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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 July 1999 Issue No. 438
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Let my right hand forget her cunning
By David Blanks *In the middle of the fifteenth century, in a Benedictine abbey in the city of Salzburg, the religious centre of the Holy Roman Empire, a monk by the name of Andreas Walsperger drew a round map of the world. Although medieval maps were traditionally round, this one was slightly different. Instead of dividing the world into three unequal parts, oriented toward the East, with Asia, which was half the world, at the top, and Europe and Africa, each taking up one quarter of the globe, at the bottom, Walsperger's map was informed by geographical writings of the second-century, Greco-Egyptian astronomer from Alexandria, Ptolemy. Usually remembered for his geocentric model of the universe, which had yet to be challenged by the likes of Copernicus and Galileo, Ptolemy's geography had only just been rediscovered in the West thanks to the work of Arab and Greek scholars. Walsperger incorporated the "new" ideas into his vision of the world by "reorienting" his map on a North-South axis and reapportioning the relative sizes of the known continents.
As was common in those days, the monk illustrated his map with drawings and Latin captions. Dominating the rest of the picture, and located on the eastern edge of the earth, is an enormous walled fortress with towers and banners and a gigantic church half the size of China. This was Paradise. At the very centre of Walsperger's map was another, smaller walled fortress with towers and banners and a church. This was Jerusalem.
It had already been more than 200 years since the western invaders had lost the city to Salah al-Din, but with the Turks knocking on the gates of Constantinople, in the minds of many westerners, Jerusalem was still at the centre of the world, and preachers throughout Europe were still calling for new Crusades to liberate the Holy City from the infidel.
The Capture of Jerusalem in 1099:
As engines hurl stones to breach the walls, Crusaders enter on scaling ladders. Scenes from Christ's passion identify the city as Jerusalem
Source: Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
It might be argued that this is exactly what happened, at the beginning of this century, when General Allenby (re)took Jerusalem from the Turks in December 1917. He was rumoured to have said: "Only now have the Crusades come to an end." Compare this with the spectacle some twenty years earlier of German Emperor Wilhelm II riding into Jerusalem dressed up as a medieval Crusader. The British and the Germans may have hated one another passionately, but it seems they were united in their prejudices. This total lack of cultural sensitivity was the sort of thing Sayyid Qutb must have had in mind when he wrote that the Crusader spirit "runs in the blood of all Westerners."
Nine hundred years ago this week, a violent and uncontrollable band of barbarian warriors, who had been encamped outside Jerusalem for five agonising weeks, pushed two enormous wooden towers up to the walls of the city as the population inside prepared to defend itself. Although they had already seen their share of misery, it was only the beginning.
A year earlier, the sudden arrival of savage Europeans outside the walls of Constantinople had taken the Greeks, Turks and Arabs completely by surprise. Although the Byzantine emperor had written to the pope in 1094 asking for his help against the Seljuks in Asia Minor, he had long ago given up hope of ever receiving a response--and in any case, he had envisioned the arrival of several hundred highly trained and devoted mercenaries. What he got instead, four years later, was a contentious and uncivilised pack of heavily armed fanatics who, far from wanting to help the emperor, had the singular and seemingly insane notion that they were going to march to the centre of the world and recover the inheritance and birthright of their supreme commander, Christ. Not only had the western knights sworn a solemn oath to do so, they didn't much care if they died in the process: that would mean reaching Paradise just that much quicker.
For their part the Turks and the Arabs had no earthly idea why these barbarians had suddenly appeared on the fringes of their territory. Although later writers would explain the disaster as a punishment from God for the failure of the Muslims to get there own house in order, the chroniclers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries make no guesses as to the motivations behind these surprise attacks. Anyway, at the time, the Muslim leaders had more important things to worry about, namely, fighting each other. The main reason the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan ignominiously lost his capital of Nicaea to the invaders was that he had not taken the threat seriously. His attention had been thoroughly fastened upon a much more pressing problem, how to defeat a rival Turkish emir, Danishmend, who was laying siege to a town in eastern Anatolia.
