Customer Reviews

Holy War

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(28)

 

 

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.

As a non-Muslim citizen of an Islamic country, I must say that this is a very, very dangerously misleading book. From the onset of the book, it is clear where the author's sympathies lie. The western reader is "almost deceived" to think that the Crusaders were attacking a community of peace-loving Muslims in their homeland, without reason, when in fact the lands contested in the Crusades formed the heartland and cradle of Christianity. I use the phrase "almost deceived" because whilst the author acknowledges the pre-Crusades Muslim conquests, it is only when the Crusades is mentioned that the author becomes unduly critical, thereby implying that there was some unmentioned justification in the Muslim conquests.

Right from the beginning of this book, the author seems to insinuate that the Crusades (which was first started in 1096) is the source of the enmity between the Christians and the Muslims and in the absence of such provocation from the western Christians, many of today's problems would not exist.

How could this be? If the author's arguments are correct, then it does not explain why for hundreds of years before the First Crusade, the Muslims have been warring against the Christians and Jews. Even during Muhammad's lifetime, some of those who were subjugated in his wars in Arabia, were Christians and Jews. After the death of Muhammad, the Muslims poured out from Arabia and without provocation, conquered the then Christian Middle East and North Africa. How can the invasion of Spain and France in the 700s be attributed to the Crusades/western aggression? How does one justify the Turkish invasion of the Balkans, whose inhabitants were Orthodox Christians who viewed the Catholic Crusaders as heretics?

How does one link the Crusades to the aggression and attrocities committed by the Muslim armies in Western Africa, Persia, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, where the inhabitants were not even Christians? How does one explain the persecution and even killings of the Coptic Christians in Egypt up to the present day and the 20th century genocide against the Armenians, who were not involved in the Crusades? How can one link the present conflict in the Middle East to the Crusades? Have the Jews ever waged a "crusade" against the Muslims?

If one would only go to a religious school in an Islamic country, like say Pakistan, and ask a boy why they are urged to wage war against America and Israel. Is it the Crusades? No. It is because we are Muslims and they are Christians and Jews. Period.

The Quran says:
"Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."

The very notion of Jihad is fundamental to Islam and is the Prophet Muhammad's equivalent to Jesus' "Go ye and preach the gospel to the world". By insinuating that Jihad is a reaction to western aggression, the author shows a poor understanding of Islam.

Because of this Islamic expansionist ideology to subjugate and conquer the infidel, there are bound to be many wars of conquests and retaliation between the Muslims and the "infidels". Take the reconquest of Spain, are the Christians not entitled to self-defence and recovery of the land.

Before I am thought of as another bigoted Christian, I wish to clarify that I am actually a non-religious Asian, who alienated by what seems to be a White Christianity while residing in the West, came very close to converting to Islam at one point until I was put off when I learned that the Prophet himself killed many people.

For those in the West who are interested in knowing more about Islam's relationship with Christianity, I suggest that they read "Jihad in the West" by Paul Fregosi together with "The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam" by Bat Ye'or. An excellent book giving some information on the Jewish communities in Islamic lands is "Jewish Communities in Exotic Places" by Ken Blady.

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.

This was actually the first book I read all the way through about the Crusades, and it ignited a real passion in me for that period. It's very well-written. She manages to paint the historical figures as memorable characters who maintain interest throughout the book, rather than a set of names and dates. Ms. Armstrong also impresses with her ability to pluck one central conflict out of lots of historical data. It's her main strength as a writer.

But, as the other reviews indicate, she is not always accurate or fair. The book is biased against Christians, as are all her books, and too favorable to Islam. She seems unable to grasp the concept that both Muslims and Christians suffered from the medieval mindset during the Crusades. The peaceful parts of Jesus and Mohammed's philosophy were always linked with old tribal ideas to conquer and exploit.

I find I disagree somewhat, now, with her main thesis that the Crusades were religiously motivated. A better book might deal with the religious as a part of the complete picture. The fact that Christians and Muslims were just as violent towards their own, in many cases more violent, than they were to each other in the Crusades, is evidence that the "holy war" was a very disposable concept.

But, as I said, this book ignited a fire in me and caused me to seek out other scholarship. I cannot help thinking that those who put this book down in disgust simply can't bear to listen to an argument that contradicts their own.

Karen Armstrong needs to find something constructive to do. While she seems able enough to put together a reasonable but rough chronological account of events, serious research just seems to be beyond her. Similarly, she has never -- within my experience -- produced a convincing analysis or interpretation.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, this is history wrapped in invective and shrouded in a vendetta. Having broken free of the oppressive Sister Bridget back in parochial school (the convent in Karen's case), she seems incapable of moving past the experience. Whether writing about Islam or about Buddhism, she has made herself the whirling dervish of Western self-loathing, either incapable or at least disinclined to view any problem as the result of anything except Western/Christian bigotry. All her trains make only one stop!

