Thomas Madden on the Crusades and Today

ST. LOUIS, Missouri, OCT. 12, 2004 (Zenit) - Present-day tension between the West and Muslim countries has very little to do with the Crusades, says a historian.

In fact, Thomas Madden, chair of the history department at St. Louis University and author of "A Concise History of the Crusades," contends that, from the Muslim perspective, the Crusades were not worth noticing. That changed when 19th-century revisionists started to recast the Crusades as imperialist wars, he says.

Part 1 of this interview appeared Monday.

Q: Do you think the struggle between the West and the Muslim world is in any way a reaction to the Crusades?

Madden: No. That may seem a strange answer when you consider that Osama bin Laden and other Islamists often refer to Americans as "Crusaders."

It's important to remember, though, that during the Middle Ages -- really up until the late 16th century -- the superpower of the Western world was Islam. Muslim civilizations were wealthy, sophisticated and immensely powerful. The West was backward and relatively weak.

It is noteworthy that with the exception of the First Crusade virtually every other Crusade launched by the West -- and there were hundreds -- was unsuccessful.

The Crusades may have slowed Muslim expansionism, but they in no way stopped it. Muslim empires would continue to expand into Christian territories, conquering the Balkans, much of Eastern Europe and even the greatest Christian city in the world, Constantinople.

From the Muslim perspective the Crusades were not worth noticing. If you had asked someone in the Muslim world about the Crusades in the 18th century he or she would have known nothing about them. They were important to Europeans because they were massive efforts that failed.

However, during the 19th century, when Europeans began conquering and colonizing Middle Eastern countries, many historians -- in particular nationalist or royalist French writers -- began to cast the Crusades as Europe's first attempt to bring the fruits of Western civilization to the backward Muslim world. In other words, the Crusades were morphed into imperialist wars.

Those histories were taught in the colonial schools and became the accepted view in the Middle East and beyond. In the 20th century, imperialism was discredited. Islamists and some Arab nationalists then seized on the colonial construction of the Crusades, claiming that the West was responsible for their woes because they had preyed on Muslims ever since the Crusades.

It is often said that people in the Middle East have long memories; it is true. But in the case of the Crusades, they have a recovered memory: one that was manufactured for them by their European conquerors.

Q: Are there any similarities between the Crusades and the war against terror today?

Madden: Aside from the fact that soldiers in both wars want to serve something greater than themselves that they hold dear and long to return home when it is over, I see no other similarities between the medieval Crusades and the war against terror. Motivations in a post-Enlightenment secular society are very different from those in the medieval world.

Q: How are the Crusades different from Islam's jihad, or other wars of religion?

Madden: The fundamental purpose of jihad is to expand the Dar al-Islam -- the Abode of Islam -- into the Dar al-Harb -- the Abode of War. In other words, jihad is expansionistic, seeking to conquer non-Muslims and place them under Muslim rule.

Those who are then conquered are given a simple choice. For those who are not People of the Book -- in other words, those who are not Christians or Jews -- the choice is convert to Islam or die. For those who are People of the Book, the choice is submit to Muslim rule and Islamic law or die. The expansion of Islam, therefore, was directly linked to the military successes of jihad.

The Crusades were something very different. From its beginnings Christianity has always forbidden coerced conversion of any kind. Conversion by the sword, therefore, was not possible for Christianity. Unlike jihad, the purpose of the Crusades was neither to expand the Christian world nor to expand Christianity through forced conversions.

Instead, the Crusades were a direct and belated response to centuries of Muslim conquests of Christian lands. The immediate event that sparked the First Crusade was the Turkish conquest of all of Asia Minor in the 1070s through 1090s.

The First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II in 1095 in response to an urgent plea for help from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Urban called the knights of Christendom to come to the aid of their Eastern brethren.

Asia Minor was Christian. ...