The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (24 page)

And what about those ankle-or knee-deep rivers of blood? This was a rhetorical flourish. When the Christian chronicler and Crusade leaders boasted of this, everyone would have considered it an embellishment. In fact, such rivers were not even remotely possible. There weren’t enough people in Jerusalem to bleed that much, even if its population had swelled with refugees from the surrounding regions. The fact that the sack of Jerusalem was not out of the ordinary probably accounts for the laconic nature of the earliest Muslim accounts of the incident. Around 1160, two Syrian chroniclers, al-’Azimi and Ibn al-Qalanisi, wrote separately of the sack. Neither one offered an estimate of the numbers killed. Al-’Azimi said only that the Crusaders “turned to Jerusalem and conquered it from the hands of the Egyptians. Godfrey took it. They burned the Church of the Jews.” Ibn al-Qalanisi added a bit more detail: “The Franks stormed the town and gained possession of it. A number of the townsfolk fled to the sanctuary and a great host were killed. The Jews assembled in the synagogue, and the Franks burned it over their heads. The sanctuary was surrendered to them on guarantee of safety on 22 Sha’ban [July 14] of this year, and they destroyed the shrines and the tomb of Abraham.”
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It wasn’t until later that Muslim writers realized the propaganda value of stressing (and inflating) the death totals.

In any event, it is a matter of record that Muslim armies frequently behaved in exactly the same way when entering a conquered city. This is not to excuse the Crusaders’ conduct by pointing to similar incidents and suggesting that “everybody does it,” as Islamic apologists frequently do today when confronted with the realities of modern jihad terrorism. One atrocity does not excuse another. But it does illustrate that the Crusaders’ behavior in Jerusalem was consistent with that of other armies of the period—since all states subscribed to the same notions of siege and resistance.

Indeed, in 1148, Muslim commander Nur ed-Din did not hesitate to order the killing of every Christian in Aleppo. In 1268, when the jihad forces of the Mamluk sultan Baybars took Antioch from the Crusaders, Baybars was annoyed to find that the Crusader ruler, Count Bohemond VI, had already left the city. He wrote to Bohemond to make sure he knew what his men had done in Antioch:

You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next, your palace lying unrecognizable, the Church of St. Paul and that of the Cathedral of St. Peter pulled down and destroyed; then you would have said, “Would that I were dust, and that no letter had ever brought me such tidings!”
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Most notorious of all may be the jihadists’ entry into Constantinople on May 29, 1453, when they—like the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099—finally broke through a prolonged resistance to their siege. Here the rivers of blood ran again, as historian Steven Runciman notes. The Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.”
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Like Crusaders, who violated the sanctuary of both synagogue and mosque, Muslims raided monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundered private houses. They entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

When the slaughter and pillaging was finished, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the wretched ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved and many martyred.

PC Myth: The Muslim leader Saladin was more merciful and magnanimous than the Crusaders

One of the most famous figures of the Crusades is the Muslim warrior Saladin, who reunited much of the Islamic world and inflicted great damage on the Crusaders. In our age, Saladin has become the prototype of the tolerant, magnanimous Muslim warrior, historical “proof” of the nobility of Islam and even of its superiority to wicked, Western, colonialist Christianity. In
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
, Amin Maalouf portrays the Crusaders as little more than savages, even gorging themselves on the flesh of those they have murdered. But Saladin! “He was always affable with visitors, insisting that they stay to eat, treating them with full honours, even if they were infidels, and satisfying all their requests. He could not bear to let someone who had come to him depart disappointed, and there were those who did not hesitate to take advantage of this quality. One day, during a truce with the Franj [Franks], the ‘Brins,’ lord of Antioch, arrived unexpectedly at Saladin’s tent and asked him to return a district that the sultan had taken four years earlier. And he agreed!”
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The lovable lug! If asked, he might have given away the entire Holy Land!

Just Like Today: The moral double standard

B
ill Clinton suggested that the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 was the ultimate cause of the September 11 attacks. Yet the Muslims’ sack of Constantinople in 1453 does not burn in anyone’s memory. No president has pointed to it as the root cause of any modern-day terrorist acts. Indeed, it is less well known today than another sack of Constantinople: the one perpetrated by misguided Crusaders in 1204.