Intellectually and scholastically her work is a void. The research is mediocre at best (explaining perhaps her volume of output), and the evidence that she adduces often fails to support -- or even directly contradicts -- the conclusions that she draws.

As to the Crusades, she is right that they are a pivotal remembrance to the Middle Eastern world-view. She is right that they were long and sometimes bloody. It does not follow, however, that she is right about anything else; and -- in fact -- she is right about very little else. History is far more complex than this. When men, nations, peoples, civilizations take up arms and have at one another there is always a very great deal more to it than Ms. Armstrong's monotonous "bad boy" explanations.

For instance, she makes much of Saladin's magnanimity toward the defenders at the fall of Jerusalem. OK. It happened. Armstrong's conclusion (quelle surprise!) is that Saladin was just a really great guy, unlike those [insert epithet of choice here] Latins. Not only does she gloss over Saladin's pointedly unmagnanimous behavior just weeks before at the Horns of Hattin, but she seems blissfully unaware of any other possible explanation for Saladin's mercy. In fact, Saladin himself said -- with direct reference to Jerusalem -- that, in essence, he was practicing psychological warfare by demonstrating to the world that his conquest was so complete that he had nothing left to fear from this enemy. Not only would such a fact be most inconvenient to Ms. Armstrong's agenda; it was probably just too much work for her to dig out such details.

If you are serious enough to want to know the history of the Crusades, at least start with a real history. A good place would be almost anything by Jonathan Riley-Smith, but particularly his "The Crusades: A History" now in trade paperback from Yale University Press. There you will learn not only about real people with complex motivations and reactions, but you will also learn the general parameters of serious debate about the Crusades.

Ms. Armstrong's work is pap for the ideologically-driven weak-minded.

British theologian Karen Armstrong entered a convent at seventeen to become a Catholic nun. She defrocked in 1969 (this caused a great scandal among British Catholics, many of which have not forgiven her to this day). She has since become a student of the three great monotheistic religions, writing one bestseller on the subject, A History of God

In this book, she recounts the history of the Crusades and how it still shapes the modern-day Middle East. Interestingly, she tries to take a tripartite Christian/Jewish/Muslim view (more accurately, a quadripartite Catholic/Greek Orthodox/Jewish/Muslim view, but she herself writes about a "triple vision"). Most other accounts give short shrift to the Jewish point of view.

Even now, the subject is still fraught with passion and having an entirely unbiased view is probably unattainable by anyone party to one of those three traditions, but she does a good job of it in my opinion. It would be interesting to see a history of the Crusades written by a Chinese historian with no axe to grind... Certainly, her assessment is quite critical of the Crusaders, but the only actors to which she is wholly sympathetic are the humanistic Byzantines, who were poorly repaid for their forbearance towards the Crusaders by the sack of Constantinople.

Her central thesis is that the Crusades were the crucible where the modern European identity was forged, and that unfortunately in the process it was alloyed with anti-semitism and a visceral hostility towards Islam. Her second thesis, somewhat less convincing, is that in the current Israeli-Arab conflict, both parties are consciously replaying the Crusades.

The convoluted politics of the Middle East, over seven millennia in the making, have a habit of tripping up overly simplistic analyses. The Lebanese master story-teller Amin Maalouf, in his excellent (but clearly not unbiased) The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, notes that shortly after the first crusade, an army of Christian and Muslim allies fought another such army in Syria.

The Crusades were clearly seen at first as a colonial or purely military venture by Arabs of all faiths, it is only later with the sultans Nasr-ud-din and Salah-ud-din (Saladin) that the war took on a religious significance. While Karen Armstrong does a good job of showing how the conflict progressively acquired the traits of a holy war, she is not as good at identifying the purely secular realpolitik that was pursued then as it is today.

All in all, for all its flaws, specially in the political analysis of the current situation, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

Like a good many readers, I'm in Karen Armstrong's debt for a number of memorable books. Frankly, if I'd started out with this effort, I might not have gone on to devour so much of her stuff. Back at the end of the eighties she had not yet perfected her writing style, and it can get pretty dry, especially in the long chapters which aren't about the Crusades, but about the history of the middle east since 1947. I've been around for most all of that history, and (except for some illuminating pages about the internal politics of Egypt) it was a twice told tale to me.

The sixty percent that dealt with the Crusades themselves, though, and the roots of Zionism, gave me what I wanted: a quickie primer on a large swath of history that, just as Armstrong says, continues to be deeply relevant to today's headlines, but about which I knew next to nothing. Some of that history is fascinating in its own right: the instant myth of "the Children's Crusade", how the sixth Crusade came to be led by an emperor whom the Pope excommunicated as he sailed for the east; Saint Francis' mission to the Saracens, and a good deal more.

It's also true that the publisher whipped the book out of cold storage after 9/11, with just a few paragraphs of additional commentary from the author, so all of the modern information is a decade out of date. I expected that, so it wasn't an annoyance.

