Criticism of Islamism - Enmity Towards The West - Christian Crusades

Christian Crusades

The belief of some, such as Sayyid Qutb, that the Crusades were an attack on Islam, or at least "a wanton and predatory aggression" against Muslim countries from which Muslims developed a rightful mistrust of Christians/Europeans/Westerners, has been called into question.

According to historian Bernard Lewis, the Crusades were indeed religious wars for Christians, but to

recover the lost lands of Christendom and in particular the holy land where Christ had lived, taught and died. In this connection, it may be recalled that when the Crusaders arrived in the Levant not much more than four centuries had passed since the Arab Muslim conquerors had wrested theses lands from Christendom - less than half the time from the Crusades to the present day - and that a substantial proportion of the population of these lands, perhaps even a majority, was still Christian."

The Arab Muslim contemporaries of the Crusaders did not refer to them as "Crusaders or Christians but as Franks or Infidels". Rather than raging at their aggression, "with few exceptions, the Muslim historians show little interest in whence or why the Franks had come, and report their arrival and their departure with equal lack of curiosity." Crusaders and Muslims allied with each other against other alliances of Crusaders and Muslims. Rather than being event of such trauma that Muslims developed an old and deep fear of Christians/Europeans/Westerners from it, the crusaders' invasion was just one of many such by barbarians coming from "East and West alike" during this time of "Muslim weakness and division."

Lewis argues that any traumatization from the Crusades felt by Muslims surely would pale in comparison to what European Christendom felt from Islam. The Crusades started in 1096 and the Crusaders lost their last toe-hold when the city of Acre, was taken less than two hundred years later in 1291, whereas Europe felt under constant threat from Islam, "from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna ."

All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christian rulers, and the vast majority of the first Muslims west of Iran and Arabia were converts from Christianity. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, even Persian-ruled Iraq had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe. In Spain and in Sicily, Muslim faith and Arab culture exercised a powerful attraction, and even those who remained faithful to the Christian religion often adopted the Arabic language."

William Cantwell Smith observes that

until Karl Marx and the rise of communism, the Prophet organized and launched the only serious challenge to Western civilization that it has faced in the whole course of its history ... Islam is the only positive force that has won converts away from Christianity - by the tens of millions ...