Insight re Crusade and Jihad

There were plenty of religious rivalries before 1096, and a great many were  Christian v Christian and       Muslim v Muslim. Like Syria or Iraq today.

The Battle Hymn of the First Crusade

People often have a hard time seeing how the ethos of the Crusades can be justified in the light of certain seemingly pacifistic statements attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospels.

Why not think about this in a different way by looking at a religiously inspired song of a more recent time?

Comments welcome. Do you find this strange, exotic, and if so why? Is this part of your personal cultural heritage? If you thought it was before you read all of the stanzas, what do you think now?

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

What does it mean that the soul of time will be His slave?

Some interesting medieval scholarship on the web, Crusaders take note

The always interesting  Jonathan Jarrett reminded me of some interesting material that has been posted to the web which might be of interest to people who like the Franks and the Frankish nobility or who are fascinated  by the motivations of the people who went on the First Crusade.


I was particularly interested in the second post, which is the next best thing to a scholarly article, because I have been reading student papers about the motives of crusaders. Jonathan Jarrett, takes the position that you just can't dismiss the fact that, expensive as the crusading expedition was likely to be, some of the pilgrims thought they might possibly become rich. Jonathan Riley – Smith, a leading contemporary interpreter of the First Crusade is well-known for his opposition to the idea that any sensible person could have gone to Jerusalem expecting riches. In my lectures on the First Crusade, I make the point that Frankish warriors/early Knights were in the habit of taking big risks, notably to their own bodies, in hopes of gains of various sorts, monetary and reputational. It is nice to see this point of view systematically developed in any sensible form. If any of my students are still interested in this problem, our library has a more detailed article by John France in the collection of articles by Thomas Madden. This collection is called, rather obscurely, The Crusades. Just so it won't be confused, no doubt, with any other collection of articles on the Crusades.

Clash of civilizations time?

Since I am teaching both  Islamic Civilization and Crusade and Jihad this term, you can see how this piece, summarized from an Arabic source  in Syria Comment, could not help but draw my attention.

Why don’t the Christians in both Lebanon and Syria immigrate to Europe is allegedly what Sarkozy asked the Maronite religious leader on his recent visit to France.  According to the article, Christians had no place in the Middle East given the clash between Christianity and Islam.  The Maronite leader was shocked by what he heard which prompted the French leader to point to a document that cites how over three million Christians immigrated from Lebanon over the past 20 years and that the Middle East will face many problems in the future.

One wonders, but not very much, what the French president thinks about all those Muslims in France.

Imagine my surprise

In the first class meeting of my Crusade and Jihad course this morning, I said something like this:

You don't have to want to be a Christian crusader in the present, or even be a Christian, to have a vague positive feeling about those old holy wars.  For example, the recent movie Kingdom of Heaven by implication condemns some aspects of crusading, especially fanatics who go too far, but does not condemn crusading or Crusaders completely.  There are plenty of literary and film examples of this going back to Walter Scott in the early 19th century.  This results in the nostalgic feeling that somewhere sometime there was a worthy crusade pursued by sincere people who even if they made some mistakes had good hearts. 

Then I asked my students if they had any such nostalgic feeling.

Not one said they did.

Image:  Richard Lionheart, North Bay seems to have fallen out of love with you...

Rethinking the Crusade environment in the light of the Arab Spring

Anyone who has been paying close attention to recent Arab uprisings against corrupt governments has been getting a crash course in what is unrevealingly called "sectarianism." What this term describes, or obscures, is the fact that the Middle East, which many of us visualize as Muslim, full stop, is actually made up of various religiously-defined communities, some non-Muslim, some generally accepted as Muslim, others claiming to be Muslim but regarded with a great deal of suspicion by other Muslims.   See this article on the Syrian situation.  Without re-reading the post, I can tell you what stuck with me:  Although Syria presents itself as something of a secular state, all Syrians together, and all Arabs too, there is a great fear of other "sects" resulting in a willingness to believe the worst of them.  Many Syrians fervently want to believe that they are and can be all Syrians together, but do they dare lower their defenses?  The well-documented fear of instability is easily justified by reference to what happened in Lebanon and Iraq when a long-standing modus operandi or religious truce broke down, and various parties grabbed for power out of greed or self-righteousness or perhaps mostly insecurity.  And of course that fear of instability comes close to being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 (And the other thing that stuck with me from recent reading about Syria is the fear and loathing that so many have for the idea of an Islamic Republic; as logically follows.)

Well, I knew about many of these internal religious divisions, but hearing people discussing it NOW, and urgently, has made a big impact on my effective understanding of the "Muslim Middle East," to wit, I now think a lot, in the front of my mind about the fact that however important Islam has been in the Middle East since the 7th century, and however sweeping the claims various Muslims have made, and whatever wishes for an Islamic society have been wished, it's always been at least this divided.  The divisions haven't always been active, but like so many fault lines in an earthquake-prone region,  they've been there.

Think about the religious history of the United States, as another instance.  So many people think it can or should be summed up in a phrase.  How wrong they are.

So what does this have to do with the Crusade era, which I will again be teaching in the fall?  I will have to think about something that Christopher Tyerman has said in a couple of places -- that the rulers and political and military actors "on both sides" were immigrants or recent descendants of such.  And if religious justifications for their actions and regimes were important (if not always appealed to), it is just wrong, wrong, wrong to attempt to explain the developments of the era merely by casting it as two religiously homogenous societies battling it out.  Even if that was the way some contemporaries, and influential ones at that, visualized reality.

It will be a challenge to strike the right balance.



Image:  The Assad family, late 20th century -- Syria's most famous Alawis, a term you should look up.