Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page B

the enemy. In fact, the word Saracen started to be used for anyone who was an enemy. Even other Christians were sometimes cursed as “Saracens.”
    The First Crusade, the only militarily successful one of the six Christian invasions, took the Muslims by surprise. They had been fighting each other and had not expected an attack from Western Europe. Searching for explanations as to why they were being assaulted by a people from another part of the world, Muslims turned to mysticism and astrology, noting that Saturn was in Virgo.
    Until then, lesser jihad had been the duty of a community but not necessarily all individuals, leaving a choice for those who did not wish to fight. But during the Crusades, Muslim leaders declaredthat when Islam is attacked, jihad is the duty of every individual.
    After the Crusades the interpretation of jihad became hard line. Ebu's Su'ud wrote in the sixteenth century that peace with infidels was impossible and fighting should be permanent and unending.
    The Crusades were about power, not religion. And the Muslims understood this. Initially, they began looking for ties and seeking negotiations with the four new Mediterranean kingdoms the Christians had established in the Middle East. But slowly they built their own war propaganda machine. Just as the Christians established a term for their enemy—the Saracens—the Muslims began calling all the Christian intruders al-frani, the Franks. Clerics began teaching that defeat at the hands of the Franks was God's punishment for their failure to carry out their religious duties. And one of those duties was jihad. By reviving the culture of jihad the Saracens were able to build a counter-Crusade and drive out the Franks. It has happened throughout history: peoples who go to war tend to become mirror images of their enemy—another lesson.
    In the thirteenth century, Muslims became the enemies of Islam when Mongols, who had converted to Islam, invaded and sacked the Islamic cultural center, Baghdad, in 1258. In the midst of the Mongol disaster, a brilliant young Sunni named Ibn Taymiyah, sometimes known as Shaykh-al-Islam, started writing the first of what was to be 350 works on Islamic law. He completely rejected greater jihad. To him jihad meant violent warfare, and he insisted that it was the obligation of all fit males to fight. It is Ibn Taymiyah who is quoted today by Osama bin Laden and other “Islamic militants.”
    The Christian world did have a few voices of moderation. Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar from England, argued that Muslims should be converted rather than killed and that if the Church treated them well they would gladly convert. An Italian theologian of the same period, Thomas Aquinas, argued that the evil done by Muslims did not justify killing them. While these were sincere pleas for nonviolence, they were completely acceptingof the false premises with which the violence had been justified. Bacon was agreeing that Islam had to be eliminated, and Aquinas still believed that Muslims necessarily did evil.
    Most warmakers try to claim that theirs is a holy war, a just war, that God is on their side, because their cause is just. In the United States the often-repeated inanity, “God bless America,” though technically a request, is generally used as a declaration, God blesses America. And war is seldom far behind such assertions—a holy war at that.
    It is not surprising that the counter-Crusade and its war cries continue to echo in the Muslim world. Islamic militants from Palestinian Hamas to Libya's Muammar Qaddafi use Crusade and counter-Crusade imagery in speeches to rally the faithful. What is more surprising is that in the West, where the Crusades represent a humanitarian atrocity, an unconscionable act of aggression, a military failure, and one of the worst mistakes in the history of international relations, they also remain a model. Images of the Middle Ages and the Crusades in the movies, video games, and