Holy wars and the collision of east and west down the years

By Ron Ferguson

Published:

THE Kingdom of Heaven has been and gone in Orkney. No, I don’t mean that Jesus Christ touched down at Kirkwall Airport. I’m talking about the movie. In his latest period re-creation, Sir Ridley Scott, of Gladiator fame, plunges us into the Moslem siege of Jerusalem.

The movie itself is an amazing spectacle. When it was shown here, the Phoenix cinema in Kirkwall became a wraparound Christian-Moslem battlefield with full screaming sound effects. You expected to see blood on the walls as you made your way down for your ice cream.

In my opinion, the film doesn’t quite work, but it raises some interesting issues. Scott adds layers of tolerance and conciliation which weren’t around at the time. The Crusades were brutal and hardly ecumenical. However, historical accuracy may be less important than historical relevance. This epic about the Crusades is thought-provoking, especially given the ramifications of these events on today’s strained politics.

Let me explain.

Here was the deal in the 11th century: you’ll save your soul and go to heaven if you kill a bunch of infidels. Does that sound familiar? It certainly would to the likes of the London bombers, who currently either are or are not disporting himself with 90 virgins in paradise as their reward for blasting themselves and a few unsuspecting strangers to fragments of scorched flesh.

In 1095, when Pope Urban II rallied Christians for holy crusade, he offered an extraordinary reward to those who set out to liberate the land of Christ's birth: “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins.”

Read His Holiness’s lips: kill and be saved.

While there are undoubtedly connections between the activities of the people who tried to blow up Glasgow Airport and the recent invasion of Iraq, the links go much further back than that. Osama bin Laden repeatedly refers to the Crusades in his cheery wee videos.

When President George W. Bush, taking ineptitude to unprecedented levels, called for a “crusade against evil”, it was as if he was reading a script prepared for him by Mr bin Laden himself.

Even Basil Fawlty, never mind Dick Cheney, would have told him: “Whatever you do, don’t mention the Crusades.”

The First Crusade began nearly a millennium ago, but Moslems refer to those terrible events as if they happened yesterday. It so happens that the Crusades were, in fact, defensive wars in the face of Moslem military expansionism; nevertheless, they have become an integral part of a widespread perception of continuous western imperialism.

How Christian were the Crusades? Well, it depends what you mean by “Christian”. The point is well made in Kingdom of Heaven. When Balian (Orlando Bloom) raises the question about the motivation of the Crusaders, a Hospitaller replies: “They are dying for doing what the Pope would tell them to do; but not Christ, I think.” Quite so.

While some Crusaders went out to the Holy Land for reasons of piety, many were driven by less-elevated thoughts of conquest, land, booty and glory. There is evidence that quite a number of noble knights were simply bored by domestic life and thought that a spot of slaughter of the infidels would brighten up their day.

The connections with the teachings of Christ are about as tenuous as those linking the teaching of Mohammed with the Moslem wars of expansion.

I’m not making the conventional case that mainstream Christianity and Islam are all about peace and love and organic vegetables, and that this glorious harmony is spoiled only by a few dysfunctional extremists. Institutional Christianity and Islam have the capacity to hurt people, whether by violence, the protection of paedophile priests, or the suppression of women.

Amid the spiritual riches of the mainstream sacred texts, there are passages which present a vengeful and even genocidal tyrant god. Given the evolutionary nature of religious thought this is unsurprising; what is indefensible is the use of these historical texts to justify current violence.

I’ve heard people express surprise that Moslem suicide bombers have been willing to blow up fellow-Moslems. This is to misunderstand the current situation. As Professor Reza Aslan, in his magisterial book No God But God, points out, the Wahhabist sect which Osama bin Laden represents hates most fellow-Moslems and regards them as lax betrayers of the faith. The current troubles in the Islamic world are as much to do with an ideological civil war raging within Islam as they are to do with the west.

Surely all this means that religions cause most of the troubles in the world? This liberal consensus – which is itself bristling with immaculately conceived dogmas – is eye-wateringly naïve. Human beings have an innate capacity to start a war on an empty Earth. The charnel house of the 20th century contained more than 100million corpses – not due to religion, but to Fascism, totalitarian socialism and other causes. Creed as they donned their uniforms of hate.

The other thing is this. The instinct for religion represents a hunger for ultimate meaning. A longing for the transcendent is neither a dysfunction nor a disease. The only language we can use for the search for God is, by definition, human language. The trouble comes when this provisional, stuttering talk is taken as a literal map of ultimate reality. And hardening of the theological arteries leads to ideological and political trouble.

Any human institution which has come down through history inevitably carries a great deal of baggage. The Christian Church, for instance, is a flawed and sometimes absurd creation. Yet despite its obvious sins and clamant need of continual reformation it keeps in circulation whispers about the divine.

It not only attracts seriously loopy and sometimes dangerous people, it nurtures and forms lots of incredibly generous, caring and inspiring non-celebrities.

At their best, communities of faith dream of impossible possibilities like loving and forgiving enemies. They also bear witness to, yes, a beautiful Kingdom of Heaven which exists not in Jerusalem nor on a movie screen but within and beyond the human heart.