Book Reviews

(2) Henry Ansgar Kelly

Dr Anthony McRoy 

July 2006

Dining with Terrorists: Meetings with the world’s most wanted militants 

June 2006

 عماد خدوري و أديب يونس

The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

A Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam

Crusades of ‘Liberation’ – From Urban II to Bush

 The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading: A Short History,
by Jonathan & Riley-Smith Continuum, London, 227pp

The First Crusade: A New History,
by Thomas Asbridge, Free Press, 408pp

Dr Anthony McRoy

This review series on the Crusades began by referring to Bush’s reference to ‘this crusade’. Of course, modern American actions are not religiously-motivated. Rather, security, control of resources (i.e. oil) and according to Bush and Co., the ideological goal of spreading freedom and are its aims. Hence, according to the neo-cons, the US presence in Iraq is not an ‘occupation’, but rather ‘liberation’ – though how ‘liberated’ Fallujah residents feel is questionable. As we read these two books, substituting ‘ideological’ for ‘theological’ motivation, we discover amazing parallels between Bush’s crusade and that of Pope Urban II – in many ways, the former is following in the latter’s footsteps.

Jonathan Riley-Smith is rightly regarded as one of the foremost experts on the Crusades, and this short book underlines why. ‘Lucid’, ‘expertly researched’, and ‘informative’ are all proper descriptions. Understanding the Crusades necessitates entering the Mediæval world, an age of faith (and superstition), where chivalry, the desire to please God and attain salvation often dovetailed. When Pope Leo IX (1049-54) was fighting the Normans in southern Italy (not only Anglo-Saxons had trouble with those pesky Normans), ‘he fostered the cult of martyrdom of those troops who had fallen in battle’, and ‘offered… absolution from their sins’, illustrating how the idea of warfare under the command of the Papacy promised heaven to those Catholics even fighting their co-religionists, p. 5. Theological justification was partly found in the Old Testament wars for God, even though the New Testament has no concept of sacred violence, p. 6, which is why crusading was anathema to Protestants such as Martin Luther.

Pope Gregory VII, in reaction to the Turkish victory at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, originally summoned Catholics to ‘to give their lives to “liberate” their brothers in the East’, p. 7. He even suggested carrying on to Jerusalem. Urban II was further influenced by Catholic victories against Muslims in Spain and Sicily, p. 16. The motif of ‘liberation’ against ‘tyranny’, so frequently employed by Bush in his modern crusade, was also used by Urban: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that “liberation” was the word most frequently used by him when justifying the need to crusade’, p. 17. In his statement prior to the US Presidential elections, Bin Laden ridiculed Bush’s comment that Al-Qaida’s motivation is hatred of ‘freedom’: ‘If so, then let him explain to us why we don’t strike for example – Sweden?’. Of course, ‘freedom’ for neo-cons means ‘freedom’ under US domination – another parallel with Urban, for whom ‘”liberation” had meant freedom under the popes…’, p. 17.

In practical terms this meant ‘freeing of the eastern churches… and the freeing of the city of Jerusalem…’, p. 18. This is another parallel with Bush, who is influenced by a sect within Evangelical Protestantism called ‘Dispensational Premillenialism’, progenitor of ‘Christian Zionism’, characterised by men like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, the latter notorious for anti-Arab racist and Islamophobic comments. One failure of many Muslim commentators is to distinguish Protestantism from Catholicism in their treatment of the Crusades, and another is to recognise that not all Evangelicals are Christian Zionists. Like the latter, crusaders saw their actions as fulfilment of prophecy, p. 142 and a text that actually refers to the Roman siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, Luke 21:24 (Jerusalem will be trampled by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled’, ‘Gentiles’ in this context referring to the Romans), encouraged this view, a text often taken out of context by modern Christian Zionists.

Another parallel is that just as Bush claims he is fighting an all-out ‘War on Terror’ where for example he does not distinguish between HAMAS and Hezbollah on the one side and Al-Qaida on the other (although he never expelled New York Republican Congressman Peter King, infamous for both Islamophobic comments and support for Sinn Fein), so Urban saw no major difference between ‘liberating’ people in Spain from those in Palestine: ‘in our days [God] has fought through Christian men in Asia against the Turks and in Europe against the Moors’, p. 20.

