Page 1 of 2 Islamophobes seduced by Crusader myth
By John Feffer
The Muslims were bloodthirsty and treacherous. They conducted a sneak attack
against the French army and slaughtered every single soldier, 20,000 in all.
More than 1,000 years ago, in the mountain passes of Spain, the Muslim horde
cut down the finest soldiers in Charlemagne's command, including his brave
nephew Roland. Then, according to the famous poem that immortalized the
tragedy, Charlemagne exacted his revenge by routing the entire Muslim army.
The Song of Roland, an 11th century rendering in verse of an eighth
century battle, is a staple of Western civilization classes at colleges around
the country. A "masterpiece of epic drama," in the words of its renowned
translator Dorothy Sayers, it provides a handy preface for students before they
delve into readings on the
Crusades that began in 1095. More ominously, the poem has schooled generations
of Judeo-Christians to view Muslims as perfidious enemies who once threatened
the very foundations of Western civilization.
The problem, however, is that the whole epic is built on a curious falsehood.
The army that fell upon Roland and his Frankish soldiers was not Muslim at all.
In the real battle of 778, the slayers of the Franks were Christian Basques
furious at Charlemagne for pillaging their city of Pamplona. Not epic at all,
the battle emerged from a parochial dispute in the complex wars of medieval
Spain. Only later, as kings and popes and knights prepared to do battle in the
First Crusade, did an anonymous bard repurpose the text to serve the needs of
an emerging cross-against-crescent holy war.
Similarly, we think of the Crusades as the archetypal "clash of civilizations"
between the followers of Jesus and the followers of Mohammed. In the popular
version of those Crusades, the Muslim adversary has, in fact, replaced a
remarkable range of peoples the Crusaders dealt with as enemies, including Jews
killed in pogroms on the way to the Holy Land, rival Catholics slaughtered in
the Balkans and in Constantinople, and Christian heretics hunted down in
southern France.
Much later, during the Cold War, mythmakers in Washington performed a similar
act, substituting a monolithic crew labeled "godless communists" for a
disparate group of anti-imperial nationalists in an attempt to transform
conflicts in remote locations like Vietnam, Guatemala, and Iran into epic
struggles between the forces of the Free World and the forces of evil. In
recent years, the Bush administration did it all over again by portraying Arab
nationalists as fiendish Islamic fundamentalists when we invaded Iraq and
prepared to topple the regime in Syria.
Similar mythmaking continues today. The recent surge of Islamophobia in the
United States has drawn strength from several extraordinary substitutions. A
clearly Christian president has become Muslim in the minds of a significant
number of Americans. The thoughtful Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has become a
closet fundamentalist in the writings of Paul Berman and others. And an Islamic
center in lower Manhattan, organized by proponents of interfaith dialogue, has
become an extremist "mosque at Ground Zero" in the TV appearances, political
speeches, and Internet sputterings of a determined clique of right-wing
activists.
This transformation of Islam into a violent caricature of itself - as if Ann
Coulter had suddenly morphed into the face of Christianity - comes at a
somewhat strange juncture in the United States. Anti-Islamic rhetoric and hate
crimes, which spiked immediately after September 11, 2001, had been on the
wane. No major terrorist attack had taken place in the U.S. or Europe since the
London bombings in 2005. The current American president had reached out to the
Muslim world and retired the controversial acronym GWOT, or "global war on
terror".
All the elements seemed in place, in other words, for us to turn the page on an
ugly chapter in our history. Yet it's as if we remain fixed in the eleventh
century in a perpetual battle of "us" against "them." Like the undead rising
from their coffins, our previous "crusades" never go away. Indeed, we still
seem to be fighting the three great wars of the millennium, even though two of
these conflicts have long been over and the third has been rhetorically reduced
to "overseas contingency operations".
The Crusades, which finally petered out in the 17th century, continue to shape
our global imagination today. The Cold War ended in 1991, but key elements of
the anticommunism credo have been awkwardly grafted onto the new Islamist
adversary. And the "war on terror", which US President Barack Obama quietly
renamed shortly after taking office, has in fact metastasized into the wars
that his administration continues to prosecute in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq,
Yemen and elsewhere.
Those in Europe and the United States who cheer on these wars claim that they
are issuing a wake-up call about the continued threat of al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
and other militants who claim the banner of Islam. However, what really keeps
Islamophobes up at night is not the marginal and backwards-looking Islamic
fundamentalists but rather the growing economic, political, and global
influence of modern, mainstream Islam. Examples of Islam successfully grappling
with modernity abound, from Turkey's new foreign policy and Indonesia's
economic muscle to the Islamic political parties participating in elections in
Lebanon, Morocco, and Jordan. Instead of providing reassurance, however, these
trends only incite Islamophobes to intensify their battles to "save" Western
civilization.
As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness - and
still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana'a, and the tribal areas of Pakistan -
Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life.
Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War,
and the decade-long "war on terror" (under whatever name) will we overcome the
dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and
distorted our very understanding of our Western selves.
