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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Religious Wars
By Antonio C. Abaya Written Oct. 09, 2006 For the Standard Today, October 10 issue For a newspaper columnist, reactions from his or her readers are the justification for his or her professional existence. If nobody bothers to react to what you write, for or against, then you do not exist. Since 2001, long before blogs came into existence or became fashionable, my articles have been archived in www.tapatt.org, along with readers� reactions to them, for or against, except for a few that were scurrilous and downright insulting. I am claiming a first in Philippine journalism: an interactive column. Many friends and readers have suggested that my articles be put together in a book or books, but my standard reply has been, what for? They are already �published� online in my website, arranged chronologically as well as grouped together by subject matter or by category. A book or books would cost hundreds of thousands of pesos to publish, and would take hundreds or thousands of pesos for a reader to buy. And circulation would be limited to a few thousand individuals, mainly in Metro Manila, who could afford to buy them. My cyber-book, on the other hand, is available FOR FREE to anyone anywhere in the world who has access to a computer. And, what is more, my cyber-book includes the reactions of my readers, for or against the positions that I have taken, which is not possible or practical with a traditional book, especially since the reactions of my readers, collectively, occupy much more space than the original article they are reacting to. As of today, the only continent from which I have not received any reaction email is Antarctica . To view the readers� reactions, one must either access www.tapatt.org or join the tapatt yahoogroup, to which the reactions are automatically sent. But once in a while, I include a few of these reactions in a column, either because they are unusually nice, or because they include an insight that adds constructively to the debate. My column Vietnam Pilgrimage (Sept. 26) elicited the following comments from a Vietnamese-American, Elizabeth Pham: �Dear Mr. Abaya, I just came across your article in the Manila Standard Today today and wanted to thank you for that wonderful piece on my home country. Since growing up in the US , I randomly find myself reading articles from many different people who visit Viet Nam for the first time and somehow feel they never seem to understand the depth and intensity of the Vietnamese people. You�ve captured and felt deeply how much we�ve sacrificed for the war and what we�ve done to grow from that human disaster. One always hopes the lessons are learned but the clich� of history repeating itself seems to ring true once more. I am glad you were able to experience something personal on your first and hopefully not last visit to Viet Nam �.� Reacting to PAG-ASA is Hope? (Oct. 02) Quezon City resident Jack Sherman emailed from Athens, Georgia an insight that has escaped everyone�s notice ��.Billboards act as a buffer preventing the normal circulation of air�.and the heavier poisonous gases and metal molecules from being carried and dispersed into the upper atmosphere�.The extent of billboard abuse (in Metro Manila) is not tolerated in more developed countries.� So it can be argued that billboards contribute to urban pollution by preventing noxious gases and metal particulates from being dispersed into the upper atmosphere. But it remains to be seen if scientific arguments carry any weight in a society run by lawyers. Something tells me the billboard brouhaha will be buried in a mudslide of TROs. Liz Davies, a British resident in Metro Manila, emailed to tell us how typhoon (or cyclone) emergencies are handled in the cyclone-prone island of Mauritius (pop 1.4 million) in the Indian Ocean , where she lived for three years: ��The main TV station broadcasts regular updates on the trajectory and speed of the cyclone, and one could phone a two-digit number for a clear update on the stage and force of an incoming �howler.���After stage 3, all insurance claims will not be entertained if the owner is on the road. This keeps the roads clear, and avoids the calamities that one sees here. At the last stage all the electricity is switched off so that people don�t die from electrocution�.When the storm is over, the Army moves into action, clearing fallen trees and buildings�.� No billboard jungle in Mauritius , I suspect. My article Papal Bull (Sept. 17) drew a lot of reactions, for and against.. Nothing like religion to get everyone hot under the collar. Below are excerpts from emails that disagreed with my article. My replies are in bold face.: Jose Ma. Alcasid: �I find the so-called Muslim outrage against Pope Benedict XVI�s speech �..as nothing but hogwash propaganda fueled by the media�s liberal fringe�If there is any personage on this earth who looks after the best interest of Muslims, in the context of Christian charity, it would be none other than the Holy Father himself��(I doubt if any Muslim would agree with that statement, least of all that they need Christian charity. ACA) Tim Rooney: �What is most amazing about this is the hypocrisy of Muslims to expect to practice their religion in freedom in western nations, but do not allow westerners to practice their religions freely in many Muslim countries�.� (This is a very valid Christian complaint which, if left unresolved, cannot lead to any meaningful Muslim-Christian dialogue; much less, a rapprochement. Muslims must also explain why some of their madrassas or religious schools teach young Muslim minds to hate, even kill, non-believers, as a duty and as a passport to heaven. ACA) David Martinez: �(Muslims) have no true leader, and it seems the only time they take to the streets to protest is when a non-Muslim criticizes the terrorists. They are a misguided, ignorant and evil religion. People like you keep a one-sided stance, so as not to offend these savages as well. Shame on you�� Aristides Hernandez: �True that the Crusaders committed atrocities at the fall of Jerusalem and at other times, but on the other hand you make no mention of the many Muslim atrocities in the Holy Land, including but not limited to the sieges and fall of Acre and Tripoli; in Asia in the heartless subjugation, destruction and wholesale atrocities committed on the Hindu people; in Africa in engaging in unbridled slave trade, the conquest of lands at the point of the sword, e.g. North Africa, India, the Middle and Far East and in parts of Europe with their repugnant appurtenant atrocities. Acts of atrocities and aggression were not a historical monopoly of the Christians. �Moreover, there is no mention by you in your article of the atrocities committed by the Muslims upon the fall of Constantinople and the horrors that came before as Anatolia was being subjugated to the Muslim yoke, and the atrocities suffered by the Greek and Balkan Christians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks for centuries�.