The Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World [Tapa dura]

As is abundantly clear from the title, in Holy War Armstrong develops the thesis that the Crusades had a lasting impact which persists into the present. Perhaps the larger point that she is making is that the relationship between Islam/Christianity/Judaism today needs to be seen in the context of the past (including the more distant past) rather than being seen ahistorically.

Armstrong structures the book to support her thesis-- interspersing chapters relating to the current history of Jerusalem and Palestine with chapters about the major waves of crusades. It is not clear when you buy the book that you are going to get so much modern Middle Eastern history, and potential buyers should be aware of this as it may cause some frustration if you are expecting a book more like The Crusades Through Arab Eyes or a straight up crusading history.

In the reviews here at Amazon and in other forums there have been broad accusations of pro-Islamic bias levelled at Armstrong. I believe these accusations to be largely in error. If you read more than one of her books, Armstrong has dedicated herself to her notion of triple vision. Her stated project is to foster understanding between the three religions by talking directly to the misconceptions that we hold about each other. The writing in Holy War makes very clear that she intends the book for a western audience. Accordingly, she spends a great deal of time explaining the Islamic perspective under the assumption that it will be the point of view most lacking from the potential audience. I assume that were her presumed audience to be primarily Islamic she would probably irritate them by constantly defending the Christians.

However, it does seems that in this book Armstrong lends herself more readily to accusations of bias through a number of significant elisions. For instance, she doesn't mention the aggressive pre-crusades contact between Christians and Muslims. Nor does she detail in any length the period that she refers to as the Islamic dark ages. It may be a serious miscalculation on her part to fail to understand that an audience wears its hair shirt more readily if it believes that its neighbor has to wear one as well.

Readers should also not be fooled by the misleading introduction to the new edition-- the book itself has not been updated past its 1991 US release. Recent events in the middle east (or elsewhere) have not been addressed.

Overall, Holy War should be interesting to a wide variety of audiences. It is not as smooth as some of her later books (Battle for God is my personal favorite). Nor is it always comfortable to read. Armstrong has taken on a large project in her writing, and chosen an arena where to attempt objectivity is difficult at best, and thankless at worst. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

Even those of us who have studied the Crusades will learn much from this book. Armstrong digs deep into the events of the crusading era, providing freshly perceived context for those military and religious ventures. Her learning is impressive.

Her objectivity is less so. While Armstrong condemns religiously motivated aggression by Western European Christians, she passes much more lightly over the earlier behavior of Islamic conquerors who also were driven by religious zeal. At one point, she writes that "It is obvious that the Muslim ideal of holy war is very different from the Crusade: it is essentially defensive whereas the Crusaders, like the Jewish holy warriors, had made a holy initiative when they attacked the enemies of God and his chosen people." Yet earlier in the same book she had written "It was the duty of the Muslim state (the house of Islam) to conquer the rest of the non-Muslim world (the House of War) so that the world could reflect the divine unity." How is this morally preferable to crusading theory?

Those who were crushed by Islamic expansionists in the seventh and eighth centuries seem to have been forgotten. Ask the Iranians how they feel about the Muslim conquest of Persia. The memory is hardly golden.

Armstrong's thesis, that the Crusades are having an impact on contemporary Middle East politics and the relations among the three Abrahamic faiths, is well-researched and convincingly argued. It is fairly easy to posit that the past has an influence on what is going on today. I would definitely agree. It is also clear that the Crusaders engaged in some behavior that would quite naturally lead to resentment, distrust and anger among the people residing in the Middle East of that time and today. However, Armstrong makes the mistake of starting at the Crusades and ignoring that which occurred prior to the Christian armies taking back the Holy Land. She mentions in passing that Muslim armies had attacked non-Muslim lands but fails to condemn these invasions at all. One glaring error I found is that she claimed that Muslims had no aggressive intentions on Europe and that the Christians had no reason to suspect or fear Muslim aggression. Tell that to the Spaniards and the Eastern Europeans and the Byzantines. Let's not even mention that the entire Muslim expansion through Arabia, the Levant, North Africa, Persia and South Asia were accomplished with the sword. If I were a Christian in Europe or anywhere else in the world, I would have feared Muslim aggression based on history and reason, not due to some misunderstanding of the Muslims. Islam was, and in some ways remains, a religion not solely of the sword but definitely one in which the sword plays a central role. Perhaps another book could be written that could posit that the entire conflict in the Middle East today is a result of Muslim imperialism in the 7th-10th centuries C.E. which was the direct cause of the Christian reaction leading to the Crusades.

Another issue with the book is Armstrong making claims about the meaning of the Quran. It is obvious from reading this book that Armstrong has not read the Quran critically or is merely trying to placate the Muslims. (Of course, writing critically about the Quran or Muhammed is a dangerous business, just ask Rushdie, and I don't really blame Armstrong for failing to be critical.) The Quran does say that war should be defensive but it also encourages, and some would say obligates, Muslims to start aggressive wars with the justification that any area that is not Muslim is hostile to Islam and therefore a threat to be dealt with. I am not a scholar of the Quran, and Armstrong knows far more than I do, but I have read it and, while it does contain some wonderful passages, it also has many contradictory passages which were recited to support the current needs of the Muslim community according to Muhammed. It is a book of peace and a book of war. It is a book of love and a book of hatred. It is a book of tolerance and intolerance, depending on one's point of view. Picking and choosing sections of the Quran to support a view can be done by both Muslim apologists defending the faith and Muslim-haters who want to bash it. Both the apologists and the bashers take things out of context, depending on how the context is interpreted. Armstrong clearly revealed her bias in how she viewed this book.

While I am not convinced that Armstrong is merely a Muslim-apologist, it is clear from the book that she does harbor some antipathy toward Christianity and tends to be far more critical of Christians than she is of Jews, and definitely Muslims. Living in the world today, we are the heirs of our past but blaming the ills on the Christian Crusaders alone is ridiculous. Perhaps it is more fair to say that the misery and oppression felt by Muslim countries in the Middle East is just as much a result of Muslim imperialist aggression against the Christian world as of Western imperialism in the Muslim world. Imperialism can be good or bad depending on which side of the equation you fall on!

But, I am not here to write history but to relate what I found in the book. In summary, it is a good thesis, well-argued, but overtly anti-Christian and overly sympathetic to early Muslim imperialism. I give it three stars for the great research and wonderful writing style.