• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1242 0

For battle and killing to be sanctified it had to be a struggle in a good and godly cause. Over time, therefore, both communities evolved superficially quite similar ideas for a just war in a good cause. But there were differences between the parallel but separate processes of evolution.60 In Christendom, the doctrine of holy war was hotly debated and transmuted over time into many different ideological strands, mostly in response to social and political change. The terminology of “Crusade” was highly mutable: “pilgrimage,” “journey,” “signed by the cross,” and so on, were other ways of describing it. In Islam, there were two terms commonly used—jihad, and ghaza in Ottoman Turkish—and there could be little debate about the meaning of these terms, and little theoretical investigation of their limits and boundaries. This was because in the dominant Sunni branch of Islam theoretical evolution was severely constrained; as contemporaries expressed it, the “gates of interpretation” (ijtihad) had been closed around the year 900. This meant that the principles of the faith, including the struggle for purity (jihad), were beyond debate and could not be altered.61

But Muslim scholars continued to adjust the application of these immutable principles, by “explaining and interpreting the eternal truths and applying the eternal laws.”62 It was not an ossified and monolithic system and if the theory was fixed, its application was not. Not all wars against infidels were declared to be holy wars, and resistance to the Franks in 1097–9 was certainly not regarded at the time as a jihad. But during the two centuries that the Franj occupied the Levant, the language of jihad grew louder and more sustained. Like the summons to the Crusade, this call to Muslims served a particular purpose.63 The summons brought together an otherwise disunited community. The new idiom of holy war provided a uniquely powerful rhetorical style. Before that fateful encounter in Palestine, Christendom had been focused upon the notion of the Peace of God, and most of the Islamic world had conveniently abandoned both the traditional rhetoric and its practice of the “lesser jihad.” As an outcome of their struggle in the Levant, both cultures were left with a well-honed ideology of war in a just cause.

When the organized forces of “Crusade” and jihad confronted each other directly on the battlefield, the contrast between them was immediately apparent. Visually speaking, the dominant motif of the Western Christian side overwhelmed all others. The Muslim banners carried many different emblems and texts, mostly the names and qualities of God and other suitable verses from the Qur’an. But on the Christian side the single image of the cross was dominant. From the first contact the defining characteristic of the Crusade was the symbol of the crucified Christ. The “Crusaders” were cruce signati, “signed with the cross.”64 In Arab Muslim eyes, there was something distinctive and disquieting about these Christians, the Franks, who wore the cross and had stormed Jerusalem in 1099.65

The cross wearers violated all the acceptable standards of society in ways unthinkable to the local Christians and even the Byzantines. The twelfth-century Muslim warrior Usāmah ibn Munqidh recounted the corrupting impropriety of the Crusaders’ behavior in the Holy Land. They were “without any vestige of a sense of honour and jealousy.” He told a story of a bath keeper whose establishment was frequented by the Franks.

One day a Frankish knight came in. They do not follow our custom of wearing a cloth around their waist while they are at the baths, and this fellow put out his hand, snatched off my loin cloth and threw it away. He saw at once that I had just recently shaved my pubic hair. “Salim!” he exclaimed. I came towards him and he pointed to that part of me. “Salim! It’s magnificent! You shall certainly do the same for me!” And he lay down flat on his back. His hair there was as long as his beard.

I shaved him, and when he felt the place with his hand and found it agreeably smooth he said, “Salim,