� (In my article, Fundamentalism (Sept. 14), I did enumerate the places in the 21st century where resurgent Islam is, to all appearances, at war with the rest of the world. It is undeniable that both Islam and Christianity have been guilty of enormous atrocities, not only between each other�s followers, but also between schismatic groups within their faiths: Christians vs �heretics�, Catholics vs Protestants, Sunnis vs Shias. My point in Papal Bull was that Pope Benedict�s quote of Emperor Manuel II was ill advised: the pot is not credible calling the kettle black, even when he is using someone else�s words to do so. ACA.) J. Larry Tilby, a member of US Armed Forces in Germany : �I am not a Roman Catholic, but I don�t think the Pope has any reason to apologize about history. If he blocked Turkey from joining the European Union, then he should apologize for that�. �Both religions have experienced periods of barbarism but, except for the Balkans, is there any other recent (within the last century) place where Christians have carried out the atrocities that too many Muslims seem to engage in today?...� (What about Iraq and Chechnya? ACA.) Larry again: �I don�t see any reason to go out of my way to accommodate Muslims just because they are Muslims. In fact, I think we should isolate these Muslim (and Christian) countries who prove themselves to be uncivilized. Then they can get back to the important business of killing each other instead of us�.� Rilkegauss (no other name given): �How fair and dispassionate was your column on Papal Bull? And why not be straightforward, not hide in vagueness, by saying only �bull� when it�s plain that you mean �bullshit.�?� (A papal bull is a statement issued by the pope and sealed with a bulla. If I had used �bullshit� it would have been unnecessarily disrespectful. And the double-entendre would have been lost. ACA.) Rilkegauss again: �One cannot deny that both Muslims and Christians have done awful wrongs to (each other) in history. But must history set forever the agenda for the future? Can�t both sides say, �OK now let�s draw a line somewhere, we�re living in a different age, draw a line in history and beyond that, no going into grievances of one party to the other, because if we go down that path, we�ll all be hostages to history � to people more ignorant, less civilized than we are, who are better off than they, partly because of the lessons we see in the things they have done and borne�.� (Theoretically, I agree with you. But practically, how will this be achieved? Christianity has been secularized, while Islam is sinking deeper into fundamentalism. How can the twains possibly meet? By encouraging the spread of Christian fundamentalism? The more the two will clash. By encouraging Islam to secularize? Fat chance! ACA.) Ike Eslao: �It was in fact the Islamic empires that started the decimation of Christians east of the Mediterranean by systematic destruction of the Coptic Christians there. From the 7th century onwards, the Arabs conquered all the eastern parts of the Roman and Greek empires across the Mediterranean . At that time, the population of Copts was estimated to be about 9 million, until they were reduced to indistinguishable level even as minorities�.� (See what I mean? One side will always claim the other side committed more atrocities. Who will be the independent and even-handed referee who can transcend the bickering and still be credible? Perhaps a panel of respected Jewish agnostics? At least, the Muslims consider the Jews �people of the Book,� like Muslims and Christians. But then Christian fundamentalists look on Jews as �Christ-killers�, unless and until they convert to Christianity during the End Days. So where does that leave us innocent bystanders in these religious wars? ACA.) These and many other reactions appear or will soon appear, in full, in www.tapatt.org. Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
| Reactions to �Religious Wars�
Interesting comments, Mr. Abaya. Religion will always be a touchy issue. Let's look at it this way: Pretend God/Allah is represented by a very big elephant. Now take several people, all representing a different religion. Blindfold each of them and have them touch and feel a different part of the elephant (e.g. a Catholic is made to hold the tail, a Muslim to feel the trunk, etc). Each of them will have different explanations or interpretation as to what they touched and felt; and yes, there will be some similarities too. My point is, we are all talking about one God. We just have different interpretations of him. That's why I find these religious wars such a farce! C'mon people. Grow up a little. We all have a right to our opinions and the same goes for the religion we choose. We can never truly say that one is better than the other and vice-versa. If we all respect God/Allah, or whomever we worship, then why not put a stop to all the killings and insults? We cannot keep using past incidents to justify the recent atrocities done in the name of these 'religions'. Such thinking is precisely why this never-ending cycle of killings and 'religious wars' continue. And as for the Pope, well, like I said before, you cannot just quote someone without thinking about the repercussions such a statement will cause Freda Veluz, [email protected], Oct. 11, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww You wrote: (See what I mean? One side will always claim the other side committed more atrocities. Who will be the independent and even-handed referee who can transcend the bickering and still be credible? Perhaps a panel of respected Jewish agnostics? At least, the Muslims consider the Jews �people of the Book,� like Muslims and Christians. But then Christian fundamentalists look on Jews as �Christ-killers�, unless and until they convert to Christianity during the End Days. So where does that leave us innocent bystanders in these religious wars? ACA.) Dear Tony, I am just a simple (Finnish) businessman and I�m not a scholar but I feel compelled to comment on your reaction above to one of your readers, especially the question, "... who can transcend the bickering and...be credible"? Normally I wouldn�t respond like this and I hope I do not sound inappropriate, but it�s clear that this unnecessary bickering and rampant fundamentalism from all so called religions is a personal threat to all of us, and we desperately need a solution. As one saintly person described, " ...sectarianism is the