Yes...but! Sept. 7,2004

September 7 2004

Home > Columns >Yes...But! 4-44b

When I saw the front page of the September 4 Globe and Mail and that giant, bloodstained hand, clutching a tiny golden cross; when I read that “Beslan is a Christian Enclave surrounded by Muslim areas,” a word popped up in my mind: Crusade. Earlier I had tried to visualize the community happening that preceded that carnage in southern Russia. I pictured chatting, excited children dressed up for the first day of school, parents and grandparents present, having walked them from all over town, now assembled in the gym perhaps. In my imagination I saw the principal motioning for silence, and just as the local bishop was about to say the blessing, he was shot.In a flash, seeing a cross dangling from his falling body, I realized that this was not another episode in the war on terror, but the latest paragraph in a religious tragedy that started a thousand years ago. The prelude to this event occurred in the year 1091 when the then pope issued an appeal to reclaim the Holy Land from the Barbaric Muslim forces who had taken it hundreds of years before. Pope Urban’s II rousing call to holy war to redeem the Holy Land for Christ met with an enthusiastic response. Within months 100,000 people had simply dropped everything and "taken up the cross," and went to war. Ever since then the word ‘crusade’ has carried a curse in Islamic lands. So when George W. Bush, speaking spontaneously, without the aid of advisers or speechwriters, looked for a simple expression of what the assaults of September 11, now three years ago, meant to him and what was required to combat it, he used the “crusade" word. For George W. Bush, the word ‘crusade’ was an offhand reference, expressing his exact emotion, revealing his most deeply felt commitment. ‘Crusade,’ he said. Later, his embarrassed aides tried to downplay the term, but the record stands. ‘Crusade,’ is a word meaning nothing less than an apocalyptic conflict between irreconcilable cultures. The President's usage of that cursed word flashed through the Arab news media with the speed of light. Crusade. I am a Christian with a feeling for history. The Crusades were a set of world-historic crimes, still vividly remembered in the Arab world. In Iraq "insurgents" shocked the West by decapitating hostages, and turned this most despicable act into a military tactic. But a thousand years ago, Latin crusaders used the severed heads of Muslim fighters as missiles, catapulting them over the fortified walls of cities under siege. The crusades were crimes stemming from a false notion of Christianity. In the name of Jesus, and certain of God's blessing, crusaders savagely slaughtered Muslims and Jews alike, flattening the entire city of Jerusalem in 1099 and later turning on Eastern Christians, and then on Christian heretics. Once blood is spilled there is no stopping, as we saw in Beslan. That thousand year old trail of violence still scars the earth and human memory. These long series of military campaigns, lasting almost 200 years, till 1291, have shaped what we call Western civilization. Then and now Jerusalem, at the centre of the earth, still defines world politics. When Bush's remark was translated into Arabic for broadcast throughout the Middle East, the word "crusade" was rendered as "war of the cross," so aptly pictured in that bloody - cross-clutching hand. Back even further. Before the Crusades, the emphasis of the Christian Church was on Easter and the hope of “the resurrection of the body and life eternal,” as confessed in the Apostles’ Creed. However Crusade-theology focused on the cruel death of Jesus and introduced violence as sacred, graphically seen also in Gibson’s film, The Passion. The Crusades institutionalized the cult of martyrdom among Muslims as well. Today the suicide-murderers of the World Trade Center, like the suicide-bombers from the West Bank and Iraq, exploit a perverse link between the willingness to die for a cause and the willingness to kill for it, just as the Crusaders, also thinking of heaven, honored that link. Today, Christianity hardly talks of resurrection; its favorite word is ‘Rapture,’ preaching an escape from earth, implying disregard for both the human body and Planet Earth. It is not surprising that both Rapture and Rape have the same root in the latin verb ‘rapio’ meaning ‘to carry off.’ Bush's inadvertent reference to the Crusades establishes violence as the perfectly appropriate response to what is wrong in the world. Bush's savior is the Jesus whose cross is wielded as a sword. His is not the Jesus who turns the other cheek. That is for “girlie men” says an actor turned politician. But sacred violence, initially unleashed in 1096, continued in 9/11 2001, and now in Beslan and Iraq and Israel and wherever, has a momentum of its own. What we now witness is not a war on terror, but a Clash of Civilizations, a World-Wide-War between fanatic adherents of two erring religious interpretations.