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September 18, 2006
Karen Armstrong
You gotta love Comment is Free. Karen Armstrong writes a weirdly deluded piece about how all of this Christian hatred of Islam stems from the Crusades. You know, us going to kill them.
Comment 1 provides quotations pointing out that they started killing us some 500 years previous to the First Crusade. Comment 5 points to the attempted invasion of France (and the successful one of Spain) some 400 odd years before the First Crusade.
Isn’t it just wonderful how the cosy assumptions of such Guardian writers are now challenged, almost in real time?
September 18, 2006 in Religion | Permalink
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Comments
You have to laugh when Tim Worstall, an Englishman living in the twenty first century, considers that Islams attacked 'us' when the Moors invaded Spain.
James C
Tim adds: Why would that be funny? I live just outside Lisbon. When I look out my window up the mountain I see Castello dos Mouros. The next village over is called Alcabideche, a Portuguese-ication of Arabic Al’ etc etc.
Posted by: james C | Sep 18, 2006 11:59:26 AM
Tim, if you think this is bad, take a look a la Bunting's latest.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/madeleine_bunting/2006/09/post_393.html
Posted by: Frank Fisher | Sep 18, 2006 12:03:57 PM
The wikipedia skills of those commentators is impressive, but if Armstrong's argument is acultural ahistorical tu quoque twaddle (which it is) then so is the "they started it" rebuttal.
Posted by: Lysias | Sep 18, 2006 12:15:15 PM
folk wisdom says you dont call a crazy person crazy to his face and for good reason..
what ever public behaviour exhibited by the nut will be intensified
Posted by: embutler | Sep 18, 2006 2:00:23 PM
Tim adds: Why would that be funny?
Because you aren't Spanish and yet you talk about the Moorish invasion of Spain as an attack on 'us'.
James C
Posted by: james C | Sep 18, 2006 5:04:52 PM
Well, James C, how recently, and how nearby, qualifies as "us"? How about Muslims slave-raiding Cornwall, Devon, Ireland and Iceland in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Posted by: dearieme | Sep 18, 2006 5:18:18 PM
"The fishermen and coastal dwellers of 17th-century Britain lived in terror of being kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa. Hundreds of thousands across Europe met wretched deaths on the Barbary Coast in this way. . . "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
Wilberforce (1759-1833) campaigned in Parliament against the slave trade for 18 years before he finally succeeded in getting legislation through banning British ships from engaging in the trade in 1807. It took somewhat longer for Parliament to pass the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, a month after Wilberforce died. This act liberated all slaves in the British empire.
It took Imperial Russia and then the US of America several decades more to abolish slavery.
Posted by: Bob B | Sep 18, 2006 7:10:17 PM
Quick! Somebody blame The Spanish Inquisition!
Posted by: DirtCrashr | Sep 18, 2006 9:03:28 PM
Amazing how some people just can't blame those responsible for wrongdoing. catholic fundamentalism (site, catholicfundamentalism.com )suggests that one reason the other side is so brutal is that they just aren't overly bright, an unavoidable consequence of polygamy
Posted by: billadams | Sep 19, 2006 12:33:47 AM
billadams, I'm willing to consider you an authority on "[not] overly bright".
Anyhow, this who-gets-to-be-"us" gibberish...
If the Spanish of 1000 years ago (or however long) aren't "us", okay, fine, whatever, but don't then tell me Pakistanis and Indonesians get to be pissed off at the Irish about the Crusades, or the perfidies of the diabolical Jews in Palestine. Which they are.
Anyhow, at the time of the Crusades, the mentality was that Christendom was under attack by the Islamic world. Why draw your "us" lines at the borders of modern nation-states, particularly since they really didn't exist at that time? Was Strasbourg part of France when the Muslims invaded France? If so, the Strasbourgeois get to be "us"; otherwise, not. Right? What about the Normas who turned into fucking Poms after 1066? They were French at the time of the battle of Tours; their distant descendants now sell scandium in Portugal. So you'll have to exclude Frenchmen from the wrong part of France in order to keep Tim out. And what about the EU?
It all gets very complicated.
