The Crusades in the Modern World

Engaging the Crusades, Volume Two

Mike Horswell, Akil N Awan, Mike Horswell, Akil N Awan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138066076
• eBook ISBN: 9781351250467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Engaging the Crusades is a series of volumes which offer windows into a newly-emerging field of historical study: the memory and legacy of the crusades. Together these volumes examine the reasons behind the enduring resonance of the crusades and present the memory of crusading in the modern period as a productive, exciting and much needed area of investigation.

The Crusades in the Modern World evaluates a broad range of contemporary uses of the crusades and crusading to answer key questions about crusading today and how the crusades are understood. Each chapter demonstrates how perceptions of the crusades are deployed in causes and conflicts which mark the present, exploring the ways in which those perceptions are constructed and received. Throughout the book there is a focus on the use of crusading rhetoric and imagery to frame and justify violence, including crusading discourses employed by both Islamic fundamentalists and far-right terrorists, and the related deployment of 'Reconquista' rhetoric by populist movements in Europe. The use of the crusades for building national identity is also a recurring theme, while chapters on academic engagement with the crusades and on the ways in which Wikipedia articles on the crusades are created and contested highlight the ongoing production of knowledge about crusading.

The Crusades in the Modern World is ideal for scholars of the crusades as well as for military historians and historians of memory.

1 Weaponising the crusades

Justifying terrorism and political violence

Akil N. Awan

On 29 October 2010, a young woman entered the FedEx courier company’s Sana’a office and dispatched a parcel to a synagogue in Chicago, Illinois. Contained within the package was a potent explosive device disguised as a printer cartridge, designed to detonate over U.S. airspace. Fortuitously, the bomb was safely intercepted en route at a scheduled stopover. Responsibility for the thwarted attack was quickly claimed by the Yemen-based franchise of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Lost amidst the flurry of security activity, and the understandably palpable sense of relief over the disrupted plot, however, was one incongruous overlooked detail. The package was addressed to a man who had been dead for over 800 years. The bomb’s intended recipient was ‘Reynald Krak’,¹ a pseudonym for Raynald of Châtillon – the infamous twelfth-century Frankish knight, who notoriously plundered Muslim caravans and killed Muslim pilgrims, even in periods of truce during the Second Crusade. The Muslim scholar, Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, renowned for his biography of Saladin and a contemporary of Raynald, alluded to his notoriety by describing him as a ‘monstrous infidel and terrible oppressor’.² Indeed, in the wake of the Battle of Hattin (1187), the victorious Saladin himself differentiated his treatment of crusader captives on the basis of their reputations. Whereas Guy of Lusignan was magnanimously offered a cup of iced rose water, the widely despised Raynald was beheaded by Saladin’s own hand. In the centuries since Hattin, Raynald became a reviled caricature of cruelty and violence in both the East and the West; a bogeyman, personifying the crusades’ enduring legacy of Christian-Muslim enmity.³

Raynald of Châtillon may have been dead for close to a millennium, but the ghost of his memory had been revived to chilling effect. AQAP’s glossy English-language magazine, Inspire, explained the group’s strange choice of ‘target’ for its terrorist attack:

We are fighting a war against American tyranny. This is a new Crusade waged by the West against Islam. […] This current battle fought by the West is not an isolated battle but is a continuation of a long history of aggression by the West against the Muslim world. In order to revive and bring back this history we listed the name of Reynald Krak […] who was one of the worst and most treacherous of the Crusade’s leaders. […] Today we are facing a coalition of Crusaders and Zionists and […] this operation is a response to the Crusaders aggression against the Muslims.⁴

Terrorism, as Alex Schmid and Jenny De Graaf’s seminal work on the subject explains, is best understood, if it is viewed in the first instance as communication, rather than as mere violence.⁵ Thus, AQAP’s decision to resurrect a long-dead crusader as their imaginary interlocutor in their political communication with the West should not have surprised anyone – particularly as the crusades have long symbolised the seminal conflict that defined the troubled relationship between Western Christendom and the Muslim World; a toxic legacy that continues to the present day. This chapter explores the ways in which the problematic legacy of the crusades has been employed by jihadists today to further their political aims, foment social divisions and ultimately legitimise violence and terrorism.

Constructing grand narratives

Central to the worldview of many extremist groups is the presence of what Jean-François Lyotard referred to as a grand or meta-narrative.⁶ Grand narratives are overarching, totalising accounts or meta-discourses, which provide ideologies with a legitimating philosophy of history. Essentially, these accounts claim to connect and give meaning to disparate historical events, experiences and phenomena by appealing to some universal, overarching schema. Under the rubric of the grand narrative, extremists work to construct stories that allow them to connect their imagined past, present and future, thus enabling them to make sense of the world around them and locate their place within history. In the process, these narratives function to legitimise power, authority and broader worldviews, often hiding political motives and acts, such as violence, behind the façade of lofty ideals.

