... H.D.S. GREENWAY

A joust with history in war on terror

(from the Boston Globe for May 31, 2002)

 

 

ONE OF THE BOOKS recommended to George W. Bush in the wake of Sept. 11 was "Warriors of God" by James Reston Jr. It is the story of Richard the Lionheart, his Muslim adversary Saladin, and the Third Crusade in the waning years of the 12th century, when two gallant foes fought for control of the Holy Land and the glory of God. To one it was a crusade in the name of Jesus Christ, and to the other it was a jihad in the Prophet Mohammed's cause.

 

Bush will have a shock of recognition when he comes to Reston's description of the fanatical, murderous cult of the Assassins, from which the word derives &endash; "a tribe of Ishmaelites, whose very name induced both the Christians and Muslims to quiver with fear and harror." Its leader, Rashid al Din Sinan, meaning Orthodox of Faith, commanded a following of about 60,000 terrorists.

 

"Sinan was brilliant, dairvoyant, ruthless, deceitful, pious, mystical and ascetic, with eyes fierce as meteors … and a tyrant's power of awesome destruction," Reston wrote some two years before the World Trade Center's demise. Sinan had under his spell a cadre of young novitiates, known as fidai, whose allegiance to him personally was absolute."

 

Only through his wisdom "lay the path to Purification and Enlightenment and Paradise." As an expression of their devotion only to their Messiah, these fidai were prepared for any suicide mission." In the end, neither Saladin's Muslims nor the Christian Crusaders could roust Sinan's Assassins out of their mountain fastness. It took the Mongols of Central Asia to do the job in the 13th century.

 

President Bush may receive another shock of recognition: that the symbols, legends and language of that long-ago titanic struggle between Christendom and Islam are still with us, flooding our politics in a sea of grievances and folk memory. Bush himself used the term "crusade" in describing his war against Osama bin Laden, probably not thinking that crusade contains in it the word cross nor aware that bin Laden has used the word frequently to compare those ancient invading knights to today's Western designs on Arab lands. Islamic militants today regularly adopt the name Saladin in their causes.

 

Christians in today's world have forgotten the religious fervor that led them for centuries to allempt to capture Jerusalem from the infidel Muslims. There were five major Crusades, but only the first managed to capture Jerusalem in 1099 -- only to be evicted by the chivalrous Saladin in 1187.

 

The dream took a long time dying in Europe. Columbus sailed out into the unknown saying that whatever fortune came out of his enterprise should be used to recapture the Holy Land. Christian Europe no longer wants Jerusalem, but the last Austro-Hungarian emperor claimed the title "king of Jerusalem," and the last Chrstian conquerors, the British, left only in 1948.

 

The dream has never died in the Islamic world, nor for the Jews who took up their own struggle for their ancient lands about about 100 years ago. There are Palestinians today who look upon Israel as the new Crusader Kingdom that will one day disappear from the Holy Land as did the Crusaders in their time.

 

It was control of Jerusalem's Muslim aud Jewish holy places - just a few streets away from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - that proved to be the final deal-breaker in the Camp David talks that came so close to a solution between Palestinian and Israelis. Today Israeli tanks and Palestinian militants do battle where Richard and Saladin went toe-to-toe 800 years ago. And for the true militants in both Arab andJewish camps the fight is still a religious war.

 

If you are a militant Islamist you see Christian America as the not-at-all hidden hand that keeps Jerusalem in the hands of the infidel Jews. For the pathologically disappointed among the Arabs, the great battle horses of Crusader knights differ little from today's American-made F-16 fighter bombers that drop death on undefended Arob villages.

 

Nine out of 10 Americans cannot tell you anything of Richard the Lion Heart's life, but in Arab lands the memory of Saladin burns as an unextinguished flame lighting the litany of wrongs to one day be righted. The realization that Bush, in the eyes of so many, walks in Richard's footsteps will come as the third shock to the American president.

 

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Globe.