The crusades: time for another?

Two of Christendom's favorite hymns, often used at services of Holy Communion, are "Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts" and "Jesus, King Most Wonderful." Both were written by the great medieval monk and theologian, Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153). Not many of those who sing Bernard's hymns know the name of their author, and even fewer know that he was the leading agitator behind the Second Crusade (1147-49). The thought might make them uncomfortable.

The Crusades do not enjoy a good press in the modern West--although the very existence of the modern West owes a great deal to them. Even among Christians the Crusades have a poor reputation. Of those bloody was fought between 1096 and 1270, chiefly but not solely in the Holy Land, Jerry Falwell, for instance, has said that they were "bloody aberrations . . . in no way representative of Biblical Christianity." He even goes so far as to classify them with some of the far-out cults and the "Jim Jones tragedy" as "aberrations of Christianity." Many Christians share Reverend Falwell's distaste.

Yet even if the Crusades were not "representative of Biblical Christianity," they were certainly representative of Christendom, of what we call Christian civilization. They inspired and enrolled many of the best men and minds of their day, including the saintly King Louis IX of France (who died of illness in 1270 during the Eighth Crusade, the last of the true medieval Crusades.)

In the long run, the Crusades were a disaster. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, established in 1029, survived for barely a century. The Fourth Crusade, in 1202-04, captured not Jerusalem but constantinople, until then the first city of Christendom and the capital of the millennial Byzantine Empire. The fall of Constantinople to Western Christians so weakened the Christian Byzantine Empire that it rapidly fell prey to the Turks and finally expired in 1453, opening the door of Europe to the Moslems, whom Byzantium had held off for eight hundred years.

The fact that the Crusades ultimately ended in failure was a setback to the prestige of the medieval papacy and indeed to the Christian Church as a whole. This is one reason why many of us who are Protestants would like to blame them on Catholicism and to act as though they were no concern of ours. And of course crusading was not justified by Biblical doctrine and is not part of the program of any serious Biblical Christian today. Nevertheless, the Crusades were a primary preoccupation of Christendom for two centuries, and Christians should not dismiss them out of hand or brush them off with blanket condemnation. It is just possible that the medieval Crusaders knew something about the region adn culture they were invading that we have forgotten.

Dar al Islam

MANY MODERN Christians reject the Crusades with horror, believing they were an attempt to make converts by force. In fact, they were an attempt to conquer the Holy Land--an attempt that was, for about a century, a complete and surprising success. The Crusades were provoked not by missionary zeal, but by religious repression of Christians in the Holy Land--residents and pilgrims--by their Moslem rulers. Should the Moslem Arabs once again take control of Israel and begin to persecute the Jews living there, would we be surprised to see world Jewry organize militarily to rescue them? In that light, the First Crusade, if not justified, is at least as defensible as many other wars waged by the nations of the world, Christian and non-Christian alike.

A second fundamental misunderstanding is the idea that the Crusades are responsible for current Moslem hostility to Christianity. Missionaries in Moslem lands often explain their meager success in these terms, and indeed, after Mehmet Ali Agca tried to kill Pope John Paul II, some extremist Moslem media defended his action on the ground that the Pope is the "King of the Crusaders" and a menace to Islam. There is no doubt that the Crusades--now more than seven hundred years in the past--furnish a pretext for Moslem hostility. But to say they are the reason for Moslem hostility is to betray a fundamental ignorance of more than a thousand years of Moslem history.

The Crusades were not the cause of Moslem aggressiveness, but a reaction to it. From the very first years of its existence, Islam has been a militaristic, aggressive religion. According to Moslem doctrine, the Moslem belongs to the dar al Islam, the house of Islam, while all infidels--including Christians and Jews--belong to the dar al harb, the house of war. It is the Moslem's duty to expand the house of Islam and to pare down the house of war. Islam conquered the richest and most populous parts of the Christian Roman Empire within a century of its founding by Mohammed in 622. The conquering Moslems were finally stopped at the gates of Constantinople in 678, but they penetrated in the West as far as northern France, where they were defeated by Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, at Tours in 732.