greatest enemy of mankind". So who can help us solve this barbaric condition? We need someone who is genuinely spiritual or saintly to teach us to understand and appreciate our respective religions; be they Moslem, Christian, Jewish, or Hindu etc..; so that we too; regardless of our religion; can also become genuinely spiritual. This person would not force us, frighten us, threaten us or convert us, but teach all of us how to live truly spiritual lives. The world and its, "... innocent bystanders...", regardless of whether we are from Christian, Muslim, or Hindu background, need someone, as you say to, "...transcend the bickering and ... be credible". A person who can present God and religion in a down to earth, scientific, and philosophical manner, rather then fanatically and dogmatically. We need someone who can teach genuine spirituality to anybody and which has real application in our daily lives. Anybody who is sincere, thoughtful, and introspective in their search for the truth, and devoted to building a relationship with God; regardless of race or religious faith; would find such a persons teachings profound and life-changing. However, here is our deadly problem; the fundamentalists, fanatics and pseudo-spiritualists from all sides tend to envy, fear and even despise such a person. Even amongst us regular people there are those of us who are intelligent and who genuinely thirst for truth, but who are prevented from pursuing it due to worries of displeasing their family or society or wanting to impress their society with their "holiness" or prevented because of fear of being disloyal to the "church" or to their "religion". To stop this horrific bickering in the name of God we could and should seriously consider a non-sectarian philosophy where people are thinking, "I am spirit soul, you are spirit soul, and we are both servants of God". "So there is no need for conflict". "God is the father of all living beings, not just the father of some nations or one religious faith". There is no question of having to change our social or religious "status" in order to learn more about God and our spirituality. Muslims need not convert to Christians, and Christians need never say they are now Muslims. God is all powerful and He is not forcing me to convert or love Him. God and His real representatives don�t force us to surrender or kill us if we don�t. How can you force anyone to love you, what more to force people, to love the supreme personality of God? Force is fanaticism and has nothing to do with real religion. Surrender means love and love is voluntary. All major religious scriptures teach that the kingdom of God is based on love and that is based on freedom. Anyone really working on God's behalf would appreciate this point and if they don�t, then they cannot claim to represent God in any way and are most certainly not tasting love for God, but are most likely just wanting to control us. I believe the word you mentioned is "transcend" the bickering and I really feel we need a person or persons who are really "transcendental" and instead of scaring us or forcing us they will teach us more about God and how we can use our respective faiths to wake up to our actual religious condition and understand our eternal identity as spirit souls and our eternal loving relationship to God. If this is not what religions are for, then there is no meaning in any of them. More power to you, Tony, and thank you for having me on your mailing list. Petteri Petteri J. Makitalo, [email protected], Oct. 11, 2006 CEO Veridium Technology Inc. Member / Board of Trustees Philippine Finland Association wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Hi Tony, So nice reading over these comments. It is quite interesting to listen to two warring sides (Muslims and Christians) who both profess love and an ever loving God, but are willing to kill each other in order to prove that he can love more. I am sure they do not represent the majority, yet they are more visible. Both sides will surely profit if they were to ask - what would Jesus Christ and Allah have done under this circumstance? Dodi Canete, [email protected], Davao City , Oct.12, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Tony� Let me just express my great satisfaction at seeing the DPWH finally getting those billboards out of the EDSA road right of way. For the past 5 years I have been expressing my displeasure at seeing these billboards in various forums but my letters and postings had elicited no reaction at all. I was even appalled at a media statement of the DPWH secretary, Hermogenes Ebdane who apparently said that it was not his job. When did the road authority lose its control over its jurisdiction in the public domain? It took a presidential directive for DPWH to act. Only in the Philippines? As Cavite representative Joseph Abaya (among several congressmen I had texted about this lately prior to �Milenyo�) texted to me after I informed him about the falling billboards during the typhoon, �what legislation has failed, Mother Nature has succeeded in doing!!�. Now, about billboards outside the right of way. Would you believe that the law apparently prescribes 100 meters away from the road? That�s what someone stated during a talk show with Chairman Bayani Fernando, an adman and a congressman discussing with the host 2 days after the typhoon. Of course that�s the prerogative of the law-making body (in the Netherlands, billboards are totally banned to be visible from highways) but here, on the roadside on the SLEX, they also help light the highway at night and provide a pleasant view of the landscape for some but not all of us. I am one of those who actually find them acceptable, and just like my seagoing days when we availed of the Firestone billboard near the PN HQ to use as a navigational aid in entering Manila harbor, some billboards help me identify where I am on the expressway. I doubt whether that theory about blocking air circulation is really valid, but getting the billboards farther away from the road is evidently important both from the scenic and the safety point of view. Since I believe 100 meters is too far, I would suggest the following to our lawmakers: 1. Total ban on government rights of way except for official government signage 2. 