This is one illustration of the strange, unacknowledged moral double standard that PC types use when evaluating behavior by Westerners and non-Westerners: Any number of massacres and atrocities can be forgiven non-Western, non-white, non-Christian people, but misdeeds by Christian (or even post-Christian) Westerners remain seared in the world’s collective memory. The Abu Ghraib prison scandals received horrified attention worldwide in 2004 and 2005, often from the same people who glossed over or ignored worse evils of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Hamas. It’s a tacit admission of a fact that the PC establishment stoutly denies in every other case: Christianity does teach a higher moral standard than Islam, and more is expected not only of observant Christians, but of those who have imbibed these high principles by living in the societies molded by them.

In one sense it’s true: Saladin set out to conquer Jerusalem in 1187 because Crusaders under the command of Reynald of Chatillon were taking a page from the Prophet Muhammad’s book and raiding caravans, in this case, Muslim caravans. The Christian rulers of Jerusalem ordered Reynald to stop because they knew that his actions endangered the very survival of their kingdom. Yet he persisted; finally, Saladin, who had been looking for a reason to go to war with the Christians, found one in Reynald’s raids.
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A lot is made of the fact that when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in October 1187, he treated the Christians with magnanimity—in sharp contrast to the behavior of the Crusaders in 1099. However, the real Saladin was not the proto-multiculturalist, early version of Nelson Mandela that he is made out to be today. When his forces decisively defeated the Crusaders at Hattin on July 4, 1187, he ordered the mass execution of his Christian opponents. According to his secretary, Imad ed-Din, Saladin “ordered that they should be beheaded [in accordance with Qur’an 47:4, “When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike their necks”], choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.”
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Also, when Saladin and his men entered Jerusalem later that year, their magnanimity was actually pragmatism. He had initially planned to put all the Christians in the city to death. However, when the Christian commander inside Jerusalem, Balian of Ibelin, threatened in turn to destroy the city and kill all the Muslims there before Saladin could get inside, Saladin relented—although once inside the city, he did enslave many of the Christians who could not afford to buy their way out.
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PC Myth: Crusades were called against Jews in addition to Muslims

It is unfortunately true that Crusaders targeted Jews on several occasions. Some groups of Crusaders allowed themselves to be diverted from the mission Pope Urban had given them. Stirred up by anti-Semitic preachers, one contingent of men who were making their way east for the First Crusade instead turned to terrorize Jews in Europe, massacring many. Count Emicho of Leiningen and his followers advanced through the Rhineland, killing and plundering Jews in five German cities: Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. Some of the bishops in those areas tried to prevent these massacres, and eventually Count Emicho and his followers met their end when he tried to extend his pogrom into Hungary. However, the damage was done; news of his exploits spread to the Middle East and led many Jews to ally with the Muslims and fight against the Crusaders when they arrived. Fifty years later, another group in the Rhineland, bound for the Second Crusade, began massacring Jews again.

All this was inexcusable, as well as being an incalculable error of judgment. The Crusaders would have been much wiser to see the Jews, fellow dhimmis, as their natural allies in the resistance to the Islamic jihad. The Muslims treated Jews and Christians more or less the same way: badly. It is unfortunate that neither group ever saw the other as a companion in the sufferings of dhimmitude and a fellow fighter against its oppressions. However, even today, eight centuries after the last Crusade, that kind of thinking is rare, so it is perhaps unfair to expect it of the Crusaders.

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy…. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others?”

Jesus (Matthew 5:7, 46–7)

“Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.”

Qur’an 48:29

In any case, was the mistreatment of Jews a fundamental feature of the Crusades in general? Not according to the historical record. Pope Urban’s call for the First Crusade at the Council of Claremont says nothing about Jews, and churchmen were Emicho’s most formidable opponents. In fact, Urban himself condemned Emicho’s attacks. Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the chief organizers of the Second Crusade, went to the Rhineland and personally stopped the persecution of the Jews, declaring: “Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. ‘Not for their destruction do I pray,’ it says.”
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Popes and bishops repeatedly called for the mistreatment of the Jews to end.

Yet even after the sack of Jerusalem and massacre of the Jews, during the Crusader period Jews in the Middle East generally preferred to live in areas controlled by the Franks, despite the undeniable hostility the Christians from Europe had for them.
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They knew all too well that what was in store for them in Muslim lands was even worse.