Column: time to brush up on your Crusader history
How much do you know about the battle of Yarmouk in 636 AD, when an Arab army first destroyed a major Christian force near Syria's borders with Israel and Jordan? Or the First Crusade, when Frankish knights took Jerusalem in 1099, slaughtering virtually every Muslim and Jew in the city? Or the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, when news of the Ottoman massacre of a Christian garrison at Famagusta, Cyprus, contributed to the defeat of its fleet at the hands of a Spanish-led armada?
If the answer is plenty, that's great. But the odds are that these episodes in the long struggle between Christians and Muslims will mean more to the average Turk, Iranian or Palestinian. And that's a problem for the West's understanding and approach to Gaza, Iran and the Middle East as a whole.
It's one that Simon Mayall, a former lieutenant general in the British Army, has tried to address in a new book, called "The House of War: The Struggle Between Christendom and the Caliphate." His history races through key battles that marked the ebb and flow of this near-1300-year contest, from Yarmouk to the fall of Constantinople and of the last Caliphate in 1924, after World War I ended with Ottoman defeat and the imposition of a British mandate for Palestine.
All history is, of course, selective. School textbooks in Turkey won't talk so much about the slaughter at Famagusta, just as they fail to acknowledge the 1915 Ottoman genocide against Armenians. They've no interest at all in the Battle of Agincourt, a victory over France familiar to any English schoolboy. But as the age of Western dominance fades, and issues of identity and religion return as core forces driving politics and conflict across the world, we need more accessible, dispassionate accounts like Mayall's.
"I wanted to link them up," Mayall said of the battles in The House of War, when I asked why he wanted to write it this way, and why now. "People in the West who are secular and liberal and areligious need to understand that these are powerful points of identity."
The book opens with Osama bin Laden's fatwas, the Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places (1996), and World Front for Combat against Jews and Crusaders (1998). To Americans and Europeans at the time, these were the bizarre ramblings of a lunatic stuck in a medieval time warp and an Afghan cave. But among Muslims, they were quite comprehensible and, for a significant number, resonant.
Mayall served much of his career in the Middle East and ended up as the UK government's defense adviser for the region, as well as envoy to Iraq. So, this is a soldier's book, with a keen interest in which combatants did and didn't show bravery or tactical and strategic brilliance, and in the way attackers deployed mines and cannon, elite infantry and cavalry. Armor is polished, colors flutter. It's a ripping yarn.
But The House of War is interesting for what it says about the roots of victories that changed the face of Eurasia, and the moments of humiliation, atrocity and victory that still shape attitudes today. Understanding the deep nature of the Sunni-Shia schism, for example, or the long history of struggle between Persians and Arabs, just might have avoided the disaster of America's 2003 re-invasion of Iraq. And recognizing the long record of ethnic cleansing as a tool of state-building in the region should keep us all alive to the risks in Gaza and Israel.
"The Persians are still so dismissive, even bitter about the fact Islam came to them through what they see as an inferior Arab culture; it irritates them so much that the Americans can't get past the 1979 hostage crisis to see that," Mayall says. This matters, he says, because although Iran may, for example, use Hamas, a Sunni Arab organization whose interests have aligned with Tehran's against Israel, it will never put itself at risk for them.
This historical myopia isn't unique to the Christian West. It's as much a factor for many Muslims, who see Israel as just another chapter in European colonialism, a proxy crusader state run by Jews for a mere 76 years, after more than a millennium of (mostly) Arab Muslim control that should surely resume. That, of course, ignores the thousands of years before the arrival of the Romans, let alone Islam, when the history of Palestine was Jewish, and the al-Aqsa mosque compound was the site of Jewish temples. Mayall is hoping to get his book converted to a TV series, and to publish it in Arabic and Turkish, as well as English.
This isn't a question of self-flagellation or critical history studies, let alone condoning Sept. 11 or Oct. 7, or the dreams of some Israeli extremists to displace Palestinians throughout the Holy Land. No injustice legitimizes the deliberate slaughter of innocents, and no historic or religious claim makes ethnic cleansing acceptable. Rather, learning more about other versions of the past aims at understanding the drivers of historical grievance, so we can better anticipate responses and make policy.
We don't have a lot in the way of grievance that drives us, a result of the West's roughly 400-year technological, military and ideological dominance. But we too often forget others do, and that even distant history can seem more real and attractive than a sometimes humiliating present, which was largely made in the West.