The successful reconquest of Jerusalem by the Frankish Crusaders in 1099 shook the Moslem world, but it took less than a century for it to recover. In the East the march of conquest against/Christendom was soon resumed. (In the West, the Spanish gradually expelled the Moslem Moors, but the liberation of Spain was not complete until 1492, almost four hundred years after the First Crusade.) The Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and turned Christendom's greatest church, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque. They overran the Balkans and much of south-central Europe until they were finally stopped for the last time at Vienna in 1683. Not only the Greeks but all the Christian peoples of southeastern Europe have a vivid memory of the horror of Turkish Moslem rule.

Christian Resurgence?

THE RISE of the European powers coincided with the protracted decline of the great Islamic nations. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Islam was once again on the defensive. The greatest psychological shock, however, was delivered not by Christians but by Jews--the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and, even more forcibly, the "Jewish" reconquest of Old Jerusalem in 1967. (For almost all Moslems, it is the Jews, not the Israelis, who recaptured Jerusalem, just as the Pope is a Christian, not a Pole.)

It is true that the Moslems--as in the era of the Crusades--have now suffered almost two centuries of reversals at Christian hands. But this means that over the 1,360 years of Christian-Moslem history, the Moslems have been clearly on the defensive for only about four centuries. Four centuries of Christian resurgence do not explain nine and a half centuries of active aggression before, during, and after the centuries of Christian resurgence.

Very few Christians think of international politics in religious terms. The Christian West has produced more sympathy for the Moslems who were massacred during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 than for all of the Lebanese Christians whose protracted suffering at Moslem hands was one of the reasons for that Israeli invasion. We do not think of Christendom as something that we should defend, much less expand.

The Moslems, however, do think of dar al Islam, the house of Islam, as something they intend to expand. The historic Crusades were in fact a long-delayed reaction to the Islamic jihad, or holy war. The jihad swept Christianity from North Africa and most of the Middle East, and threatened to sweep it from Europe as well. Christians today are not proud of the historic Crusades, nor should they be. But it is wise to remember that it took the crusading fervor, with all its faults, to stop and reverse the religiously motivated military expansion of Islam by means of the jihad.

Many serious Islamic authorities still believe in jihad. Indeed, the Islamic world is not only spiritually and morally capable of launching a fresh jihad, it is already in the process of doing so--on its own timetable, and by degrees, but a jihad nonetheless. The renewed Islamic advance against the Christian West may be said to date from the great oil embargo of 1973.

The Urbane Shah

MANY Westerners consider the Ayatollah Khomeini a crackpot and ignore his project of exporting his Islamic revolution. At the same time, we look on the oil crisis of 1973, which caused the economy of every Western, "Christian" nation to stagger, as basically a profit-making scheme. In reality, however, it was not the fanatical Ayatollah but the urbane Shah who launched the "oil weapon." And the Shah and the Ayatollah had their Islamic faith in common. Both of them were committed to reducing us, the dar al harb. And between them they have made a good start.

Israelis know that the threat of the jihad is not an idle one, the fancy of scholars in an ivory tower. Christendom, by contrast, does not feel threatened. It is, on paper at least, far richer and more powerful than the Islamic world. But Christendom has paid a high price in the past for underestimating Islam. In the seventh century, Christian Rome was far richer and stronger than Islam. It did not feel threatened either--at least not at first. The incredible ferocity of the Islamic attack, when it came, stunned and virtually overwhelmed Christendom. It barely escaped complete subjugation.

It would be folly to exaggerate the concept of a new jihad, or the threat that it poses. But it would be even greater folly to ignore it. For the Christian world today, unlike that of 1096, is hardly in spiritual shape to begin a fresh crusade.

While Christians no longer have much sympathy for the old Crusader mentality, it could be very important for us to understand it. Unless we can at least understand the Crusades--rather than simply dismissing them as "aberrations of Christianity"--we will not be able to understand the jihad, to which the Crusades were a reaction. And unless we understand the jihad, and begin to take it seriously--as seriously as we take the Communist world revolution--we may soon find ourselves at a point where nothing less than a crusade can help us.