Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [111]
I HAVE USED THE WORDS “CRUSADE” AND “CRUSADER.” EVERYONE does. But not a single “Crusader” participated in the First Crusade. At best they were Crusaders avant la lettre, before the word existed. The wars to rescue Jerusalem long antedated the word “Crusade,” which was first coined in Spain in the thirteenth century as cruzada, a generation after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. It first entered English usage as the French word croisade about 1575, and it was not fully Anglicized as “crusade” until the early eighteenth century, after crusado, crusada, and croisado had all been tried and found wanting.52 “Crusade” has from the beginning been a floating, highly mobile and adaptive term, precisely denoting very little but replete with connotations. It has always been a versatile theory. Popes championed a useful concept that allowed them to declare a holy war on any individual or group, proscribing them as enemies of Christ.53 There were holy wars against Muslim infidels; against heretics like the Albigensians of Provence; against recalcitrant Christian monarchs; even against humble towns that failed to toe the papal line. But the first category, war against the Muslim infidel, was always popularly regarded as the true war “for and by the cross.”
Sanctified war was an innovation within the Christian church, which had for centuries struggled to impose the Peace of God upon adversaries. The bishops in the province of Narbonne had, forty years before Urban’s speech, declared, “Let no Christian kill another Christian, for no one doubts that to kill a Christian is to shed the blood of Christ.”54 And Urban II, according to Fulcher of Chartres, had expressly contrasted the evil of war with a struggle in a good cause. Urban told the throng at Clermont:
Let those of you who have formerly been accustomed to contend wickedly in private warfare against the faithful, fight against the infidel, and bring to a victorious end the war … Let those of you who have hitherto been robbers now become soldiers. Those of you who have formerly contended against their brothers and relatives now fight against the barbarians as they ought.
Islam had developed a coherent theory of a holy war long before. Muslim jurists had presented a world split into two parts—one was the House of Peace (Dar ul Islam), where a true Islamic ruler governed, and the other the House of War (Dar ul Harb), where Islam was not in control.55 Muslims should strive to ensure that peace took the place of war.56 The Arabic root of the word “to strive or struggle,” J-H-D, generated the word jihad, which meant any kind of battle in a good cause. In everyday terms it referred to the internal struggle against evil or temptation and was called the “greater jihad,” much as later Christian writers came to talk of a holy war against sin.57 But the same word also meant a “holy war” in the purely military sense, which most Muslims regarded as a “lesser jihad,” derived from this process of inner purification.58 Most Western writers have subsequently focused on the secondary meaning, as Rudolph Peters succinctly put it:
The Islamic doctrine of jihad has always appealed to Western imagination. The image of the dreadful Turk, clad in a long robe and brandishing his scimitar, ready to slaughter any infidel that might come his way and would refuse to be converted to the religion of Mahomet, has been a stereotype in Western literature for a long time … The assumption underlying these stereotypes is that Moslems, often loosely called Arabs, are innately bloodthirsty and inimical to persons of a different persuasion, and that [is] owing to their religion, which allegedly preaches intolerance, fanaticism and continuous warfare against unbelievers.59
The theory of jihad was drawn from a few occurrences of the word in the Qur’an and more fully in the juristic commentary on the oral traditions (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed. These statements often required considerable interpretation to mold them to events. In theory, for Islam as for Christendom, war was an evil.