However, there is also an ironic parallel with modern Islamist guerrilla jihad – the concept of baraka (supernatural blessing/power) in regard to weapons. The assassin of Sadat reportedly had Bismillah Al-Muntaqim (in the name of God the Avenger) inscribed on his gun. Similarly, the common Mediæval Catholic belief in that Jerusalem and its environs had ‘absorbed the virtus, the sacred power, of the prophets and …above all Christ himself…’, p. 21. There is no Biblical basis for such a belief, which is why Evangelicals like myself reject it, but it certainly fired the imagination of crusaders. The Crusaders under siege in Antioch were inspired to victory by ‘discovering’ the Holy Lance that slew Christ on the Cross; other miraculous phenomena allegedly accompanied the Crusaders – dreams, visions of Christ and the saints, celestial phenomena, p. 95ff – again, much of the same is claimed today by Christian Zionists. It can be seen how relevant Riley-Smith’s book is for understanding not only the past, but also the terrible present.

Asbridge is a brave man, attempting to write a book about a subject much traversed especially in the light of Riley-Smith’s able scholarship, but his courage is well-placed, because his book is nothing short of brilliant. His excellent book more than readable, it is actually gripping. The sooner he follows the footsteps of Starkey and Schama as a TV historian presenting a series on the Crusades the better. He is particularly good on the siege of Antioch by the Crusaders and their own siege by the Muslims, p. 153. Normally such an account would be dry and open to a charge of excessive detail, but Asbridge has that rare gift in a scholar of making history read like a novel. His treatment of the lance story is especially good, since he shows that it is an exaggeration to see its discovery as the turning point of the siege, p. 226. Rather, it seems to be their extraordinary devotion to their faith and their courage in the face of being abandoned by the Byzantine emperor, and their outrage at the Muslim leader Kerbogha’s demand that they surrender and convert to Islam or face death or captivity, p. 229. Starving, facing an overwhelmingly more powerful force, presented with the options of apostasy, death or enslavement, the crusaders decided to fight.

Perhaps this is another parallel with the present. The 9/11 Commission Report claimed that in Al-Qaida’s view, the only thing America could do to end the jihad is convert to Islam, whilst Premier Blair has claimed that the ideology behind Al-Qaida is satisfied with nothing short of the ‘physical elimination’ of Westerners. An elementary study of Al-Qaida communiqués reveal this to be untrue. Is it really possible that the vast resources of the US and UK governments misunderstood those communiqués? Or is it that those governments realised that by asserting this claim, American and British voters would conclude that like the besieged Westerners in Antioch that they had no realistic option other than to fight? The difference is that Kerbogha’s demand was genuine, and it was a catastrophic tactical error that led to his defeat.

Many aspects of Asbridge’s book are illuminating. For example, the internal rivalry between the crusaders, notably that between Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse, that sapped crusader strength and delayed advance to Jerusalem, p. 243ff. More startling is the ferocious sack of Marrat, with Crusaders employing their own version of WMDs, using ‘fire and sulphur flames’ to smoke out Muslims hiding in caves, then torturing them to death, followed by the victorious Franks then starving to the point they resorted to cannibalism, p. 274. The fall of Jerusalem was characterised by a general massacre of the Muslim and Jewish populace, including women and children, p. 316ff, and slicing open the bodies of dead Muslims to see if they had swallowed valuables. To a lesser extent current Coalition military policy in Iraq resembles this, with the massacre of hundreds at Fallujah, the revelation by The Lancet that around 100,000 Iraqis have been killed, and the plunder of Iraqi oil by US firms close to the Bush Administration.

