June 15, 2005
Reality Check
Robert Spencer on revisionist history and revisionist now.
.... And as for the treatment of Christians in Palestine in the decades just before the First Crusade, I discuss it at some length in my forthcoming book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (coming August 8 from Regnery). What was life like for the Christians in Palestine in the years leading up to the Crusades? Let's see: In 1004, the sixth Fatimid Caliph, Abu ‘Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985-1021) turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother and uncles (two of whom were Patriarchs) and ordered the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim commanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh century after the Persians burned an earlier version, marks the traditional site of Christ’s burial. Al-Hakim piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the order that Christians and Jews accept Islam or leave his dominions.Posted by Ithildin at June 15, 2005 11:28 AM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHEHe ultimately relaxed these decrees, and in 1027 the Byzantines were allowed to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Nevertheless, Christians were in a precarious position and pilgrims remained under threat. In 1056, the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. When the Seljuk Turks swept down from Central Asia, they enforced a new Islamic rigor, making life difficult for both native Christians and pilgrims (whose pilgrimages they blocked). After they crushed the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and took the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes prisoner, all of Asia Minor was open to them — and their advance was virtually unstoppable. In 1076, they conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. The Seljuk Emir Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once his men had entered the city, they murdered 3,000 people. But I guess Carroll would say they all committed suicide.
Carroll’s coup de grace is meant to fill his readers with foreboding about the contemporary situation: “Europe’s initiating ‘holy war’ with Islam…was based on flawed intelligence, propaganda, and threat exaggeration.” If Carroll had filmed Ridley Scott’s recent dhimmi Crusades flop, Kingdom of Heaven, he would have cast George W. Bush as the evil Crusader Guy of Lusignan. He ascribes “the political fanaticism that has lately seized the Arab Islamic religious imagination (exemplified in Osama bin Laden)” to “a defensive fending off of assault from ‘the West’ than in anything intrinsic to Islam.” Yet acceptance of his thesis here depends on the reader’s ignorance of the 450 years of jihadist aggression that preceded the Crusades and obliterated the Christian cultures of the Middle East and North Africa -- and which today’s jihadists consider to be the direct antecedent of their own efforts. Against what were the initial conquerors of Syria, Egypt, Constantinople, Spain and all the rest defending? What is the significance of the fact that today’s jihad terrorists hold to the same ideological and religious imperatives? You won’t get the answers from James Carroll.