Overall, I give it 3 and a half stars. I was going to call it three, until I got a gander at all the negative reviews here, largely from people who seem to go ballistic at the notion that Islam isn't profoundly evil to its core.

I disagree with those reviews. By no means does this book cater to political correctness in order to give the Islamic corner of the religious triad a free ride. Here, as in all her books, Karen Armstrong is fair minded, and fair minded almost to a fault. Yes, she bends over backwards to see the Arabic world from its own point of view; because she bends over backwards to see every culture she talks about from its own point of view. She doesn't mince the ugly events: she calls a spade a spade, a broken treaty a broken treaty, a massacre a massacre, and violent fanaticism violent fanaticism, no matter who is perpetrating it. There's plenty here to offend all three of the Abrahamic faiths, since all three have been guilty of idiocies and atrocities, which each has papered over with embarrassed silence.

She does devote more space and energy to presenting the Islamic interpretation of events. But that's an unavoidable part of her job, since we her readers are already fully familiar with the Christian and Jewish points of view on all this long and sorry history (and that was even more true when the book was written a decade ago.) I didn't get the sense that her reportage of the events themselves was skewed in any way, and she leaves the readers free to make alternate interpretations if we so desire.

It's an introduction, by an intelligent non-historian with commendably wide sympathies. It doesn't pretend to be a be-all and end-all. I'm glad to have got this primer under my belt. I made it through the dry parts, and enjoyed the medieval parts, and it made me feel better prepared to tackle a more substantial work, like Hourani's _History of the Arab People_, which has been sitting on my shelf intimidatingly for a few years now.

I am a fan of Karen Armstrong, having several of her works upon my shelf. Much of her work contains a degree of her own brand of philosophy which, at times, can be a bit lengthy and academic. This book is no exception, for she inserts passages of poetic examples in historical narratives to illustrate the passion and dispair of a "people", particularly the Arabs.
This book is a sympathetic portrait of the Arab cause, especially noticeable is Karen's soft spot for Palestine and Yasser Arafat. For example, she states Israel made "retaliatory raids" into Jordan to attack the Fedayeen (Battle of Karameh), but does not mention the attack was a result of the 37th terrorist attack on Israel by the Fedayeen, this time killing school children traveling in a bus.
Karen also states Jordan's King Hussein expelled Arafat, but does not state the catalyst for this event was an assasination attempt on King Hussein by the Feydayeen. His motorcade was machine gunned by PLO terrorist. This is not mentioned in the book. Nor is the fact Jordan called on Israeli fighter jets to repel Syrian tanks as a result of these difficulties. King Hussein actually declared war on the Palastinians to removed them from Jordan. These are historical facts based on interviews with King Hussein of Jordan, often seen as an Arab outcast for calling on the Israel when threatened by a "brother" Arab.
I am not sypathetic to Jewish, Muslim, nor Christian. I appreciate clear thought and unbiased factual history. This book is not a good source for historical reference.

Karen Armstrong certainly explored the complexities of the crusades and identifying the similarities between the Outremer (crusader states) of the medieval era and modern day Israel. Both of which were/are seen as a foreign pestilence to the surrounding Arab population. She documents the brutality of radical crusaders such as the right-wing "Tafurs", who scoured the countryside around Antioch duriing the siege of 1096, and were said to have eaten Muslim flesh. Armstrong also presents a intrinsically spiritual connection in the first two crusades. She points to the "righteousness" of the Cluniacs and Cistercians in wanting to achieve dominance over the Near East. Though she does not justify the acts of the crusaders she certainly provides an insight into why Western Christians felt threatened.

Ms. Armstrong certainly expanded my preceptions about Islam without question. She explored in depth the anti-semetic views of both Jews and Muslims upheld by Christians, which she states to be a result of the crusades (she illustrates this heavily in the end). Islamic rulers for the most part upheld their teachings during this time, and were a moral opposite to the "moralist crusaders". The book gave me a fresh perspective from an Arab viewpoint, something certainly lacking in the modern era.

While the book had some good aspects some were certainly looked in a blatantly painful way. The author seemed to take an almost propagandist view of the Christian/Islamic relations from a Muslim perspective. The author wholeheartedly avoided the subject of the Arab conquest of the Middle East beginning in the 630's. She also forgot to mention the same ruthlessness projected by the Turks in dealing with the Byzantines and later the Slavs of Eastern Europe (i.e. policy of Islamization) in latter centuries. A description of the Armenian holocaust would have also been worth mentioning. The author had mentioned in the introduction that she was not writing an "exact history" of the tragic events that unfolded almost a millenia ago. However, on the back cover (paperback version) the book is listed as a historical publication.

I have learned a great deal about Islam, Judaism and Christianity. However, a clearly anti-western perspective was constantly reinforced without looking at the entirety of the subject (mentioned above) gave a sad one sided view of an already tragic situation in our modern world.

Please Excuse any spelling errors!