Helpfully, Asbridge usually employs the word ‘Muslim’ rather than ‘Saracen’. He also notes that both Crusaders and Muslims often had a ‘pragmatic’ attitude to each other, rather than simply hostility, p. 338. Two other points in his book are worthy of consideration. He notes how the Crusaders – not just unruly peasants, but rather led by their knights, attacked European Jewish communities, p. 84ff, as the infidel in their midst. Western Muslims suffered victimising attacks after 9/11; it can be seen that this in some way echoes the past. The other point he observes is that how some Middle Eastern Christian communities aided the Crusaders, after they harassment by their Muslim overlords. In Afghanistan America was able to recruit help from non-Pashtuns and Shia, the latter persecuted by the Taliban, and in Iraq they were helped by the formerly oppressed Kurds. This shows the necessity of Muslim states avoiding all forms of communal discrimination, because it allows the modern Crusaders to imitate their forebears. Asbrige’s final quote is poignant: ‘By 1300, the memory of the crusade as a war engendered by fanatical hatred had become embedded in the collective consciousness of western and eastern society…. Christendom and Islam had been set on the path to enduring conflict’, p. 339. As Bin Laden’s comments demonstrate, that consciousness and conflict still endure.

The Wisdom of the Arabs

Compiled by Suheil Bushrui

Dr Anthony McRoy

This delightful little book explores a feature of Arab culture too often ignored in the West – the cultural contributions of the Arabs in terms of wisdom. Under heading of religion, virtue, self-restraint, daily life, leadership and art and learning, the book draws on Arab folk tradition and literature, such as ‘Arabian Nights’, The Qur’an and Hadith to the more modern poetry of Kahlil Gibran. Of particular note is the section ‘The Arabs’:  from the Hadith we learn ‘Arab identity is in the tongue; whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab’;  Umar ibn Al-Khattab tells us ‘The Arabic language creates a balanced mind and enriches human values’; Al-Tawhidi declares: ‘The Arabs have bravery, hospitable reception, fidelity, gallantry, generosity, responsibility to obligation, oratory and a gift for explanation.’

An ideal gift for a special occasion.  

September 11: Religious Perspectives on the Causes and Consequences

edited by Ian Markham and Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’

Dr Anthony McRoy

 Jointly authored by a Christian theologian and a Muslim Palestinian, this book is a compendium of articles by scholars in the field of religion and social sciences into the background of 9/11. Its main theme is to provide complementary religious perceptions, but that should not deter the secular reader from exploring this interesting and informative book. Among the issues examined are those of how a free society should respond to terrorism, as in the article by Heidi Hadsell ‘Internal Security and Civil Liberties: Moral Dilemmas and Debates’. The article by Heidi Gehman, ‘The Terrorist Attack on America’ is especially good, emphasising that ‘Many Muslims feel that their own governments are controlled…by U.S. foreign policy…’, p. 15, and then comments on the role of the US-Israeli alliance. Another instructive article is that by Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’, ‘A Critical assessment of Modern Islamic History’, which observes that Palestine is ‘the most central question facing the contemporary Arab world.’ p. 40. If only President Bush would take this to heart.  

The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

Roy Mottahedeh

Based on first-hand accounts of eyewitnesses, this book examines the background to the Iranian revolution. Although Iran is not Arab, the fact that Islam and later its Shi’ite version were both introduced to Iran by Arabs, the impact of the Revolution is reviving Islamism in Arab countries, and the common causes of anti-Western radicalism in Iran and the Arab world. We learn that the Arab immigrants to Iran after the conquest extended ‘irrigation, grow cash crops, and thereby establish the town of Qom…’, the major Iranian holy city, p. 21. Another Arab contribution to the events of 1979 occurred about twenty years previously, with the events of the Algerian war of independence: ‘They had all followed the Algerian war with close and concerned attention’, p. 113, especially an incident when French troops deliberately burned alive hundreds of Algerian men, women and children sheltering in a cave. One especially interesting section is on the CIA coup against Premier Mossadegh in 1953, p.129ff, an event little-known in the West, which occurred after he nationalised the Anglo-Iran Oil Company (now BP). The themes of the rest of the book are well-known, especially how the Americans fawned on the tyrant Shah they had imposed on Iran and refused to listen to objections – something that will resonate with Arabs everywhere.  

A Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam

Gordon Newby

 Dr Anthony McRoy

The title leaves us with little to say except that with the explosion of interest in Islam since 9/11, Westerners are increasingly exposed to Arabic religious terminology and Islamic concepts in their daily media, some of which can be obscure. It refers to both ideas and personalities, such as ‘dar al-ahad’ (realm of treaty) and the ‘Ikhwan’, making them accessible and simple to the Western reader. Whilst scholars would use more extensive volumes, this is ideal reference for the average layman.