25 meters or more from edge of the road provided that the height of the billboard should always be less than the distance to the edge of the road to ensure that when it falls it does not fall on the road. 3. The advertiser must have liability insurance to be specified in the law before the billboard is allowed. I did not mention building standard, because as I heard it from the talk show, the building code provisions are already very strict. Chuck Carlos L Agustin, [email protected], Oct 12, 2006 President, National Defense College of the Philippines wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Thanks for the fine reading. If ever people should realize that these so-called "religious conflicts" were brought about by zealots and fanatics on both sides-- the Islamic fundamentalists and as well as the Christian fundamentalists-- with the attendant side drama of "power grab internal war" between factions.. To boil it down-- it has nothing to do with religion and faith-- but more of having to do with flexing muscles and showing who has the better "might". I just came from a visit to Turkey . Now-- here is a predominantly Islamic country-- but secular in state operation. The founder of modern Turkey , Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had the vision (clear separation of Religion and the running of the State) and the intestinal fortitude to lead his country from the "folly" of mixing religion and country. Too bad western bias has overlooked the deed of this man. Too bad the Islamic country never learned from this man. Alexander Po, [email protected], Oct; 12, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear Tony, True, whenever religion is the subject of discussion, people can be most passionate up to death. The oldest account I have read was Zacariah Setchin's "Chronicles of the War Among Gods and Men" during the olden times reckoned to be the dawn of human existence in Sumer , the Land Between the Two Rivers. I found this Islamic Comics in the internet about the Prophet Mohammed compiled by Islamic writers from Islamic sources - the Quran and the Hadith. In 24 pages you will find interesting insight into Islam. Please see: http://www.islamcomicbook.com Keep the articles coming, I enjoy reading them. Rene G. Tababa, [email protected], Oct. 12, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww A few weeks ago, Pope Benedict invited all representatives of Islamic groups in Rome . The purpose was in the spirit of open lines of dialogue. What reports have we seen? Nothing significant. It all must have been very ho-hum. If it went well the Vatican would have released something. And as you hinted, if it went badly, the press would have been all over it. There was an article on the English Al Jazeera site with a story that I think is worth reading; ".... As Kamal and I left this spectacular sanctuary, we took a long stroll down the narrow alleyways of old Cairo . "The pope's diatribe is very dangerous because it plays with fire - with religion," Kamal volunteered. "A clash of religions is the most perilous and most difficult to extinguish. Everyone will lose"; a fascinating response from a former militant, who once believed in the clash of civilizations himself." What does this mean: Dialogue is a non-event; misunderstanding is good business. Ike Eslao, [email protected], Oct. 12, 2006 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear ACA, Your reply to Larry Tilby needs further elaboration. Larry said: ""Both religions have experienced periods of barbarism but, except for the Balkans, is there any other recent (within the last century) place where Christians have carried out the atrocities that too many Muslims seem to engage in today?... To which you replied "What about Iraq and Chechnya ?". I think Iraq and Chechnya cannot be called religious wars, however crazy these wars are. They are not fighting to convert the people to Orthodox or Kabbala. The point is: We need to recognize who is waging religious war here. Civilizational or cultural conflict is a completely different animal because you don't have to kill in the name of God. The points raised by these readers deserve a little discernment and nuanced understanding if we want to encourage principled discussions. Ike Eslao, [email protected], Oct. 14, 2006 MY REPLY. Actually in his letter, my friend Larry referred only to �atrocities�, not to �religious wars.� In both Iraq and Chechnya , both sides have committed atrocities. While the Christians in both places have not conducted religious wars, Christianity having been secularized, the Muslims are partly motivated by religious reasons, as they believe their culture � which include their religion, Islam � is being threatened by the �Crusaders.� Osama bin Laden has been very effective in reminding Muslims of the atrocities committed against their ancestors in the religious wars of 1,000 years ago. In Afghanistan , one of the biggest groups of international volunteers who fought under him against the Soviets were the Chechens. It is also not coincidental that wherever Islamic fundamentalists prevail, one of their first moves is to establish sharia or religious law as the basis of governance. Also, in the religious wars of the past, the motive was not always to convert, but more to punish those who refused to embrace the One True Faith. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Dear ACA When I wrote about the systematic destruction of Coptic Christians by Islamists, I was using historically nuanced facts. They are: The Crusades were frontal battles launched to liberate the Holy Lands from the occupying Moors, while the killings on Christian Copts and their culture were inflicted on non-combatants akin to genocide. But then you dismissed these by saying "One side will always claim the other side committed more atrocities". If that's your idea of analyzing historical facts then there will be no difference between Saddam's genocide on Kurds and the battle to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany because there were "atrocities from both sides". Is that the way to understand historical facts? Ike Eslao, [email protected], Oct. 14, 2006 MY REPLY. I would say that both the Crusades against the Saracens, and the Muslim campaigns against the Copts were wars of extermination waged for religious reasons. In the Christian capture of Jerusalem , non-combatants were also slaughtered to the last man, woman and child. I think it is futile trying to tote up who killed more, one side or the other, or who started the wars in the first place. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (The following book review was emailed to us) The Holy Terror By Eamon Duffy The New York Review of Books, Oct. 19, 2006 God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman Harvard University Press, 1,024 pp., $35.00 In a speech delivered in 2001 on the first Sunday after September 11, George W. Bush pledged America to a war on terrorism, which he referred to as "this crusade." There was an immediate outcry across the Islamic world. Did the term "crusade" hint at some grand confrontation between opposed civilizations, and, behind that, a hungry Western imperialism? According to a prominent European Muslim leader, the Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseilles, the President's "most unfortunate" invocation of the Crusades recalled "the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world," perpetrated with savagery over centuries by medieval Christian knights intent on the "recovery" of the Holy Land, and Jerusalem in particular. The President and the Mufti were invoking diametrically opposed sets of associations�"crusade" as valiant and costly struggle for a supremely good cause, and "crusade" as byword for barbarism and aggression. The contrast is no recent invention. Christian "holy war" is by its very nature profoundly contradictory�sanctified slaughter (but also self-sacrifice) designed to forward or protect the religion of Christ, who commanded his followers to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek to the aggressor, and who warned that all who took up the sword would perish by the sword. Yet for all its contradictions, crusading dominated the thinking and policies of Western Christendom for centuries, and shaped some of the most characteristic institutions of the Middle Ages, not least the papacy, which had invented it. Like the Mufti, historians have found it difficult to approach the Crusades without moral outrage. In the twentieth century, the historiography of the subject was dominated for English speakers by one writer, Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume narrative history of the Crusades, first published in 1951, held the field for fifty years. Runciman, a devout Christian, was a civilized and vivid writer, whose view of the Crusades was colored by Enlightenment horror of fanaticism. Famously, he ended his history with a resounding condemnation: The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing.... High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost. For all his immense learning, Runciman's account of the Crusades was limited both by his materials�essentially medieval narrative sources like chronicles�and also by the narrowness of his understanding of what constituted a crusade. He was uninterested in the extensive crusades against pagans and heretics in Europe , and his consequent focus on the struggle with Islam had a distorting effect. Over the last thirty years or so, a generation of British scholars led by figures like Giles Constable and the British doyen of crusade studies, Jonathan Riley-Smith, has transformed perceptions of the nature of crusading. They turned their attention to hitherto unexploited sources, like the records of the military orders, and the charters regulating crusaders' property, which contain rich material on the identity and motivations of the first crusaders. They brought the anti-pagan and anti-heretical European crusades into the story alongside the better-known crusades to the Holy Land , and called into question some of the stereotypes of the crusaders as uniformly brutal, uncivilized, and basely motivated. It had been commonly accepted that the explosion of crusading zeal reflected the urgent need for land and wealth of a rapidly expanding European population. Some historians argued that the first crusaders were often penniless younger sons, who saw in the crusade an opportunity to grab land and get rich quick. But the new crusade history showed how ill-founded this hypothesis was, by demonstrating the immense cost of going on crusade: even penniless younger sons needed the financial backing of their families, and this often involved enormous sacrifice and the mortgaging of lands to equip and sustain them. The study of crusade preaching and crusade charters revealed the depth and force of the religious roots of crusade, and the profound appeal of the crusade indul-gence, forcing historians to take more seriously the religious motivations for crusade. These and many other insights have been embodied in dozens of scholarly monographs and papers, including both single-author and collaborative histories of the crusading movement as a whole. But none of these have approached the scale of Runciman's three-volume classic, until now. Christopher Tyerman, who teaches medieval history in Oxford, offers in his new and massive study of the Crusades as a whole a welcome synthesis for the general reader of the newer understanding of crusade which, despite self-deprecating comparisons between his own "clunking computer keyboard" and Runciman's pen, "at once a rapier and a paintbrush," in scale at least does invite comparison with Runciman's masterpiece. Much more separates the two works than fifty years of research. Runciman was the last of the great gentleman scholar-historians, and his writing stands in a tradition which goes back through Acton and Macaulay to Gibbon, though his cast of mind was worlds away from Gibbon's sneering genius. The sweep of his narrative, the humane liberalism of his judgments, and his sometimes romanticized admiration for Byzantine civilization are all redolent of a more leisured world, before the professionalization�and narrowing�of historical writing. Tyerman's sensibility is drier, more sardonic; his perceptions and instincts are those of a working historian trained in the less leisurely ways of the modern university. His narrative, only slightly less comprehensive than Runciman's and full of fascinating detail, is more businesslike, less colorful. For all his scholarly balance, however, he can rise to the memorable phrase when required, and he never tries to excuse the inexcusable. So he characterizes the anti-Jewish pogroms that erupted in the wake of the preaching of the First Crusade in 1096 as a "mixture of demotic religious propaganda and material greed" which "combined to create an obscene cocktail of butchery and bigotry." But by and large his appraisal of both villains and heroes is more cautious than Runciman's: the great Muslim leader Saladin features here not as Runciman's wise and humane aristocrat, but as a shrewd politician whose generosity, like his occasional savagery, was carefully calculated. Where Runciman saw in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the armies of the Fourth Crusade an unsurpassed crime against humanity, Tyerman tells us that it was, by the standards of the time, "an atrocity, but not a war-crime." The advances in crusade history since the publication of Runciman's book are nowhere more obvious than in Tyerman's lucid exposition of the evolution of Christian notions of holy war. Tyerman is as well aware as Runciman of the inner contradictions in Christian theories of holy violence, but his careful exposition of the stages by which it evolved makes for less indignation and more understanding. Both Christianity and Islam have deployed ideas of holy war: in particular, their armed confrontation over possession of the holy city of