Modern Middle Eastern conflict has roots that lie very deep in the history of our culture. In her book, dealing with ‘holy war’ in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Karen Armstrong examines these roots and relates them to current affairs. All three of these
great religions have had their
holy wars, even though we have become all too painfully focused of the Islamist ‘jihad’ in recent years.
She devotes more time to the
medieval Crusades than anything else, but Armstrong commences with the ancient beginnings of Judaism and its ‘promised land.’ Faith linked to place forms the foundation of holy war, because geographical place needs to be taken from alien occupiers and then defended against alien intruders. Religious conflict over place becomes all the more violent if more than one religion considers a place to be sacred.
The ancient Hebrew conquest of Palestine can be considered a ‘holy war’ because Palestine was the
land promised to the children of Israel by God. After discussing the ancient Hebrew devotion to the ‘promised land’ and its loss through the Great Diaspora, Armstrong shifts attention to Christianity and Islam.
In one sense, all three religions are universalistic. The one God is omnipresent as well as omniscient and timeless, but all three also have their sense of sacred particular places. With Islam, the concept of sacred place is broadened considerably. Not only have Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem been venerated as holy cities, but so also has the entire vast region of Islam, where the faith took root in the centuries after Muhammed. Thus, all of Arabia, Egypt and Iran, for example, are ‘holy lands’ in Muslim eyes (the 'dar as Islam'), and should be defended against foreign desecration.
Throughout their early history, neither Christianity nor Islam waged truly holy war. After the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, the Christian faith germinated in
Western Europe, far from the ancient levantine land in which it began. The great Islamic conquests of the seventh to ninth centuries AD saw enormous territorial expansion, but these were not ‘holy wars’ in a strict sense. Following the injunctions of the Quran, as well as practical politics, Islam in its medieval heyday tolerated the two other religions ‘of the book.’ It permitted Jews and Christians to practise their faiths in Muslim-occupied territories and undertake pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Although existing in a kind of medieval ‘cold war,’ Byzantium and the Caliphate had long learned to co-exist by the eleventh century and even respected each other’s culture. Only with the Turkish onslaught of the late eleventh century did Byzantium feel threatened to its core, and begged for help to the Roman Pope.
In early medieval Europe, there was a serious attempt by the Christian monks and clergy to emphasize the universal love taught by Jesus and dampen the warlike tendencies of semi-barbarous people. But by the eleventh century, as Western Europe had evolved from tribalism to feudalism and was beginning to ‘feel its oats’ as a culture, it began to become aggressive. The clergy, presided over by the Roman Papacy, realized that this energy would have to be directed outwards, but even Pope Urban II did not foresee the horrors that would be unleashed with the European Crusades to the Holy Land.
Armstrong describes the massacres that began with the First Crusade, and we are reminded that Jews were slaughtered as well as Muslims, beginning with massacres of Jews that had long lived peacefully in Germany. Thus, the medieval Crusades constituted a Christian holy
war against Judaism as well as Islam, and when the Fourth Crusade of 1204 was misdirected to Constantinople by the chicaneries of the Venetians, they became a holy war of western Roman Catholicism against Eastern Orthodoxy.
The horrors inflicted by the Crusaders upon the peoples of the Middle East have never been forgotten in Muslim eyes and provoked the first great Muslim jihad—the great reaction that began ith Sullah ad Din (Saladin) late in the twelfth century. This Islamic holy war of self-defense was directed against the barbarous violators of the Dar as Islam, and not simply the western occupiers of Jerusalem, and Muslims have long invoked the name of Saladin as one of the greatest of their historic military heroes.
As Armstrong describes the medieval Crusades, she relates them, chapter-by-chapter, to the
Modern conflicts in the Middle East. Thus, Zionism, the founding of the modern state of Israel, and the defense of Israel in such events as the Six Days’ War can be called Jewish ‘holy wars’ of the modern era. We are reminded that modern Islamic ‘fundamentalism,’ like the Jihad of Saladin centuries ago, is seen by its followers as a ‘holy war’ of defense against Western influence in this strategic, oil-rich region. Thus, even the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the assassination of Anwar Sadat, discussed in depth in the book, constituted ‘holy war’ not only against ‘corrupt’ rulers but also against the Western interests that supported them.
Much has been written about the medieval Crusades and modern Middle Eastern conflicts, but Karen Armstrong, combining solid scholarship with an ability to popularize, provides a valuable service in interrelating the past with contemporary events in one single book. It is not the only work by this distinguished author, who gives the layman considerable insight into religion, and how it has intertwined broadly with culture and politics in our world.
More summaries about the Holy War