Jihadists have long sought to construct and deploy a particularly tendentious grand narrative in order to support and validate their worldview. One of the most significant and recurring refrains within this narrative is the construction of the crusades – not simply as a series of eight historical campaigns that took place between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries – but rather as a central existential threat; a label ubiquitously applied to any form of Western aggression and encroachment against the Islamic world throughout history.

At first glance, this may seem surprising, considering that the early crusading expeditions were largely neglected by contemporary Muslim chroniclers, who viewed the invaders as primitive, uncouth, barbarians who posed little concern.⁷ Indeed, the Islamic world’s initial response to the crusades was one of ‘apathy, compromise and preoccupation with internal problems’.⁸ Moreover, beyond the actual events themselves, the memory of the crusades played a considerably less significant part in Islamic conceptions of history from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, than is often assumed.⁹ This should not surprise us, considering that the crusades had not been of the Muslims’ making, and which on balance, the crusaders had lost; the Muslim world had ultimately proved successful in repelling the crusades, reclaiming any territorial gains made by Western Christendom and having destroyed any lingering crusader presence along the Levantine Mediterranean coast. Indeed, throughout this entire period, there was no Arabic word for the crusades per se,¹⁰ and the crusades were simply subsumed within a broader history of recurrent waves of aggression by the Faranj or Franks.

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the terms harb al-salib (the war of the cross) and al-salibiyyun (crusaders) entered the Arabic lexicon and, even then, only through an appropriation of European terms encountered in European history books. This development was largely in response to an assertive, expansionist Europe who now threatened the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Ottoman empire, plunging it into crisis. The first Arabic history of the crusades, al-Akhbar al-saniyya fi’l-hurub al-salibiyya (Great Accounts in the Crusading Wars), penned by the Egyptian historian Sayyid Ali al-Hariri was not published until 1899. Al-Hariri echoing the sentiments of the earlier French historian, Joseph François Michaud, viewed the crusades as a forerunner to European colonialism. It was precisely at the moment that Michaud had been writing his seminal six-volume Histoire des Croisades, that France had embarked on its colonising invasion of Algeria in 1830. It was in this context that both politicians and historians began to proudly identify the new colonising movement and its mission civilisatrice with the crusades of old.¹¹

The Ottoman Caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909), presciently recognising the political utility of this framing language, lamented the new European ‘crusade’ against the Ottoman empire – a view al-Hariri went on to endorse in his book:

The sovereigns of Europe nowadays attack our Sublime Empire in a manner bearing a great resemblance to the deeds of those people [the crusaders] in bygone times. Our most glorious sultan, Abdul Hamid II, has rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us in the form of a political campaign.¹²

In the century that followed, the moribund Ottoman empire was dismembered in the wake of the First World War, the caliphate was abolished, and virtually every Muslim majority country was either colonised outright or came under the sphere of influence of European powers. Even after the end of European empire in the latter half of the twentieth century, unequal power dynamics continued to dominate the relationships between the Islamic world and their old colonial masters, whose influence had now also been bolstered by an increasingly assertive U.S.A. It is in this context that we might begin to understand the potency of crusading discourse in the wider jihadist meta-narrative. For jihadists, the memory of the crusades lives on as the clearest example of an assertive, belligerent Christianity, an early harbinger of aggression and imperialism of the Christian West to come.¹³

The Egyptian radical, Said Qutb, often regarded as the leading theorist-architect of salafi-jihadism,¹⁴ was the first to systematically invoke the crusades within the broader Islamist grand narrative. Born into the heady political milieu of a British-occupied Egypt in 1906, Qutb witnessed first-hand, the subjugation of both his native country, and the wider Middle East and North Africa (ME...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the crusades in the modern world
• 1 Weaponising the crusades: justifying terrorism and political violence
• 2 Los Caballeros Templarios de Michoacán: Knights Templar identity as a tool for legitimisation and internal discipline
• 3 Medievalism, imagination and violence: the function and dysfunction of crusading rhetoric in the post-9/11 political world
• 4 The Reconquista revisited: mobilising medieval Iberian history in Spain, Portugal and beyond
• 5 The reception of the crusades in the contemporary Catholic Church: ‘purification of memory’ or medieval nostalgia?
• 6 Philatelic depictions of the crusades
• 7 Wikipedia and the crusades: constructing and communicating crusading
• 8 Engaging the crusades in context: reflections on the ethics of historical work
• Index