The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (8 page)

The jihad also did not prevent Muslim governments from occasionally seeking Christian allies against Muslim rivals, even during the Crusades.

CHAPTER III

F
ROM
C
RUSADERS TO
I
MPERIALISTS

The Crusades figure very prominently in modern Middle Eastern consciousness and discourse, both of Arab nationalists and of Islamic fundamentalists, notably Usama bin Ladin. It was not always so.

The capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099
C.E.
was a triumph for Christendom and a disaster for the Muslims and also for the Jews in the city. To judge by the Arabic historiography of the period, it aroused very little interest in the region. Appeals by the local Muslims to Damascus and Baghdad for help remained unanswered, and the newly established Crusader principalities from Antioch to Jerusalem soon fitted into the game of Levantine politics, with cross-religious alliances in a pattern of rivalries between and among Muslim and Christian princes.

The great Counter-Crusade which was ultimately to defeat and expel the Crusaders did not begin until almost a century later. Its immediate cause was the activities of a freebooting Crusader leader, Reynald of Châtillon, who held the fortress of Kerak, in present-day South Jordan, between 1176 and 1187
C.E.,
and used it to launch a series of raids against Muslim caravans and commerce in the adjoining regions, including the Hijaz. Historians of the Crusades are probably right in saying that Reynald’s motive was primarily economic, in other words, the desire for loot. But Muslims saw his campaigns as a provocation and a challenge directed against the holy places of Islam. In 1182, in violation of an agreement between the Crusader king of Jerusalem and the Muslim leader Saladin, he attacked and looted Muslim caravans, including one of pilgrims bound for Mecca. Even more outrageous, from a Muslim point of view, was his threat to Arabia and, notably, a buccaneering expedition in the Red Sea, involving attacks on Muslim shipping and on the Hijaz ports which served Mecca and Medina. It was these events that led directly to Saladin’s proclamation of a jihad against the Crusaders—a vivid illustration of the central importance of Arabia in the Islamic perception.

The victories of Saladin and his capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 have long been and are today a source of inspiration to Arab leaders. Saddam Hussein refers frequently to two previous rulers of Iraq whom he claims as predecessors in his mission—Saladin, who ended the Western menace of his day by defeating and evicting the Crusaders, and Nebuchadnezzar, who dealt expeditiously and conclusively with the Zionist problem. On October 8, 2002, the prime minister of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in a speech to the French National Assembly, told how Saladin was able “to defeat the Crusaders in Galilee and liberate Jerusalem.” This interesting use of the word
liberate
by a French prime minister to describe Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders may be a reflection of present-day realignments or, alternatively, a case of extreme political correctness. In some other countries this formulation might be ascribed to ignorance of history, but surely not in France.

Even in Christian Europe, Saladin was justly celebrated and admired for his chivalrous and generous treatment of his defeated enemies. This treatment, however, did not extend to Reynald of Châtillon. The great Arab historian Ibn al-Athir explains the circumstances. “Twice, [said Saladin,] I had made a vow to kill him if I had him in my hands; once when he tried to march on Mecca and Medina, and again when he treacherously captured the caravan [bound for the Hijaz].”
¹
After Saladin’s great victory, when many of the Crusader princes and chieftains were taken captive and later released, he separated Reynald of Châtillon from the rest, and killed and beheaded him with his own hands.

After the success of the jihad and the recapture of Jerusalem, Saladin and his successors seem to have lost interest in the city, and in 1229 one of them even ceded Jerusalem to the emperor Frederick II as part of a general compromise agreement between the Muslim ruler and the Crusaders. It was retaken in 1244, after the Crusaders tried to make it a purely Christian city. After a long period of relative obscurity, interest in the city was reawakened in the nineteenth century, first by the quarrels of the European powers over the custody of the Christian holy places, and then by the new Jewish immigration.

The same period saw a first awakening of interest among Muslims in the Crusades, which had aroused remarkably little concern at the time they occurred. The vast and rich Arabic historiography of the period duly records the Crusaders’ arrival, their battles, and the states that they established but shows little or no awareness of the nature and purposes of their venture. The words Crusade and Crusader do not even occur in the Arabic historiography of the time, in which the Crusaders are referred to as the infidels, the Christians, or most frequently, the Franks, a general term for Catholic—and later also Protestant—European Christians, to distinguish them from their Orthodox and Eastern coreligionists. Awareness of the Crusades as a distinctive historical phenomenon dates from the nineteenth century, and the translation of European books on history. Since then, there is a new perception of the Crusades as an early prototype of the expansion of European imperialism into the Islamic world. A more accurate description would present them as a long-delayed, very limited, and finally ineffectual response to the jihad. The Crusades ended in failure and defeat, and were soon forgotten in the lands of Islam, but later European efforts to resist and reverse the Muslim advance into Christendom were more successful, and initiated what became a series of painful defeats on the frontiers of the Islamic world.

Under the medieval Arab caliphate, and again under the Persian and Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world, and for most of the Middle Ages, Christendom was on the defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these other setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding both shipping and seashores as far away as England, Ireland, and, on occasion, even Madeira and Iceland. The corsairs were greatly helped in their work by Europeans who, for one reason or another, settled in North Africa and showed them how to build, man, and operate oceangoing vessels in the North Sea and even in the Atlantic. This phase did not last very long.

Then came the great change. The second Turkish siege of Vienna, in 1683, ended in total failure followed by headlong retreat—an entirely new experience for the Ottoman armies. This defeat, suffered by what was then the major military power of the Muslim world, gave rise to a new debate, which in a sense has been going on ever since. The argument began among the Ottoman military, political, and later intellectual elite as a discussion of two questions: Why had the once ever-victorious Ottoman armies been vanquished by the despised Christian enemy? And how could they restore their previous dominance? In time the debate spread from the elites to wider circles, from Turkey to many other countries, and dealt with an ever-widening range of issues.