The Crusades continue
With their irrational fear of spiders, arachnophobes are scared of both
harmless daddy longlegs and poisonous brown recluse spiders. In extreme cases,
an arachnophobe can break out in a sweat while merely looking at photos of
spiders. It is, of course, reasonable to steer clear of black widows. What
makes a legitimate fear into an irrational phobia, however, is the tendency to
lump all of any group, spiders or humans, into one lethal category and then to
exaggerate how threatening they are. Spider bites, after all, are responsible
for at most a handful of deaths a year in the United States.
Islamophobia is, similarly, an irrational fear of Islam. Yes, certain Muslim
fundamentalists have been responsible for terrorist attacks, certain fantasists
about a "global caliphate" continue to plot attacks on perceived enemies, and
certain groups like Afghanistan's Taliban and Somalia's al-Shabaab practice
medieval versions of the religion. But Islamophobes confuse these small parts
with the whole and then see terrorist jihad under every Islamic pillow. They
break out in a sweat at the mere picture of an imam.
Irrational fears are often rooted in our dimly remembered childhoods. Our
irrational fear of Islam similarly seems to stem from events that happened in
the early days of Christendom. Three myths inherited from the era of the
Crusades constitute the core of Islamophobia today: Muslims are inherently
violent; Muslims want to take over the world; and Muslims can't be trusted.
The myth of Islam as a "religion of the sword" was a staple of Crusader
literature and art. In fact, the atrocities committed by Muslim leaders and
armies - and there were some - rarely rivaled the slaughters of the Crusaders,
who retook Jerusalem in 1099 in a veritable bloodbath. "The heaps of the dead
presented an immediate problem for the conquerors," writes Christopher Tyerman
in God's War. "Many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to
clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great
pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred." Jerusalem's Jews suffered a
similar fate when the Crusaders burned many of them alive in their main
synagogue. Four hundred years earlier, by contrast, Caliph Umar put no one to
the sword when he took over Jerusalem, signing a pact with the Christian
patriarch Sophronius that pledged "no compulsion in religion".
This myth of the inherently violent Muslim endures. Islam "teaches violence",
televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed in 2005. "The Koran teaches violence and
most Muslims, including so-called moderate Muslims, openly believe in
violence," was the way Major General Jerry Curry (US Army, retired), who served
in the Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bush Sr administrations, put it.
The Crusaders justified their violence by arguing that Muslims were bent on
taking over the world. In its early days, the expanding Islamic empire did
indeed imagine an ever-growing dar-es-Islam (House of Islam). By the
time of the Crusades, however, this initial burst of enthusiasm for holy war
had long been spent. Moreover, the Christian West harbored its own set of
desires when it came to extending the Pope's authority to every corner of the
globe. Even that early believer in soft power, Francis of Assisi, sat down with
Sultan al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade with the aim of eliminating Islam
through conversion.
Today, Islamophobes portray the building of Cordoba House in Lower Manhattan as
just another gambit in this millennial power grab: "This is Islamic domination
and expansionism," writes right-wing blogger Pamela Geller, who made the
"Ground Zero Mosque" into a media obsession. "Islam is a religion with a very
political agenda," warns ex-Muslim Ali Sina. "The ultimate goal of Islam is to
rule the world."
These two myths - of inherent violence and global ambitions - led to the firm
conviction that Muslims were by nature untrustworthy. Robert of Ketton, a 12th
century translator of the Koran, was typical in badmouthing the prophet
Mohammad this way: "Like the liar you are, you everywhere contradict yourself."
The suspicion of untrustworthiness fell as well on any Christian who took up
the possibility of coexistence with Islam. Pope Gregory, for instance, believed
that the 13th century Crusader Frederick II was the Antichrist himself because
he developed close relationships with Muslims.
For Islamophobes today, Muslims abroad are similarly terrorists-in-waiting. As
for Muslims at home: "American Muslims must face their either/or," writes the
novelist Edward Cline, "to repudiate Islam or remain a quiet, sanctioning fifth
column." Even American Muslims in high places, like Congressman Keith Ellison
(D-MN), are not above suspicion. In a 2006 CNN interview, Glenn Beck said, "I
have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like
saying is: 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies'."
These three myths of Islamophobia flourish in our era, just as they did almost
a millennium ago, because of a cunning conflation of a certain type of Islamic
fundamentalism with Islam itself. Bill O'Reilly was neatly channeling this
Crusader mindset when he asserted recently that "the Muslim threat to the world
is not isolated. It's huge!" When deputy undersecretary of defense for
intelligence William Boykin, in an infamous 2003 sermon, thundered "what I'm
here to do today is to recruit you to be warriors of God's kingdom," he was
issuing the Crusader call to arms.
But O'Reilly and Boykin, who represent the violence, duplicity, and
expansionist mindset of today's Western Crusaders, were also invoking a more
recent tradition, closer in time and far more familiar.
The totalitarian myth
In 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency and the emerging anticommunist elite,
including soon-to-be-president Dwight Eisenhower, created the Crusade for
Freedom as a key component of a growing psychological warfare campaign against
the Soviet Union and the satellite countries it controlled in Eastern Europe.
The language of this "crusade" was intentionally religious. It reached out to
"peoples deeply rooted in the heritage of western civilization," living under
the "crushing weight of a godless dictatorship." In its call for the liberation
of the communist world, it echoed the nearly thousand-year-old Crusader
rhetoric of "recovering" Jerusalem and other outposts of Christianity.
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