Posted by: P. Froward | Sep 19, 2006 4:00:56 AM
FWIW my impression is that current debates waging about world religions are conducted with about the same sophistication as the mantra of the sheep in Orwell's Animal Farm: Four legs good, two legs bad. The historic flexing of national borders during and since medieval times in Europe or the extent of the influence of the Enlightenment don't figure.
The least considerations of the perpetrators of the attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Saalem in 1998, the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, the commuter trains in Madrid in 2004 or Londoners last year were the different faiths, ethnicities and nationalities of the victims. It seems that what really mattered in the calculation of the planners was the likely dimensions of the carnage.
Posted by: Bob B | Sep 19, 2006 9:04:21 AM
When the Bali bombers blew up the night club, I understand they accepted Balinese deaths on the grounds that good Muslims wouldn't have been there.
I would assume that a similar calculus drives them to accept "colateral" casualties in Nairobi, Dar-es-Saalem, New York, Madrid and London.
If all that really mattered in the calculation of the planners was the likely dimensions of the carnage, then they could stay at home and start another Darfur.
Posted by: JM | Sep 19, 2006 9:32:03 AM
When people talk above the historic threat posed by Islam, they always seem to use the examples of Spain, Poitiers and Vienna. It's as well to remember that the Middle East was central to early Christianity with some of the most important churches being in Syria and Egypt.
The imperial nature of Islam can not be understand if we ignore those parts of the world where the Islamic tide did not roll back.
Posted by: JM | Sep 19, 2006 9:40:05 AM
"I would assume that a similar calculus drives them to accept "colateral" casualties in Nairobi, Dar-es-Saalem, New York, Madrid and London."
What really impressed me about any calculation on the scale of acceptable collateral casualties was that with the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Saalem in 1998, the number of Americans killed or injured was relatively small compared with the many dozens of local citizens who were just unlucky enough to be passing by.
Either little intelligent thought had gone into the planning or the number of local citizens incidentally killed or injured was considered entirely unimportant compared with achieving greater strategic or devotional goals.
Speaking of those goals, what amazes me is the evident belief of some - apparently including some highly educated folk - that killing dozens, hundreds or, better still, thousands of people is a telling testimony of the sincerity of the commitment of the perpetrators.
Obviously, such a bizarre rationale is not peculiar to malign sects of Islam - after all, there was also Timothy McVeigh and the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995 or the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway that same year by the Aum Shrinkyo cult in Japan, or Rumsfeld's peculiar fixation with bombing Iraq because there are better targets there, so we need to keep the motivation for all such atrocities in duly informed perspective. But why organise the killing of people, apparently at random, when there are millions of poor Muslims in developing countries? Surely the world would be the more impressed with the organisation and funding of business and development projects that would help alleviate their plight.
Posted by: Bob B | Sep 19, 2006 11:30:42 AM
But why organise the killing of people, apparently at random, when there are millions of poor Muslims in developing countries? Surely the world would be the more impressed with the organisation and funding of business and development projects that would help alleviate their plight.
Good question.
I can't see John Snow or Jim Naughtie asking it any time soon. I think it self evident that the commentariat applies different moral standards to different ethnicities. Apparently we have to follow the Geneva convention when dealling with head hackers.
Posted by: JM | Sep 19, 2006 1:33:03 PM
To be fair to Tim, I think the them and us, are "their" definitions.
Posted by: EU Serf | Sep 19, 2006 3:20:54 PM
It's not mainly a matter of which side inflicted the worst amount of damage or when they did it that are seminal to the issue. It has more to do with how enduring the memories of such events are. For the Muslims, who haven't migrated to the rapid pace and limited attention span resulting from modernity, the memory of the Crusades is far more vivid, which doesn't necessarily make their discontent any more valid. But it is a key factor the West neglects while pressuring Islamic societies to modernize.
Posted by: matt cheplic | Jan 2, 2007 6:05:22 AM
I appreciate all religions because I'm an exceptionally positive person. Which is why I'm supporting Hillary Clinton for President.
She's ddeply religious and has all the features this great country needs in a leader.
Posted by: KStone | May 3, 2008 10:48:58 AM