There was good reason for concern. Defeat followed defeat, and Christian European forces, having liberated their own lands, pursued their former invaders back into their own lands in Asia and Africa. Even small European powers such as Holland and Portugal were able to build vast empires in the East and to establish a dominant role in trade. In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried eighty-three guns besides other weapons. . . . It was a wonder of the age, the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”
²
Another source of wonderment was the sovereign who sent the ambassador. “The ruler of the island of England is a woman who governs her inherited realm . . . with complete power.”

A further detail, not mentioned by the Ottoman historian, was also of some importance. The English ambassador in question was indeed formally appointed by Queen Elizabeth but was chosen and maintained not by the English government but by a trading corporation—a useful arrangement at a time when the major concern of the Western world in the Middle East was business. Indeed, it was the rapid and innovative technological and economic expansion of the West—the factory, the oceangoing cargo ship, the joint stock company—that marked the beginning of the new era. Western European ships, built for the Atlantic, could easily outperform ships built for the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, both in war and in commerce, and that commerce was further strengthened by two Western habits—cooperation and competition. By the eighteenth century traditional Middle Eastern products such as coffee and sugar were being grown in the new Western colonies in both Asia and the Americas and exported to the Middle East by Western merchants and corporations. Even Muslim pilgrims traveling from South and Southeast Asia to the holy cities in Arabia sometimes booked passage on European ships, since they were quicker, cheaper, safer, and more comfortable.

For most historians, Middle Eastern and Western alike, the conventional beginning of modern history in the Middle East dates from 1798, when the French Revolution, in the person of a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte, landed in Egypt. Within a remarkably short time, General Bonaparte and his small expeditionary force were able to conquer, occupy, and rule the country. There had been, before this, attacks, retreats, and losses of territory on the remote frontiers, where the Turks and the Persians faced Austria and Russia. But for a small Western force to invade one of the heartlands of Islam was a profound shock. The departure of the French was, in a sense, an even greater shock. They were forced to leave Egypt not by the Egyptians, nor by their suzerains the Turks, but by a small squadron of the British Royal Navy, commanded by a young admiral named Horatio Nelson. This was the second bitter lesson the Muslims had to learn: Not only could a Western power arrive, invade, and rule at will but only another Western power could get it out.

Imperialism is a particularly important theme in the Middle Eastern and more especially the Islamic case against the West. For them, the word
imperialism
has a special meaning. This word is, for example, never used by Muslims of the great Muslim empires—the first one founded by the Arabs, the later ones by the Turks, who conquered vast territories and populations and incorporated them in the House of Islam. It was perfectly legitimate for Muslims to conquer and rule Europe and Europeans and thus enable them—but not compel them—to embrace the true faith. It was a crime and a sin for Europeans to conquer and rule Muslims and, still worse, to try to lead them astray. In the Muslim perception, conversion to Islam is a benefit to the convert and a merit in those who convert him. In Islamic law, conversion from Islam is apostasy—a capital offense for both the one who is misled and the one who misleads him. On this question, the law is clear and unequivocal. If a Muslim renounces Islam, even if a new convert reverts to his previous faith, the penalty is death. In modern times the concept and practice of
takfir,
recognizing and denouncing apostasy, has been greatly widened. It is not unusual in extremist and fundamentalist circles to decree that some policy, action, or even utterance by a professing Muslim is tantamount to apostasy, and to pronounce a death sentence on the culprit. This was the principle invoked in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of President Sadat and of many others.

European activities in the Islamic lands went through several phases. The first was commercial expansion and, as Muslims see it, exploitation of them and their countries, both as markets and as sources of raw materials. Then came armed invasion and conquest, by which European powers established effective domination over important areas of the Islamic world—the Russians in the Caucasus and Transcaucasian lands and later in Central Asia; the British in India; the British and the Dutch in Malaysia and Indonesia; and in a final phase, the British and French in the Middle East and North Africa. In these places the imperialists ruled for varying periods—in some, as in Southeast Asia and India, for centuries; in others, as in the Arab lands of the Middle East, for relatively short interludes.

In either case, they left their mark. In the Arab world the period of Anglo-French imperial rule began with the French in Algeria (1830) and the British in Aden (1839); continued with the British occupation of Egypt (1882), the extension of French control to Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1911) and of British influence to the Persian Gulf; and achieved its peak with the division of the Ottoman Arab provinces of the Fertile Crescent between the two major West European Empires. This time the newly acquired territories were not simply annexed, in the traditional style, as colonies or dependencies. They were assigned to Britain and France to administer as mandatory powers, under the authority of the League of Nations, with the explicit task of grooming them for independence. This was a very brief episode, beginning after World War I, and ending after World War II, when the mandates were terminated and the mandated territories became independent. The greater part of the Arabian peninsula remained outside the imperial domains.

Nevertheless the impact of imperialism was seen as immense and, in the eyes of most people in the region, wholly harmful. The impact and the damage were both no doubt considerable, but probably less extensive and less one-sided than the nationalist mythologies would have it. There were after all some benefits—infrastructure, public services, educational systems, as well as some social changes, notably the abolition of slavery and the considerable reduction though not elimination of polygamy. The contrasts can be seen very clearly by comparing the countries that suffered under the imperial yoke, like Egypt and Algeria, with those that never lost their independence, like Arabia and Afghanistan. In Saudi Arabia universities were late and few. At the present day, for an estimated population of 21 million, there are eight universities—one more than the seven institutions of higher education established by the Palestinians since the Israeli occupation of the territories in 1967. Slavery was not abolished by law in Saudi Arabia until 1962, and the subjugation of women remains in full effect.