By Ron Hale
If Islam’s testimony is one of peace, then please explain why cartoonists in the 21st century are petrified of dying brutal deaths if their published caricature crosses some forbidden line? Just over a year ago, Islamic extremists killed 12 people after violently assaulting the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper in Paris. Is this violence a modern phenomenon or is there a trail of blood stretching back to antiquity?
Crusade historian Thomas F. Madden enlightens us to the ancient reality that Islam has always possessed a brooding and bloody side. In fact, he declares that the Crusades were in every way a defensive war — the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.
Madden is the former Chair of the History Department at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Director of Saint Louis University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He believes the Crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history.
The history of the world shows that Europe was busy defending itself against Arab invaders beginning in the seventh century and through the tenth, a 300-plus year siege of the West. The Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey) sparked the Crusades as the Christian emperor of Constantinople appealed to Europe for military help. In 1095, Pope Urban II called the First Crusade for the purpose of turning back Muslim conquests and the restoration of formerly Christian lands.
The steady stream of unwavering crusaders soon took control of the ancient cities of Nicaea and Antioch and eventually won over Jerusalem in 1099. You will remember that Jerusalem fell to Muslim conquest in 637 as Caliph Umar traveled to the Holy City to receive the submission of the city from Patriarch Sophronius. This conquest took place roughly 5 years after the death of Muhammed. Jerusalem was now under the control of the Rashidun Caliphate, the largest empire in history by land mass to that point. How did so much land and humanity fall under this Islamic caliphate so quickly? History delivers only one answer – the sword!
Palestine, Syria, and Egypt (once great strongholds of Christianity) quickly fell to the warriors of Islam. Islam had conquered all of Christian Africa and Spain by the eighth century. The Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey) by the eleventh century — this being the land first evangelized by the Apostle Paul. In 1004, the sixth Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim was responsible for the destruction of over thirty thousand churches and most tragically the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem
Bloodthirsty cross-crested knights riding white stallions under the orders of ambitious popes did not give birth to the Crusades. It was a defensive struggle stretching across four bloody centuries with the West finally reacting to Muslim aggression.
After decades of crusades and jihads, the last remnants of western crusaders were gone by 1291. It can be said that the Muslims won as the great Ottoman Turk empire eventually encompassed all of Northern Africa, the Near East, Arabia, and Asia Minor. It also went deep into Europe claiming Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia and came very close to capturing the great city of Vienna (the gateway to Germany).
As Islam flourished, Europe would soon face the Black Death. This plague would wipe out thousands upon thousands of people. At its lowest point, a breath of fresh air began to flow through the minds and hearts of Europeans as they experienced periods known as the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment. Europe was transformed with the study of literature, arts, languages, science, mathematics, medicine, humanism and the developing ideas of individualism, capitalism, and industrialization.
As the Islamic world struggled in letting go of the medieval world and adapting to the modern world, Europeans with new optimism, knowledge, industry, and wealth channeled these energies into travel and colonization. Europe was looking less and less to heaven and the Holy Lands and more and more to new ventures of enterprise, exploration and prosperity.
With the word “colonialism” still leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many, it has been fairly easy for Islamic and liberal historians to conflate European colonialism with much earlier Crusade history by repeating over and over that the first Crusade was Europe’s first foray into colonialism. It was not!
This conflation and misapplication of history serve as the underpinnings for being charged with various levels and forms of Islamophobia if you do not buy into the new narrative.
