishop and the author of an early-twelfth-century history of Jerusalem, reported that the Crusaders killed between twenty thousand and thirty thousand people in the city.16

  The story of this massacre has grown over the centuries. Around 1160, two Syrian chroniclers, al-Azimi and Ibn al-Qalanisi, wrote separately of the sack. Al-Azimi said only that the Crusaders “turned to Jerusalem and conquered it from the hands of the Egyptians. Godfrey took it. They burned the Church of the Jews.” Ibn al-Qalanisi added a bit more detail: “The Franks stormed the town and gained possession of it. A number of the townsfolk fled to the sanctuary and a great host were killed. The Jews assembled in the synagogue, and the Franks burned it over their heads. The sanctuary was surrendered to them on guarantee of safety on 22 Sha’ban [14 July] of this year, and they destroyed the shrines and the tomb of Abraham.”17

  Ibn al-Jawzi, writing about a hundred years after the event, said that the Crusaders “killed more than 70,000 Muslims” in Jerusalem. Ibn al-Athir recounted: “The population of the holy city was put to the sword, and the Franj spent a week massacring Muslims. They killed more than seventy thousand people in al-Aqsa mosque.”18 The fifteenth-century historian Ibn Taghribirdi recorded one hundred thousand. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton claimed in November 2001 that the Crusaders murdered not just every Muslim warrior or even every Muslim male, but “every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound” until the blood was running “up to their knees.”19

  The Crusaders’ cruelty was not unique for the savage warfare of the period, but that does not excuse it. The cannibalism at Ma’arra has largely been forgotten in the West, but the sack of Jerusalem and the burning of the Jews inside their synagogue has not. The Crusaders’ savagery in Jerusalem in 1099 was, according to journalist Amin Maalouf in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, the “starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West.”20 Islamic scholar John Esposito declares: “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.”21

  We have already seen how false these statements are. Islam, as the jihads in Spain, France, Italy, and Asia Minor show, was hostile to the West from its inception. There was no peaceful coexistence; there were only brief periods in between jihad invasions. Christian overtures to establish a lasting peace accord were invariably answered by a repetition of the triple choice: conversion, submission, or war. To ascribe a thousand years of hostility between Islam and the West to the Crusaders is to fall prey to the peculiar modern Western malady of civilizational self-

  loathing and blaming the West for all the ills in the world.

  Yet the Crusaders’ record is by no means spotless. No one’s is. Wars never allow one side to claim all of the moral high ground. The sins of the Crusaders, however, are taken today to be so very great, and the Crusaders’ very mission so imperialistic, colonialist, and wrongheaded, that those who view the period of the Crusades with unalloyed pride are hard to find. This shame, however, is itself a relatively new development; as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, schools all over the U.S. called their sports teams Crusaders, and students were aware that defense against the jihad was noble and worthwhile, even if all those who participated in it weren’t. But that was when the West was made of sterner stuff.

  Crusader states

  After the conquests of Antioch and Jerusalem, the poet Ibn al-Khayyat lamented the devastation the Crusaders had wrought and exhorted Muslims to respond:

  The polytheists have swelled in a torrent of terrifying extent.

  How long will this continue?

  Armies like mountains, coming again and again, have ranged forth from the lands of the Franks.…

  Do you not owe an obligation to God and Islam, defending thereby young men and old?

  Respond to God! Woe to you! Respond!22

  Initially, the response was not overwhelming. The Crusaders met w
ith a good deal of success at first and established four states of their own in quick succession: the County of Edessa and the Principality of Antioch in 1098, the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and the County of Tripoli in 1104. Collectively they were known in Europe as Outremer, the lands beyond the sea.

  The Crusaders’ original intention was not to establish states. Pope Urban II decreed that lands recovered from the Muslims would belong to Alexius Comnenus and the Byzantine Empire, not to the Western Europeans who conquered them. He envisioned the First Crusade as an act of Christian charity and sacrifice; hence the common parlance that a warrior joining the Crusade was “taking up the cross.”23

  Some of the Crusaders saw their struggle in the same way. Godfrey of Bouillon, the duke of Lower Lorraine, one of the more prominent European lords who took up the cross, sold off many properties in order to finance his trip, but he clearly planned to come home rather than settle in the Holy Land, as he did not give up his title or all of his holdings.24

  When the Crusade leaders met with Alexius Comnenus, he prevailed upon them to agree individually, in accord with Urban’s wishes, that any lands they conquered would revert to the Byzantine Empire. But as the Crusaders’ siege of Antioch dragged on through the winter and Muslim armies advanced north from Jerusalem, the Crusaders waited for the promised Byzantine troops to arrive. The emperor, however, received a report that the Crusaders’ situation in Antioch was hopeless and turned back his forces. The Crusaders felt betrayed and reneged on their earlier agreement to return the lands they won to Byzantine rule.