William Tyler
The Rise of Islam to the Crusading Centuries

William Tyler - The Rise of Islam to the Crusading Centuries

- First of all, some apologies from me Over the weekend in two separate incidents, over 36 hour period, two of my teeth snapped off, two of my incisor teeth. So if you get a view of my mouth, which looks horrendous, I do apologise, I can’t do anything about it. I’m seeing the dentist on Wednesday. I dunno when he’ll be able to do anything, but also, I dunno how much it’ll cost, but whatever, it’ll have to be done. So I apologise for that. Secondly, I also managed to acquire a very bad pain in the shoulder, cold shoulder with the pain going down the arm. And although I had a Chinese massage earlier today, which has certainly improved it, just be careful if anything else falls off while I’m talking or I crease up with pain, it’s nothing to do with you, it’s just age and me. But I’m, hopefully I should get through this all right. Now forget that, and I’ll turn to something which is not frivolous and very serious. I’d like to say on behalf of all of you who are listening to me at the moment, that we are thinking of our Israeli friends who are in the midst of the most appalling difficulties and threats. And to say to all our Israeli friends, those who are with lockdown and those who are not, we are all thinking and praying for you at this very difficult time. You are not forgotten by any of us on lockdown or indeed those of you are not on lockdown, but are our friends in Israel. We are thinking of you. So that’s what I wanted to say before I start now, I’m going to have a map which everyone should have received in their invitation today. We’re going to put the map up. Now, the map, I’m not going to talk about at the beginning of my talk, but rather yet, it’s the crusader states. These are the states created during the crusades in the 12th century. There were four of them, the county of Edessa at the top, the principality of Antioch coming down, the county of Tripoli and the largest, the kingdom of Jerusalem. They didn’t survive.

And I’ll tell you how they didn’t survive and I’ll tell you why they were created and whom, but I thought I’d put it up now, for those of you who didn’t look on your invitation or didn’t get it with your invitation, if you didn’t get it, then you can easily Google on the internet simply the crusader states. And that map or a similar map will come up. All you need to remember is that there are four of them, and the only one anyone ever talks about is the kingdom of Jerusalem. So there you are. Thanks very much indeed for putting my map up, now we can remove that, and I’ll start the talk. Thanks ever so much. Now, today’s talk falls into three distinct but interrelated parts, namely first of all, who are the Arabs, where did they come from? Secondly, Mohammed and the rise and spread of Islam in the early centuries. And thirdly, Christian crusaders against Islamic Jihadists. So those are the three topics that I’m going to try and cover. So I’ll begin then with the Arabs. The beginning of the story, the Arabs is not entirely clear, although the majority of historians place it in Africa and say that the Arabs migrated from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula sometime between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago. You could say their origin is lost in the mist of time. According to both Islamic and Jewish tradition, they are the children of Ishmael, who himself was the son you remember, of Abraham and Hagar.

And he, it is said, moved to the Arabian Peninsula and began the race of Arab. So you can take your choice of believing in the Quran or the Torah or in Christian terms, the Old Testament or in some of the historians and anthropologists, and the stories are as ever in this very, very dark age in the past, confusing. The first reference we actually have to Arabs as such comes from the Assyrians in the ninth century, BCE, according to the Assyrian record at the time in the ninth century, BCE, the Arabs were living in the Lavant, Mesopotamia and Arabia. So that’s our first reference. Then you might say, well what does the word Arab mean? Now, dear me, there are so many sources of the etymology of Arab. You could drown in them. I think it is the Hebrew word which appears in the Bible, in the book of Nehemiah, which really gives, I think the correct answer. It comes from the word in Hebrew, which meant wilderness. And the Arabian peninsula was of course a wilderness, a desert wilderness. So I think simply the Arab is a Hebrew word, and that in itself is rather ironic. And it comes from the word wilderness. And that equates with Arabia, where we know they first came to archaeologically, we know. And historically the Assyrians confirmed that in the ninth century, BCE, there was however no self-awareness amongst these Arabs that they were one people, they were tribal people, desert tribes. And they had maybe, well, they had a common language, Arabic, a Semitic language.

They had an ethnicity which was the same. And to some extent they shared the cultural values of desert dwellers. But their identity as Arabs only came about when Mohammed introduced the religion of Islam and converts the Arabs to Islam. And it is through being Islamic and the fact that they were brought together by the successors of Mohammed into an Arab empire that they began to see themselves as Arabs. And we can see them as Arabs very clearly for the first time. When I said that Arabic was a Semitic language, it is, as was Hebrew, as was Aramaic. And indeed Canaanite and Phoenician were all Semitic languages. And linguists believed that all those languages emerged from the Arabian Peninsula. I was asked last week by someone about Aramaic, well if we take Jesus of Nazareth, he spoke almost certainly Aramaic. Well, we can deduce that from the Christian gospels. But he also understood Hebrew, although the elite in Judea at the time would have also spoken Greek, Jesus did not speak Greek. Aramaic today is still spoken by a very limited number of people, both Jews and Christians, it’s small, small pockets of them is probably the right word to use, but it is linked to Hebrew and Arabic, Semitic languages. I’m not a linguist. And if any of you are linguist, you can come on and say, no, William, this is the answer. But as far as I’m aware that is correct, before I leave the origin of Arabs, let me turn to the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah lived in the fifth century, BCE, just before the halfway mark of the century. And in the book of Nehemiah, both in the Torah and in the Christian Old Testament, we know the story that Geshem the Arab opposed Nehemiah because Nehemiah was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem.

And we know that probably he came, Geshem the Arab, from a tribe called Gashmu. Remember I just said that the Arabs were tribal people and he appears to have been a very powerful ruler in Northern Arabia and stretching up to Judea. In Nehemiah chapter six, and I’m reading from the Christian Bible, which I’ve got, it says chapter six. “Now, it came to pass when Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem the Arabian and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall and that there was no breach left therein, though at that time I had not set up the doors upon the gates, that Sanballat and Geshem sent unto me saying, ‘come, let us meet together in some one of the villages in the plane of Ono.’ But they thought to do me mischief and I sent messages unto them saying, ‘I am doing a great work so that I cannot come down. Why should the work cease whilst I leave it and come down to you?’” And the chapter six of Nehemiah continues. “So the war was finished in the 20 and fifth day of the month of Elul in 50 and two days. And it came to pass when all our enemies heard thereof and all the heathen that were about to saw these things, they were much cast down in their own eyes before they perceived that this work was wrought by our God.” So we are aware in the Middle East that Assyrians and Jews were absolutely knowing about Arabs, but remember that they are tribes of Arabs, there’s no unification. Unification comes, as I said, with Islam.

And so the story of the Middle East, indeed you could argue the story of Europe in the 21st century was changed forever by one man. Mohammed. Born about 570 CE. By the time of his birth, the Roman Empire in the West Rome had collapsed, leaving only the Roman empire in the east, now Christian, based on the city of Byzantium, they spoke Greek. It’s a Greek empire based on Byzantium. Byzantium, it’s later to be called Constantinople. And in our present day is called Istanbul. One of the important things to note about Byzantium is that it divided Christianity subsequently between Catholic Christianity in the West based on Rome and Orthodox Eastern Christianity based on Byzantium. And so there were two in a sense opposing Christian beliefs. It’s also the reason why Putin in Russian orthodoxy has, and the Russians have always wished to recover Constantinople, now Istanbul, from Muslims who captured the city in 1453 and since 1453, the Russians have dreamt of releasing Istanbul from the control of Muslims and reestablishing Christianity in that city, which was the birthplace of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Now that is something we’re going to, it’s going to be important to us later in this talk. So Mohammed was born in 570 in a world where in the Middle East, Byzantium was powerful and also the Persian empire, the Persian, of course Iran, but at the time also controlling what today we call Iraq. Mohammed was an Arab born into a tribal society in the Arabian Peninsula in the town or city, if you like, of Mecca. And John McEwan, in his concise history of the Arabs, writes this, “Mecca was of little interest to the Byzantine empire, which still held the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean, or to Persia, which included what is now Iraq as well as Iran.” The religions in the area are by this time interesting.

There’s Christianity in Byzantium as I’ve just been talking about. There’s Judaism without a homeland, but lots of Jews following the diaspora, which we talked about last week throughout the Middle East. And there’s Zoroastrianism in Persia and there’s still Zoroastrianism in Persia, which is also, well sometimes it’s called a monotheism. A monothetic religion, Zoroastrianism and sometimes it’s called a dual, it’s sort of, it’s basically good versus evil in the Zoroastrian theology. And then there was Arab religion. Now Arab religion was quite interesting. It’s tribal, yes, but this is what McEwan says, “The focal point of Arab religion, was the Kaaba, a black, cube shaped shrine in Mecca,” which is of course still there. And it wasn’t Islamic, it’s pre-Islamic, “Of which the pure age were official guardians, 360 idols surrounded the Kaaba and others had been placed inside the individual deities were essentially local and concerned themselves with particular needs. That’s rather like Roman gods if you like. Thus the God Hubal whose name the Kurdish called upon him battle was also the God of rain. Mecca was the destination for an annual pilgrimage from many parts of Arabia, which coincided with an important market and helped fill the town’s coffers.” It’s the beginning of a before Islam. So Islam like Christianity in Western Europe drew upon pagan faith in their attempt to win people over. You can’t win people over if you tell them that everything they previously believed was nonsense. The clever thing is to incorporate that into the new religion as Christianity did here in England, building churches on sites of prehistoric, or Celtic rather not prehistoric, building on on temple sites here on pagan temple sites and here in Mecca, turning the Kaaba into a mosque. It’s fascinating how religions adapt and change in that way.

So let’s have a look at Mohammed and his preaching. There’s a very good chapter in Simon Sebag Montefiore book, Titans of History on Mohammed. And I wanted to read you just the beginning of this. Montefiore says, “Mohammed was the founder of the Islamic faith. Muslims believed that he was the messenger of God and the last of his prophets, and that he transmitted the word of God to his people in the form of the Quran. For Muslims, the Quran and the Hadith, collections of Mohammed’s deeds and sayings, together provide complete guidance on how to live a good and devout life.” But Mohammed is no Jesus of Nazareth, preaching peace and turn the other cheek because as Montefiore goes on to say, “While he founded Islam against a background of turbulent tribal feuding,” what we’ve been talking about, “Mohammed encourages followers to serve God with decency, humility, and piety, but,” always a but. “But he was also clearly a gifted and ruthless soldier statesman, founding a successful and expanding state by diplomacy and warfare as well as a new world religion.” In other words, Islam began at the very beginning by force of arms, quite distinct from Christianity. Now, I don’t want anyone to think for one moment that I’m saying that Christianity is all that Christ preached in terms of peace. Of course it isn’t. The church changed all of that, otherwise we would not have the crusades and we will come to that. But here at the very beginning, Islam is a very political movement and a military movement as well as a religious.

And remember from the saying of Jesus of Nazareth, last week I said that Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and render unto God the things that are God’s.” In other words, that’s not a political message. Now, the Jews at the time would’ve wanted and hoped for a Messiah with a political message like Mohammed’s message. But that is not the basis of Christianity. Despite Christians being so warlike in future centuries. Muhammad’s message and mission came to him in two visions of the angel Gabriel. And you can see by just saying that, how Islam draws upon Judaism in much the same way that Christianity draws upon Judaism. It’s a sad fact of life that much of the theology in terms of the Quran, in terms of the Torah and in terms of the Christian Bible are similar. His message came in two visions. The first in 610 CE, AD, and the second in 619 CE. As I said just earlier, his hometown or home city was Mecca, but they rejected him. Why? Well, for obvious reasons. His new religion was challenging those who were making a great deal of money out of the religions, that they had all those idols in the Kaaba. Why? Because it was drawing a desert people into a market in which there was great money. Now he was preaching something different. They disgusted him. They thought he was going to upset the status quo when many of them, people in the elite part of Meccan society were doing very nicely. He was forced to flee and he was accepted by the city of Medina. Now, of course, Mecca and Medina are important places in Islam. He fled to Medina. And between 624 CE and 627, he fought Mecca.

And in the end he captured Mecca in 630 CE. So he’s spreading Islam to Mecca by force of arms. You may or may not think that’s significant. I think perhaps it is significant. However, there is a problem about Mohammed and his words and messages and deeds as there is about Jesus. That is to say that it’s difficult to substantiate, as I said last week, history from religion in the four gospels of the Christian Bible. And so it is to extract history from the Quran and the Hadith in Islamic religion. It’s difficult. They’re not what historians would regard as suitable, entirely suitable resources in terms of primary resources. The Quran was put together after his death, for example. It’s difficult. If any of you have read the Quran and I did a long time ago, read it from cover to cover. It’s a very odd book compared to the Torah, the Old Testament or indeed to the New Testament of Christianity. It’s patchy, I think is a word I would use. I’m not going to look at religion, that’s not my purpose. My focus is really on the results of Mohammed’s preaching and the establishment of this third monotheism, Islam, alongside Judaism and Christianity. So let’s take a breather and recap. There are large numbers of Jews in the Middle East, obviously practising Judaism, but they don’t have a land of their own. They’re scattered. When we come to look at both Byzantium Empire and the Ottoman Empire, we shall have to look at how Jews were treated. There are also Christians at this juncture until 1453, very late date, there is the Christian Empire of Byzantium. When Byzantium falls again in the Ottoman Empire, we have to look at the position of Christians as well as the position of Jews within a Muslim empire. The Quran states this in terms of what you might do. Let me just read this little passage from, this is the Rough Guide to the History of Islam.

“The fourth and fifth verses of the ninth Surah in the Quran proclaim a woeful punishment to the unbelievers except to those idolaters who have honoured their treaties with you in every detail and aided none against you, with these, keep faith until their treaties have run their term. God loves the righteous. When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters. Wherever you find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush for them everywhere. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms of money, the taxation allow them to go their way, God is forgiving and merciful.” Now, this is tough rhetoric, is it not? The rough guide says “This is not the whole story from the time of Mohammed onwards, Muslim agents work to promote the message of the prophet. Likewise, recorded instances of conquered peoples being forced to accept Islam are the exception, not the rule.” Yes, but you see, like Albanians who became Muslim, you paid less tax. You didn’t pay the full tax if you were Muslim, if you remained Christian, you paid, or indeed Jewish, you paid the heavy taxation. So Albania, Kosovo within the Ottoman Empire, later in the Middle Ages converted to Islam. Well, you can see why if it’s going to cost them less. Let me just finish what I was reading, if I may. But it’s undeniable that conquest viewed by its perpetrators of reformer Jihad enabled the gradual Islamization of territories taken first by the Muslim Arabs and later on by non-Arab Muslims, in particular Turks, the Ottoman Empire. So they were spreading Islam.

So you get preached to, so if you don’t accept Islam, then you pay heavy taxes. And in the end, when push comes to shove, they will kill non-Muslims. Now, not everybody was killed, clearly, but you can see that here, Jordan, as a country is not going to kill non-Muslims. But I wouldn’t fancy our chances with Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran. So we from the very beginning have problems. We being Christians and Jews or if like, well, I was going to say Europeans, but that’s unfair. So we stick with saying Jews and Christians faced problems with Islam. It’s their intention, the Arab Empire’s intention to make us all Muslim. Muhammad himself died in 632 CE. Islam spread across the Middle East. It’s like a tidal wave that goes across. The Arabian tribes were united under Islam by 634 CE, I won’t keep saying CE and AD, 634, the tribes of Arabia are united, Egypt and Syria are taken in 634. Jerusalem is taken in 638 by 641, they defeated the Persians by 650, Cyprus is formed. So they’re moving out into the Mediterranean. They’re also moving across from Egypt across North Africa to Afghanistan. They’re moving eastwards as well as westwards. And the Singh in India by 650 are all Muslim. This is a very proselytising faith, but also a very, a faith, not just proselytising, but taking an empire in. They cross the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar. They ended up conquering Iberia, modern day Portugal and Spain. And Muslim armies entered the south of France.

They were only turned back in 732 by Charles Martel, also known as Charles the Hammer at the Battle of Plataea. And this is such an important thing to remember, and I guess most people, well, sorry, I guess all of you know, but many people don’t. But Muslims reached deep into France, and as you all know, Muslims remained in Spain until the end of the 15th century. It’s also true that like Judaism and like Christianity, Muslims split into various sects. Now, I’m not, as I said, I’m not going into religion, but it is important to know one thing, and that is the division between Shia and Sunni. Sunni is basically the Middle East, the Shia is Iran, the Persians, they share fundamental beliefs as indeed do Roman Catholics and Protestants in Christianity share basic beliefs. It doesn’t mean to say that over the centuries, Protestants haven’t murdered Catholics and Catholics murdered Protestants. And so it is with Sunni and Shia. The differences are related in Islam to the events followed the death of Mohammed. The central difference emerged after Mohammed died in 632. The issue was who was to be the caliph? That is the spiritual leader. The title caliph existed right through to the 20th century with the Ottoman sultan who was also the caliph. Interestingly, originally the caliph had to be of the house of Mohammed. Well, the Ottoman Sultan wasn’t even an Arab. He was a Turk. We’ll come to that at a later date. So when Mohammed died in 632, the issue is who is to be caliph? Literally Caliph means the deputy of God, the spiritual leader. With the prophet Mohammed dead, the majority sided with one of his closest companions, a man called Abu Bakr. And they became Sunni. A minority opted for Mohammed’s son-in-law and cousin Ali.

And they become Shia, it’s a contraction of Shia Ali. The Shia is a contraction. The word Shia Ali, meaning partisans of Ali. And Sunni means those who follow the Sunna, the message and traditions of prophet Mohammed himself. So it isn’t something that need worry us theologically, but it does have an impact politically. And today it has that impact politically between Shia Iraq and the bulk of the rest, which are Sunni in the Middle East. There are differences, of course, there are pockets of this and pockets of that. But in broad terms, that’s the story. Until Charles Martel defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Plataea, it looked possible that the Arab Islam would spread right over Western Europe. Now, the people that came across North Africa and into Spain and into Morocco on the far west of North Africa were Arabs, were Arabs, but twice more in history, Muslims, not Arabs, but Ottoman Turks reached the very gates of Vienna the last time, as late as 1683. In 1683, Islam had Vienna. From what historian said, if Vienna had fallen in 1683, Islam would’ve been on the borders of the channel, on the coast of the channel within a fortnight. And what chance would England have had of surviving a Muslim invasion? Now we don’t, we know that never happened. We know that eventually the Arabs were thrown out of Western Europe, France, and finally Portugal and Spain.

And we know that the Ottoman Turks were finally forced back, although not entirely out of Europe, because of course a part of modern day Turkey is on the European side of the phosphorus around Adriano. Incidentally, the Ottoman Turks never took Morocco. It remained Arab and not ottoman. That’s another story. History is endlessly fascinating, but what we need to know is simply that three times in history did Muslims threaten Western Europe. Once under the Arabs, twice under the Turks, the last time being in 1683. Now turn it round. How do Muslims view that today? One view is that any country that had at any kind been Islamic and any part of it is Islamic today. That’s what they believe. Of course, there are others who believe that they want to convert the whole of Europe, indeed the whole world to Islam, whether that country like England had never been a part of any Islamic empire, unlike Spain, Portugal, and parts of Southern France. So you begin to see that some of these issues that I’ve talked about, and it doesn’t need me to spell them out, really, you can see how they influence things today and not just in the past. It’s a quite extraordinary story. Now, before I leave the story of the Arabs and the Mohammed, I want to fill in a little bit here about how they spread. This is Simon Sebag Montefiore, right? He writes in this way. He’s talking about how the Caliphs, post Mohammed’s death, set up dynasty. And the first is Ummayad U double M-A-Y-A-D dynasty. And of these, the greatest was perhaps Abdul Malik, M-A-L-I-K. And Montefiore writes, “Abdul Malik was severe, thin, hooked nose, curly haired, and his enemies claimed, in what can possibly be dismissed as hostile propaganda, that he had such a noxious breath, he was nicknamed a fly killer.” Oh dear. “Abdul Malik saw himself as God’s shadow on earth.

He believed in the marriage of Empire State and God.” In other words, a theocracy exactly the same as Iran today. He believed in a theocracy and an expanding theocracy that was seeking to take other countries under his empire, the Ummayad Empire. Let me read a little further. “As such, it was Abdul Malik who collated the Quran into its final form, who defined Islamic rituals and who unified Islam into a single religion recognisable today with the emphasis on the Quran and Hadith.” Some people equate Malik with St. Paul, who you remember from last week, took the message of Jesus to Jews as a message to the world. And although he did not do so by creating an empire, he did in one sense because through Paul’s work and subsequently did the Roman Empire become Christian. And because the Roman Empire became Christian, so subsequently the Byzantium empire was Christian. So I, again, we see this military link from the very beginning when we’re looking at Islam. “Abdul Malik and his son, Caliph Walid, expanded their empire to the borders of India and the coast of Spain. Yet their dynasty remained part Islamic theocrats bureaucracy, part Roman Empress often living in a distinctly un-Islamic decadence.” Oh, well we know all about that. We know how people preach one thing and do something else in their private lives. And there is no difference here. I think Ceausescu in a different, the President of Romania living life high on the hog, as we say, whilst his people suffered terribly. Saddam Hussein is another.

This is a common theme. So here we’re told exactly that. “This led to the family’s downfall in a revolution in 750.” In other words, they were accused of being un-Islamic, which indeed they were in their private lives. They were replaced by the Abbasid, A-B-B-A-S-I-D, the Abbasid dynasty of Caliphs who ruled from Iraq and blackened the reputation of their predecessors. To the Shia however they remained heretics and sinners. So these were Sunni Muslims creating this Arab empire, but to the Shias, mainly in Iran, they were anathema, quite literally in that word. So we’ve got a picture by this period of the end of the early middle ages of a Middle East, which doesn’t look much different from the Middle East that we were talking about last week, of various peoples, various religions, various cultures, various languages, but dominated by one. The Persian empire had gone, the Roman Empire had gone. We are left with two, the Byzantine Empire and the Arab Empire. And inevitably this situation is going to lead to clashes in the same way that today it is inevitable, one might say that there will be clashes between Iran and Israel. But before I leave, finally this second part, move on from crusade, one other very important development and that is in the nine hundred and nineties. Nine hundred and nineties, the Seljuk Turks were converted to Islam. Now the Seljuk Turks had come from Asia, from the Asian steps, and they were a migratory peoples as so many were coming westwards. And they’re the people in the end, the Seljuk Turks, who are the people in the end who create the Ottoman Empire. And it was their conversion to Islam that was such a threat to the Byzantine Christian empire in Byzantium itself. So let me leave the story there. We’ve got Arabs who had an Arab empire, the Persians had an empire which is gone, but they’re now Shia in opposition to the majority Sunni. We have the Seljuk Turks, the Turkic peoples that come in.

And again, these are tribal peoples. And so the Ottoman Turks get their name from a man who led a tribe called Ottoman, but they’re Turks, it’s best to think of them as Turkish peoples. So we’ve got Arabs, and the Arabs are throughout the Middle East, of course they are, they’re not, and hadn’t been for centuries confined to the Arabian Peninsula. We have Jews without a home who also scattered throughout the Middle East. We have Christians scattered out throughout the Middle East, not Greek Christians as in the Byzantine Empire, but earlier Christians that have been converted in the East, and not of course by Paul, but by Christian missionaries in the East and like the Maronite church, there’s all sorts of little Christian churches. So we’ve got Christians, we’ve got Jews, we’ve got Arabs, we’ve got Greeks in the Byzantine Empire, and we’ve got Turks. We’ve also got other peoples who can trace their ancestry back to the Philistines, to the Phoneticians. We’ve got Egyptians, because the Middle East is on that crux between Asia and Europe. That Mediterranean coast is a point at which trade goes both ways. Trade from the east west, trade from the west east. Byzantium was based upon the whole principle of trade. And so when you think about trade, you think about the Christian traders and you think about the Jewish traders, not so much Arab traders. We will come to all of that when I look at the Byzantine Empire, when I look at the Ottoman Empire, and Trudy will pick up various points about the Jews’ story specifically in all of this, I’m now taking you forward. We’ve looked at where the Arabs came from, we think, we’ve looked at the rise of Muhammad and the rise and spread of Islam.

Now I take you to the 12th century to the 1100s and the clash that comes about between Christian crusaders from the west and Muslims from the East. Why Christian crusaders from the west? Well, because in 1094, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus the first asked Western Christianity, in fact, he asked the Pope in Rome, help, I need military help against the increasing depredations on my border by Muslims. The following year in 1095, the pope, a man called Urban II preached a crusade, crusade from crooks across, the Christian Cross leading onward Christian soldiers, the Christians in England sing or used to sing. It’s a bit not quite woke today to sing. And in the book, the Middle East for Dummies by the American historian Craig Davis, he says, “The Christian Crusades were a series of holy wars undertaken by European Christians to liberate holy land.” They came from as far away as Scandinavia, but the main thrust of the crusading movement was French. Of course the English were there, the Germans were there, but the main thrust is French, and that’s important. The Christian Crusades were a series of holy wars undertaken by European Christians who liberate the holy land from the grasp of the Muslims between the 11th and 13th century. He goes on to say, “You may be disappointed to discover that these crusades that played such an important role in European history weren’t such a big deal in Muslim history.” Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? And he lists five reasons why they aren’t so important in Muslim history. “One, people in the Middle East were accustomed to foreign invasions. So what was a few more crusades? The crusades weren’t,” he says, “A united focused effort, but loosely knit series of nine unorganised campaigns, which spanned 175 years. They fizzled out,” he said, “They never left their mark on the Middle East.”

During the fourth crusade, which is incredible, led by the Phoenicians, by the Doja Venice. They never reached the holy land. They sacked Constantinople itself and installed a western emperor in Constantinople. So that the Phoenicians controlled the trade. And I’ll talk about that when I talk about next week, Byzantium. He goes on to show they were slippery in ever changing alliances. One Byzantine emperor, Isaac the second in the third crusade joined forces with Saladin, the leader of the Muslims, because he was anti the Western Christians establishing bases in the Holy land. And the Muslims were far more worried about the threat of the Mongols, which is coming from the East than they were about the crusaders from the West. That’s interesting, isn’t it? So think about how other people see it. I’m always say to people, think of Robbie Burns. “Give us the grace to see ourselves as others see us.” And I said last week, I found it very interesting talking about the early days of Christianity to a Jewish audience and it makes you think differently the other way round, if you like. So we reach the Crusades. Now, I would disagree with what Davis said because although he is correct largely, overwhelmingly, that the Crusades had very little impact on the Middle East. That is not so the other way round the Middle East had enormous impact on the west from architecture to medicine, from horticulture to mathematics. It had a big impact on the west. And we may have an opportunity at a later stage to talk about that.

The first crusade launched after that appeal by by Alexius Comnenus, and backed by Urban the second, the Pope, was the most successful in terms that it actually captured Jerusalem, which for Christians as Jews was the pinnacle of they thought the centre core of their religion, we must recover Jerusalem. And they did recover Jerusalem, and they established those four states, crusaders states we saw on the map, they’re often referred to as the states of outremer. Outremer is French. Come on. You all know that. Oh, sometimes I think I say things and I think afterwards, you shouldn’t have said that. Everybody knows that. But in case there’s someone who doesn’t speak French, outremer is simply overseas, and the states that were established in the Middle East, those four states from Edessa down to Jerusalem were called the outremer states, overseas. The fact it’s in French is important because the leadership of these states was French. They’re Frankish states, and therefore Western Christian, they are western Frankish states. That’s why in the third crusade, the Greek emperor in Byzantium sides with the Muslims against the Frankish states, because he thought if they expanded, they were threatened. So he felt threatened by fellow Christians from the West as much as he felt threatened by Muslims. And in fact at the time he felt more threatened by the West. The crusade which we know most of in England, is the third crusade because of Richard the first, Richard the Lionheart and the clash with Saladin. Saladin was not an Arab, he was not a Turk. He was a Kurd, of all things. He was a Kurd. What? The story of the Middle East is always confusing. It always has a surprise up its sleeve. He was a Kurd, not an Arab, not a Turk.

And you know how badly the Kurds are treated in the 21st century by Arabs and Turks alike. They are a very, very isolated group in the Middle East, again, like Jews, without a Kurdistan, although they were promised a Kurdistan at the end of the First World War, they never got one. And that is a matter of deep regret. And here in Britain we have quite large Kurdish communities. In fact, when I was principal of the college education in Manchester in the North England in the 1980s, we had a group of Kurds who were studying and they wanted to take maths at GCE, the first public examination. They wanted a public examination in maths, but they couldn’t read the English. So I persuaded the exam board to set an exam in maths, which was written in Kurdish. So where it said “Answer four of the following questions,” that appeared in Kurdish, I think it’s the only time we’ve ever in Britain had an exam written in Kurdish. I was quite pleased by that because they took it and they passed, which was wonderful. So we’re talking about a series of crusades. The most successful, the first crusade, the one that we hear most about in England is the third crusade, which failed to recapture Jerusalem, Saladin held Jerusalem. But there’s other things we need to say about the Crusades because the crusades were anti-Islam they were anti anything that was against, or they thought was against Christianity. That is to say Christianity as defined by the Pope in Rome. So we get the so-called Albigensian Crusade in France against the Cathars in 1209 to 1229. The Cathars, I really can’t go into that, but the Cathars held beliefs which weren’t acceptable to the Church of Rome. And they had a large following in the south of France and they had a crusade that lasted against them 20 years until they were crushed.

They were regarded by Rome as heretics. However, Jews were also regarded by Christians in this heightened religious fervour. This heightened religious fervour of Christianity against Islam got translated as a highly religious fervour against so-called heretics in Christianity, but also against Jews. And in England we have the appalling massacre that, well the suicide of Jews in York in the Castle at York, which was besieged in 1189 to 1190. And they committed suicide on the model of Masada is the most appalling instance. We also have the origin of the blood libel in England at this time. So this is a terrible time in Europe for Jews. And remember, Jews are thrown out in England and it’s just an appalling example of how Christianity has moved so far away from the preachings of Jesus of Nazareth to persecute those who are Christian, but have slightly different views like the Cathar to persecute Jews when Christ himself was a Jew. It’s an appalling story of humanity and it just as appalling as the militarism of Muhammad from the beginning. There’s another consequence of these kingdoms, these Frankish kingdoms in the crusade. It enabled pilgrims from Europe, Christian pilgrims to reach the Holy land and visit Holy places, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and people make money out in it. The Knight Templar ran boats. They ran boats from England to France, for example. They then travelled by Knight’s Temple’s guarding them to Marseilles and sailed from Marseilles either via Italy or direct to the Holy Land, and which they got a large sum of money making them the richest organisation in the Middle Ages. The Knight’s Temple, the Knights Hospitaler also make money. These were knights who were also monks. They were religious knights and they fought in the crusades against the Muslims and the Knights Templars were crack troops, really the best of the best. But they also had massive sidelines in banking, in land acquisition, et cetera, et cetera. So the Crusades finally, or the crusaders are forced out of the Holy Land.

The four outremer kingdoms fall one by one, Edessa in 1144 Jerusalem in 1187, Antioch in 1268, Tripoli in 1289. And the final standard is made at Acre by the Knight’s Templar in 1291. And when Acre falls, the crusading movement is over. It’s over, it’s finished now. Doing three things in the talk makes it very difficult to come to any sort of conclusion. I was using a book by the very well known historian Christopher Tieman called The Crusades in the Oxford Series, in the Oxford Short series. And he wrote this book in 2004. And I can’t disagree more with his ending if I tried. He says this, “There are obvious historical parallels with Christian outremer with the state of Israel,” he says, “But also with the Palestine or Roman Syria, conquerors imposing their own space. However, Israeli are not the new crusaders anymore than the Americans are, Saddam Hussein was not the new Saladin, although he liked to think of himself as such, even though they shared a birthplace, they were both born in the same place. To imagine otherwise goes beyond fraudulence. It plays on a cheap historicism that it once inflames, debases and confuses current conflicts draining them of rational meaning or legitimate solution. The Crusades reflected central human concerns of belief and identity that can only be understood on their own terms, in their own time. So to their adoption adaptation by later generations. While it’s tempting to draw conclusion to derive from geographical congruity or superficial political similarities, the land in which the Crusaders fought over 800 years ago and the cause for which they died held truth for their time, not ours.” I think that’s rubbish. I think this is important today because I think other people think it’s important. In other words, Islam think it important.

There’s a very good essay written by the American professor Cline, C-L-I-N-E, called, Does Saddam Think He’s a Modern Day Saladin? And you can look it up. Does Saddam Think He’s a Modern Day Saladin? Professor Eric Cline, C-L-I-N-E. And Cline says this “As George Santayana cogently observed, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Valid comparisons can certainly be made between ancient and modern societies.” I agree with that. And I think that Tieman was wrong to say you can’t. “Including,” says Cline, “Rome and the United States. It’s also true that those who remember the past can deliberately attempt to repeat it or at least to use recollections of the past to pursue modern objectives. This appeared to be the case with Saddam Hussein who studied the history of ancient and mediaeval Iraq and apparently wished to see it repeated. Saddam on numerous occasions called himself the successor to two of the most famous figures from the Iraq’s history, the Neo Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar the second, and the Muslim warrior Saladin of the 12th century for the past few decades, Saddam, he wrote this at the time. So during his lifetime, Saddam used these two figures in his propaganda. He styled himself the successor to Saladin conveniently forgetting that Saladin was a Kurd, whom he was trying to exterminate. They are important. The word jihad and the word crusade, the word jihad makes our hair stand up on end. The word crusade makes the hair of Muslims stand up on end. We cannot expunge history. We have to learn from it and we have to overcome it. The problem is, as we see with Israel and Palestinians, there has to be a will on both sides.

So in terms of the Crusades, in terms of Saddam Hussein, or Iran, the West now, not meaning France and England and Germany, but meaning America is the great Satan. It’s not surprising incidentally that they use the word Satan in Iran because Zoroastrianism in Persia use that sort of context, use that sort of nomenclature. So what we’re talking about is to them, they’re still fighting the West, which is always for them. And they think of the Crusades and they think of pushing West out. Okay? The West does not hold any part of the Middle East today, but they feel it holds Israel by proxy. And they fear that it is also interfering in the politics. We cannot forget this history. Don’t ask me how it’s resolved because I don’t know how it’s resolved and nor I guess do any of you. But if we don’t understand where it’s come from, for example, when the Christians in the first crusade took Jerusalem, they massacred men, women, and children. You say, well, that was a long time ago, but it may have been a long time ago. But when people are creating a case, they go back a thousand years to find arguments and it’s no good saying how stupid it is. You have to face the reality that we live with the past. We cannot simply escape the past. Let me just finish again by reading the historian and philosopher George Santayana "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If you were doing an essay for me as postgraduates, that would be your essay this week in relationship to the Middle East in 2024. Thanks for listening and nothing else fell off, you’ll be pleased to know and I may indeed have lots of questions. Let’s see.

Q&A and Comments:

Shelly, thank you to all those people that sent nice messages saying, thanks for mentoring Israel. Thanks to all the people that said they hope I get better, but you understand, I wouldn’t want to read all of those.

Shelly says, “Christian Assyrians in the Chicago area spoke Aramean in Iraq when they lived there.” Right? Thanks.

Marian says, “Where I live, there is a thread of what you are telling us about the Maccabees lived here, the Romans and men were here. There is a ruined crusader fort on a hill where Richard the first is supposed to have stayed, which afterwards became an Arab village.” Yeah, there’s always history all around us. “Aramaic is spoken, says Robert, "In Ethiopia. It’s one of the national languages.”

Jill, “Thank you for your explanation who the Arabs were before Mohammed.”

Thank you Rita. I understand what the word means. Thank you Rita for pointing that out.

Q: Irene. Hello, Irene. “Didn’t the Jews promise Mohammed to fight with him and then withdraw and did Mohammed then take against the Jews in the Quran?”

A: Yet partly is that true. But when Saladin is fighting the crusaders in the third crusade, he has Christians from Byzantium, he has Jews as well as Turks in his army. You cannot make assumptions that these groups remained entirely separate. It is nonsense to think that, this is a very flexible society, a very integrated society in many ways.

Shelly “In online Yale course on Ukraine, professor Snyder said different Slav rulers converted their people to Christianity or Islam because as pagan they could be enslaved by anybody. But as a member of either Christianity or Islam, they couldn’t be enslaved by their co-religionists. They were Jews there at the time, but they were always a minority without political power.” Yes, of course, that’s right. I would never question anything Professor Snyder said, but of course that is right. And yes, you are absolutely right Shelley. And so is Snyder.

The word slave comes from the word Slav. Absolutely right. Monty, he is, you are right. He is a brilliant historian.

Q: When did Ishmaeli Muslims come into being and why?

A: That is, I can’t remember the date. It’s just one of the subdivisions you get as you do with Sufi’s and there’s all sorts of subdivisions, but the only subdivision that is of importance today is the Sunni Shia one. And it is because of Iran that that is important.

Oh gosh, I’ve lost it. Hang on, where am I? Come on, I lost it somewhere.

Q: Why do I think Islam is so popular, particularly with young Western women?

A: It is a mystery that women in the west should accept Islam. But maybe, and some will say and have said in interviews they feel safe and like fundamentalist religions, it tells you everything you need to know how to live your life. You don’t have to think for yourself. And lots of people like to be told what to do and what to think. Many of us would find that, Sharon, unacceptable and it’s a mystery, but partly explained by women feeling safer when they’re veiled, feeling safer in an Islamic society than in a western society. And also men, boys as well as girls wanting the certainty of a religion like Islam. According to Mordecai Israeli expert in Islam who can be found on YouTube where he speaks on the origin of Islam, Mohammed through a Jew learn about the Jewish faith. He took this knowledge on that belief and established Islamic to replace all other religions. Yes, that is why, of course, who are sorry Monty. That’s why of course there are so many links between Christianity, Judaism, which we know, but Christianity, Judaism and Islam, for example, Christ appears, Jesus Christ appears in Islamic belief. He’s just a prophet who’s superseded by the last prophet, that being Muhammad. In a book I read on the Muslim invasion, say that by then the Byzantines and the Saxons had fought each sustainments had fought each other to a standstill and were totally exhausted and short of everything. And the Arabs stepped into this power vacuum. Yes. If you are talking about the period we’ve been talking about, that’s that’s true. That is true. But I will talk, when I’m talking about Byzantium, talk about the reasons it crumbled and that’s another story.

Somebody, who’s put this? Was that William says, Abdul the book, Emir, I’m not sure you may well be right.

Q: Abigail, Ronald, why were Jews called the people of the book?

A: Because it was the bible, the the Torah for you, the Bible. That’s why it’s the people of the book. And often it is said it were all people of the book, the Jews with the Torah, Christians with the Bible and Muslims with the Quran. We are all monotheisms. And we all draw upon Judaism, but then Judaism drew probably they think on Zoroastrianism as well as other things.

Q: What is the difference between Christian missionaries and Malik’s view of religious expansionism?

A: There is no difference, David, when we reach the 19th century and you have people like David Livingston, the only difference being that the Christian empire, the European empires of the 19th century believed, we would largely find this unacceptable. But you’ve got to go back into their mindset, believed they were bringing civilization to the uncivilised and civilization to them, to the Victorian British meant Christianity. So you can, it’s up to you how you compare the views of Malik at the time and Christians in the 19th century, they believed they were bringing civilization and they didn’t. It was a, you can’t really pull apart in the British empire, religion civilization thought an educational Christian missionaries brought from the fact that many of these countries were conquered by force of arms and held by force of arms. That it’s a very big question. And it’s not, I can’t answer it easily except to say that what you are asking is the valid question. And the answer, a full answer is a very long complicated one. But basically you are right.

We read professor Snyder’s lecture on the making modern Ukraine skipped the reference for everyone, Denise, to our friends and relatives Israel, we send our love and prayers for their safety. That’s good.

Q: What was the title of professor Eric Cine’s essay?

A: The the title was Does Saddam Hussein Think He’s a Modern Day Saladin? you can pull it down off the internet. Does Saddam Think He’s a Modern Day Saladin? by Eric Cline, C-L-I-N-E. Oh, you’ve got that spelled right. Does Saddam Think He’s a Modern Day Saladin?

Q: Shelly says, do you think the Pope called for the crusading of the constant fighting European Christian somewhere else?

A: No, I don’t, no, I don’t think that’s true. No, their religious impulse was to recover the holy places. No, that I don’t think that is true. Thanks. Thanks for people who enjoyed it.

James, that exactly my point. James writes, “Some Arabs compare Israel nowadays to the Crusader kingdoms and claim that it’ll disappear eventually just as the kingdoms disappeared.” Absolutely. And that’s why I disagreed with Professor Tieman and agreed with Professor Cline that actually you, we cannot escape the past. Is there a similarity and what was the weakness of the crusader kingdom? Well, there is the similarity is that many Jews who first came to Israel in ‘48 were Europeans. Now I know that’s different today, but that was seen as a European, some Muslims would regard that as a European conquest of parts of Palestine. Now none of us agree with that, but that’s how they would see it. What was the weakness of them? They couldn’t bring in enough settlers and they couldn’t bring in enough soldiers. People didn’t want, no, they couldn’t bring in enough settlers, which is not the problem that Israel has faced. They wanted to set up these kingdoms like bits of France. So they needed people to grow vines. They needed people to herd cattle and sheep and so on and so forth. They needed to create that and people wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they come? Probably because, well, people simply didn’t move about in those days and the attractions weren’t good. There was always the fear and threat of violence more so than even in France at the time. So there is a limited amount of settlement. So they did not settle these kingdoms to have enough people to defend them. I think that’s probably the basis of the answer.

Ronnie says, “My daughter-in-law’s family who are Jews from Kurdistan spoke Aramaic. How interesting. And not Kurdish.

Q: Why has Bernard Lewis gone out of favour?

A: I’m not sure that he has particularly, I mean, there are always new books and new ideas and yes things go in and out. Well, basically things go out as new stuff comes in, in terms of history.

Honey says, "Sounds like religion is the curse of the masses.” Well, there there’s a good straight Marxist view and it’s difficult always.

Q: Do the Bedouin derived from the original Arabs?

A: No, that, hang on, I’ve lost that. The Bedouin are slightly different. They’re Arab, but they have kept a separate sort of identity. And you are right. You are absolutely right.

Q: Why has Islam proved to be so attractive even in Africa today where it is spread rapidly?

A: Ooh, Marian, that’s very difficult to answer. It’s like all religions, or let’s say it’s like Christianity. However awful life is here now, life in the hereafter will be wonderful. All those, all those virgins promise to jihadists and in Christianity, don’t worry about how awful life is here, 'cause once, if you live a good life, once you get to heaven, then you will be rewarded. It’s that message really. And they also provide things like Christians did, like water supplies and practical things.

Well, you are right, Honey. So many Muslim women are murdered by their male family members. And we know that. But I was asked why people thought that. I think that’s why they thought that they don’t. None of us ever… 100% logical is the answer.

Julian, maybe there are two different safes to access one in the streets and the other at home. Yeah.

Catherine says, “Also William, people who returned to Europe from the holy land would’ve reported that the land was arid and nothing like the fertile land in northern Europe.” Yes, that’s also true. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And they, I think it is the answer is the lack of settlement. And that of course was something that Israel addressed from the start. So with that, shall we say goodnight? I’m, it’s night for me whilst I’ve been talking, there’s been a terrible rainstorm, but it looks bright now. I hope the weather is good for you. I hope our friends in Israel keep safe and I will be here again next week. I’ve got a feeling next week I’m on Wednesday and not Monday because of Jewish holidays, I think, but I think I’m on Wednesday, so you’ll have to check on. But I am here next week hopefully. Possibly with new teeth, but I doubt that. I will see you all next week, thanks for listening today.