Jerusalem has shaped the thinking of both religions about the legitimacy of violence in the service of religion. But Christianity had, and has, more difficulty than Islam in accommodating the notion of holy war. Struggle�jihad�is intrinsic to Islam, enjoined on all practicing Muslims, and sometimes described as the sixth pillar of Islam. This jihad takes two forms�the greater jihad, the internal or spiritual struggle with self for greater purity, the meaning dominant for most Muslims for most of Muslim history, and the lesser jihad, the military struggle against infidels in the world outside Islam�the so-called "House of War"�until the whole human race accepts Islam (which means obedience to God). From the beginning, Islam was propagated and protected by conquest, though in practice the drive to universal conversion was treated as a communal rather than an individual obligation, and was tempered by pragmatic considerations and political realism. As Tyerman shows, Christian justification of holy violence was an altogether more roundabout and troubled affair. The pacifism of the beatitudes could hardly be literally sustained once Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire . War and violence might be inherently sinful, but if Christians were to be citizens, Christianity had to give some account of the right of a state to defend itself, or to resort to force in the interests of law and order. In the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries the basis for a Christian theory of just war emerged: war might be legitimate where the cause was just (as in self-defense against an aggressor), where it was declared by legitimate authority (for example by the emperor), and where the intentions of those fighting it were good (and not a pretext for grudge or gain). But just war was still not holy war: a Christian theory of holy war would only emerge as a result of the application of Old Testament and apocalyptic models of battle in God's cause to the circumstances of barbarian Europe . European society in the early Middle Ages was ruled not by kings but by a multitude of local warlords, and the rights and liberties of the Church, indeed at times its very survival, were extremely vulnerable in the face of external threats like pagan or Islamic attack, and internally to simple violent greed. In such a world, the armed warrior who fought to secure the safety of the Church or the conversion of the heathen might take on the attributes of the heroes of the Old Testament. The supreme example was Charlemagne, anointed emperor by Pope Leo III as a protector of the Church in general and the papacy in particular, his sword henceforth the sword of God. In the centuries that followed, this concept would be developed, as successive popes, confronted to the north by militant paganism and to the south and east by the expansion of Islam, offered spiritual privileges remitting sin, penitential "indulgences," to Christian warriors who died defending the Church against such enemies. By the eleventh century the papacy had become the spearhead of radical reform in the Church, now confronting not paganism but violent and rebellious secular rulers, greedy for the Church's wealth, compromising her spiritual integrity, resisting her increasingly assertive spiritual claims. These reforming popes saw holy war as a way of securing the safety and independence of the Church. Summoning warriors to the banner of Saint Peter, they offered in return the indulgences of which the pope was the unique source. The attraction of these indulgences to Christian people derived directly from the paradoxical nature of what was being offered. For all its accommodation to the world, Christianity had never wholly shaken off the conviction that armed violence was intrinsically sinful, at best a regrettable necessity, at worst an absolute bar to salvation. Since all medieval magnates maintained their authority at least in part by force, all were spiritually compromised. The Church imposed draconian and prolonged penances for all forms of homicide, and as a result upper-class laymen were likely to be excluded from communion, and hence from heaven, by their very state of life. Laymen might undertake arduous penances, especially pilgrimages, to expiate their sins, but to be sure of salvation, it seemed they must lay down their arms, even, ideally, embrace monastic life. Engagement in a holy war, however, sanctified the very activity which had before been a barrier to heaven. Here, from the highest spiritual authority on earth, was a call not merely to guiltless but to meritorious violence. In the year 1095, the Byzantine emperor appealed to the pope for help against the Islamic forces which for twenty years had been advancing through Asia Minor and which had now almost reached the Bosporous. Pope Urban II was himself by birth a member of the aristocratic military classes, whose spiritual aspirations he now decided to focus around the powerful symbolic issue of the recovery of the burial place of Jesus from Muslim rule. A war against Muslim forces in the Holy Land could be seen as fulfilling one of the prime conditions of a just war, counting as self-defense, since it was aimed both at recovering what had once been Christian territory and at relieving the Byzantine regime, bulwark of Christianity in the East, now under mounting military threat. A holy war to recover the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem could also be seen as the supreme penance for those participating�arduous, dangerous, costly in every sense, the ultimate penitential pilgrimage. The psalms, the staple of the Church's prayer, were filled with lam-entations for the loss or oppression of Jerusalem , the city in which the drama of crucifixion and resurrection had been enacted. To eleventh-century Western pieties it seemed intolerable that the very stones sanctified by God's death and resurrection should be in the hands of unbelievers; and that feeling intensified when, earlier in that century, a renegade Shiite ruler of Palestine, the Fatimid Caliph Hakim, broke with established Islamic toleration of Christian pilgrimage and ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For Pope Urban the liberation of Jerusalem from "abominable slavery" was the test of the resolve of Western Christendom to the cause of Christ. Here was a cause which went to the nerve center of contemporary religious sensibilities and anxieties, sanctified employment for the arms of Europe , and, because of its papal endorsement, guaranteed a means of expiation for all sins. And, as Tyerman points out, in case these religious incentives failed to stir the consciences of Europe , Urban, ever a realist as well as a reforming visionary, added the promise of wealth and power: "Rescue that land from a dreadful race, and rule over it yourselves." The response to Urban II's proclamation of what came to be known as the First Crusade was staggering. His appeal was made in a year of prodigies. Spectacular meteor showers filled the heavens, and a bumper harvest suggested that God was miraculously providing supplies for the eastward march. Apocalyptic preaching by zealots like the diminutive evangelist from Picardy , Peter the Hermit, fueled popular excitement, and all over Europe tens of thousands flocked to take the crusade vow, whose emblem was a cross of cloth stitched on the clothing at shoulder or breast. From every country in Europe wave upon wave of armed men, some highly trained and well organized, others a rabble of poverty-stricken enthusiasts, flooded toward Constantinople , the normal route to the Holy Land . Their arrival alarmed the Byzantine authorities almost as much as the Muslim advance, for in appealing to the pope they had envisaged help from a few bands of professional soldiers, not this invasion of half-savage Westerners, who appeared to their sophisticated Byzantine hosts as unappetizing as the busloads of tattooed, beer-fueled, and bellicose British soccer fans who travel Europe nowadays during World Cup competitions. Many of the crusaders perished on the journey, many became disheartened and returned home, and those who made it to the Middle East were plunged into three years of famine, disease, and bloody and unrelenting conflict whose savagery would become legendary�notoriously, crusaders besieging Muslim strongholds catapulted the heads of executed prisoners over the walls to demoralize the defenders. The First Crusade culminated in a spectacular and apparently miraculous victory. After a desperate siege, Jeru-salem fell to the combined Western armies on July 15, 1099 . The bloody aftermath, though Tyerman makes it clear that it was exaggerated by contemporary chroniclers, would leave a permanent stain of genocide on the reputation of crusading. The victors, elated by success and agog both for loot and for vengeance after three long years of desperate danger and hardship, swarmed into the city and butchered everyone they found. Most of the Jewish population were burned alive in their synagogues. Muslim prisoners were coerced into carrying mounds of the dead outside the walls for cremation, and were then slaughtered themselves; the gutters ran with blood, and unburied corpses were still putrifying in the streets five months later. Blood was the cement for the rickety and quarrelsome federation of crusader states, known as "Outremer," the land overseas, which now formed around the Holy Sepulchre, its precarious symbolic center at Jerusalem presided over (eventually) by a king, and spiritually by the Latin patriarch. Jerusalem was eventually recovered for Islam in 1187 by the resourceful, civilized, and wily Sunni Muslim war-lord Saladin (a Kurd born, by one of history's little ironies, in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit ), for whose valor and magnanimity even contemporary Christian chroniclers admitted grudging admiration. But the dream of a Christian Holy Land would remain potent for the rest of the Middle Ages. Fresh crusades were launched in the 1140s, in 1188, in 1201, in 1217, and on into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And the concept of the crusade itself was broadened�successive popes extended the crusade indulgences to warriors enagaged in religiously inspired struggles against Islam in the Spanish peninsula, Tunisia, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, against northern pagans in the Baltic, and against heretics within Christendom itself, most notoriously the Cathars in southern France. Popes established a special crusade tax on Church property, and the movement generated its own new institutions, most famously the hospitaler and military orders, warriors who vowed to serve the Church whether in battle or by caring for and protecting pilgrims �the Knights of Saint John, the Teutonic Knights, and, best known of all, the Templars, who have attained in modern times a posthumous fame through dubious pulp-press and cinema fantasy. The savagery of the First Crusade would remain a recurrent feature of crusading, not merely in the confrontation with Islam (in which both sides perpetrated atrocities) but in the targeting of other victims. In the wake of Peter the Hermit's preaching in 1095 and 1096, a wave of anti-Semitism swept through Rhineland Germany , and beyond. If battle was declared on the remote Muslim enemies of Christ, what of those other age-old enemies within the gate, the Jewish communities scattered through Europe , whom preachers now declared guilty of Christ's blood? Why travel to the East to confront Islam, demanded the crusaders at Rouen , when "in front of our eyes are the Jews, of all races the most hostile to God"? Mobs en route to the Holy Land paused to lynch Jews, desecrate cemeteries, and burn synagogues in the cities through which they passed. As Tyerman notes, "Nothing in official Christian doctrine justified slaying Jews." But in the new mood of vengeful zealotry, doctrinal niceties like this carried no weight. The pogroms were denounced by local bishops, and the Jews of Mainz were given refuge in the archbishop's palace. But such help was often halfhearted, and almost always ineffective. Confronted with the inflamed and murderous mob, the archbishop of Mainz fled, leaving the Jews to their fate: his palace was stormed and the entire Jewish community slaughtered. Official Church teaching might differentiate sharply between Muslim and Jew; but a new level of Christian animus toward the Jews had been established. Every successive wave of crusade enthusiasm would set off further pogroms. This virulent anti-Semitism was not the only "collateral damage" from crusading enthusiasm. Notoriously, the Fourth Crusade, launched by Pope Innocent III in 1201 to recover Jerusalem , never got there. Sucked into Byzantine dynastic politics, the Western armies converged on Constantinople, ostensibly to back a coup d'�tat to support Alexius Angelus as Emperor Alexius IV, in return for a guarantee of financial backing for the crusade. When Alexius was deposed in favor of an anti-Western rival, the crusaders invaded and sacked the city, the richest and most civilized center of Christianity on earth, and the capital of the empire which the Crusades had been called into existence to protect. For three days Westerners rampaged through the city, looting and destroying; within weeks, a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch had been installed, and the annexation of the Byzantine Empire had begun. Pope Innocent denounced the sack as a religious calamity�"How is the Greek Church, so afflicted and persecuted, to return to ecclesiastical union and a devotion to the Apostolic See when she sees in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness?" Nevertheless, he eventually confirmed the Latin ecclesiastical takeover, thereby cementing into place an undying Greek hatred of the treacherous imperialism of the Latin Church. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 was one of the events that stirred Runciman's deepest sympathies as a historian. A devoted admirer of Byzantine Christianity, he saw the Eastern Church and empire as the principle victim of the Crusades. There was never, he declared, "a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade," for the sack of Constantinople had given the deathblow to the most civilized empire the world had ever known, and had thereby crippled Byzantium's ability to protect the beleaguered Christians of the Middle East. This is one of the points at which Tyerman tackles Runciman head on, and he dismisses Sir Steven's analysis of the disastrous consequences of the sack of Constantinople as "clouded by a crude religious and cultural analysis." The Westerners, he writes, were drawn to Constantinople in part by the internal feuding of Byzantine factions. Byzantium , he believes, was already in decline long before 1204, and its inability to protect the Christians of the Middle East was one of the causes of the Crusades, not a consequence. And, more generally, he himself is prepared to credit the Crusades with far more positive consequences, seeing them for example as helping to foster the inquisitive openness of Western Renaissance society toward the wider world, in marked contrast to the closed character of some other more sophisticated societies, such as medieval and early modern China. Nevertheless, as Tyerman himself demonstrates, the events of 1204 were to resonate for generations in the remotest corners of Christendom. Mountains of jewels, precious metals, and artworks looted from Constantinople in 1204, and the years of occupation which followed, traveled west, the best-known examples of which are the bronze horses of St. Mark's in Venice, stolen from Constantinople's Hippodrome. But the greatest treasures of all were relics. Western Christianity was obsessed with relics and the sacred power they were believed to radiate�the instruments of Christ's passion, the bones of the saints. Two of the greatest trophies of the First Crusade were the Holy Lance of Antioch (believed to be the very one which pierced Christ's side on Calvary), and the Jerusalem relic of the true cross. These objects, "discovered" during the 1090s, became the war banners and protection of the crusaders, and the loss of the Jerusalem relic of the cross when Saladin retook the city sent shockwaves through Europe. But Constantinople was the greatest repository of relics in the world, and after 1204 looted relics, some of them possibly even genuine, poured into Europe. Christ's crown of thorns, acquired by the Venetians in 1237, passed eventually to the French mon-archy, and one of the most exquisite Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris , was created to house it. A jeweled relic of the true cross looted by a priest from the imperial palace in April 1204 found its way to England, where it revived and transformed the fortunes of the found-ering Cluniac monastery of Bromholm in Norfolk: Bromholm's stolen relic became one of late medieval England's greatest pilgrim attractions. As long as Islam posed any threat to Eastern Europe, crusade ideology did not entirely disappear from Western thinking. But long before its formal demise it had ceased to have any practical consequences, in a world which no longer accepted that the protection of the true faith was the principal responsibility of the secular state. For the historians of the Enlightenment, crusading was a prime example of the evils of bad religion, stirring men to atrocious acts: the figure of the Muslim Saladin, humane, wise, and above all tolerant, became a literary cudgel with which to belabor Christian fanaticism. In the Romantic era, historians, poets, and novelists revived a sense of the glamour and nobility of crusade, and in the hands of conservative nationalists like the French writer J.F. Michaud, the Crusades themselves were interpreted as part of a struggle of civilizations, prefiguring the (benign) advance of the West in nineteenth-century colonialism. This anachronistic reading of the Crusades was seized and turned on its head in the late nineteenth century by Turkish leaders, as prefiguring contemporary Western aggression, though there had previously been no long-term Islamic tradition demonizing the Crusades in this way. Those searching Tyerman's book for direct clues to the present state of the Middle East or the confrontation of militant Islam and the West will, however, be disappointed. He shies away from "clear or sonorous summing-up" and he is wary of exaggerated moral praise or blame. In the millennium year, and subsequently on a controversial visit to Greece , Pope John Paul II included the Crusades, and especially the Fourth Crusade, among the historic "sins" perpetrated by members of the Catholic Church. Tyerman mentions these apologies without comment, but it is evident that he thinks themanachronistic. Extracting "the thread of the crusade from the weave of the middle ages," he thinks, distorts both. That was then, this is now, and he does not believe that the Crusades prefigure any sort of twenty-first-century sequence of events. But they deserve study nevertheless, because they represent an aspect of humanity at its most vivid, and at times, for all their savagery, at its most noble, "an ideal that inspired sacrifice at times on an almost unimaginable scale and intensity." God's War is a first-rate, scholarly, up-to-date, and highly readable survey of the entire crusading movement, overall perhaps less entertaining and less inspiring than Runciman, but more balanced and, as a synthesis of two generations of further research, often much better informed. Tyerman's publishers have produced a physically durable and handsome book. But it has to be said that the decision to present so extensive a narrative in a single volume of over a thousand pages will probably do the book no favors with the general reader. Each page has almost forty packed lines of clear but small print, and in weight and appearance the book may strike the nonspecialist as hard to handle. That is a pity, for in the gullible age of The Da Vinci Code, Tyerman offers a sane, informed, and gripping account of one of the most characteristic and most extraordinary manifestations of the Christian Middle Ages. ***** OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |