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Aspects of the Crusades

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Study of the crusades is undergoing a wonderful revival. Many people who used to object or denounce them now understand the virtue at the heart of them. Yes, the Crusaders may have celebrated their victory by burning alive - Men, Women and Children - all the Jews of Jerusalem in their holy places, but we cannot at the same forget how many other people were liberated from Muslim oppression by the Crusaders into the freedom of rule by the west.

This small book will explain to the reader how Muslims invented the concept of holy war and unleashed it upon the civilized world. It explains very well the nature of the crusades and other misunderstood institutions such as the inquesition as defensive measures in a war for cultural survival against Islam.

The book rightly concudes that while other religions are based on truth, Islam is based on evil and war. While the politically correct endlessly talk about a few mistakes made during the crusades like slaughtering everyone in Jerusalem, the looting of Constatinople, the Crusaders natural tendency to promote their own religion over that of the failed Eastern Church and the establishment of kingdoms by the Crusaders in conquered lands, the real truth as told by this book is that the crusades were about protecting the movement of pilgrims into the holy land and liberating the many slaves of Islam.

The book is wonderful for being a short introduction to Crusades that covers the important truths of those wars of defense against Islam without the usual political correctness and overhyped stories of every little thing that went wrong during these wars of defense.

This slight, 91-page text, published by Canterbury University in 1962 and reprinted in Christchurch Australia in 1968, contains seven chapters detailing certain aspects of the Crusades, from its literature to the idea of holy war, which emanated from Islam.

As the book rightly concludes, "Of the three great world-religions, Islam is the only one which was born militant." It was "the irruption of the Seljuk Turks into Western Asia, which endangered the Byzantine Empire and interrupted the pilgrim traffic to the Holy Land" that finally instigated the Crusades.

Apart from the conclusions, however, which are made in far more lengthy editions of later and more modern derivation, what makes this small book useful are its scholarly expertise and the sources from which it is drawn.

For example, Usamah Ibn Murshid, called Ibn Munkidh, an Arab Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the period of the Crusades, translated by P.K. Hitti in 1929, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, The Life of Saladin by Beda-ed-Din, the Travels of Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Khaldun's Muqqadimah, the Chronology of Bar Hebraes, and many other works contemporary to the Crusades.

This is a quick, satisfying read for students of the early clashes of Islam with Christendom, and will inform readers on several aspects of the Crusades not usually covered.

--Alyssa A. Lappen