In fact, it was not until after the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal, received word in Cairo in the summer of 1098 that Antioch had fallen that he became aware of the Crusaders' true intentions. Until then he had been reasonably content to watch the warriors called the Franj take possessions from the Byzantines and the Seljuks. Suddenly he became alarmed. Despite his attempts to make a treaty with them, the Franj were obviously marching south, directly toward Fatimid territory. There was only one thing to do: the vizier laid siege to Jerusalem himself.
After capturing the city, along with its thoroughly mixed population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, Al-Afdal returned to Cairo and left one Iftikhar al-Dawla, commander of the Egyptians, to deal with the approaching Crusaders. The first thing he did was to kick out the Christians. In the Middle Ages most sieges were lost through treachery. Indeed, Antioch had been betrayed to the Crusaders by an Armenian armourer in charge of one of the towers, and General Iftikhar wanted to make sure that Jerusalem was harbouring no traitors. Never mind that the culprit at Antioch was a Muslim.
The twin towers that were pushed up to the walls of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 (23 Sha'ban 492) had been painstakingly constructed. In Latin a siege weapon of this type was called a testudo ("turtle") because the wooden frame was completely covered in animal hides so as to protect the attackers concealed underneath. In Arabic it was called a dabbaba, a word which still resonates in the history of modern warfare in the Middle East. The idea was to get close enough to the walls of the city to throw out a gangplank which the knights could then use to rush over the top of the ramparts.
On their side of the fortification, the defenders rained down flaming arrows with some success, but when the contraptions got really close, they bombarded them with bottles of "Greek fire," a secret and explosive mixture of sulphur, naphtha and quicklime invented by the Byzantines. The first tower burst into flames, killing the dozens of men crammed inside; but the Crusaders in the second tower had doused the animal hides with vinegar, and it failed to ignite. The gangplank was lowered, and the fanatical Franj poured into the Holy City, massacring every living thing they could get their hands on. According to one contemporary account, so many thousands were slaughtered in the Temple of Solomon that the floor was ankle-deep in blood. The Jews, whom the Egyptian commander had magnanimously allowed to stay, were herded into a synagogue. Then the men fighting for the love of God burned it to the ground.
Later Muslim accounts, written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, would embellish the numbers and the nature of the atrocities, reminding us that every generation plays its own tricks on the dead. The 900th anniversary of the First Crusade is important because of the enduring misconceptions about each other that have been foisted upon Muslims and Christians alike through the endless retelling of events which writers have emptied entirely of their original meaning and refilled with the excesses of modern ideologies.
In the remarkably insightful concluding chapter of her new book, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Carole Hillenbrand traces the ways in which the memory of the Crusades has been nurtured and reworked in the twentieth century. She draws special attention to the image of Salah al-Din, liberator of Jerusalem, who has been elevated to the level of Arab hero and defender of the faith.
Today leaders love to be cast in that role. The realities of the past are almost willfully forgotten. Who cares that Salah al-Din was actually a Kurd, that he was motivated in large part by family concerns and personal ambition, that the Muslims soon lost interest in this provincial city and went back to fighting each other, that the sultan al-Kamil ceded it back to the Franj in 1229, that this was representative of the ethic of Realpolitik that pervaded the thinking of Arab and Turkish rulers, that the men primarily responsible for expelling the invaders were actually Nur al-Din and Baybars, or that it very well may have been in the interests of the Fatimids to let the Crusaders have Jerusalem in the first place in order to create a buffer zone between them and their real enemies, the Byzantines and the Seljuks?
What many Americans and Europeans willfully forget is that the myth of Salah al-Din has taken on such proportions precisely because of the new foreign aggression that has been perpetrated in Palestine. The daily outrages that are committed by western governments in the Middle East, the negative stereotypes of Arabs in the western press, the insensitive and ill-informed analyses of Orientalist scholars, the ongoing effrontery of the state of Israel: preserving the memory of the Crusades is entirely justified. Westerners fail to understand the profound importance of history for the Muslim world or to appreciate the deeply felt sense of grievance that is the result of continued acts of aggression and attitudes that do seem to have their roots in an event which took place nine hundred years ago.
Next time you are browsing in your history books, take a look at a modern map of the world. Despite all the changes that have taken place in the West -- the alleged separation of Church and State, the blind faith in science, the rise of modernity, the supposed end of the Cold War, the rhetoric of multiculturalism, the cult of political correctness-- take a look at a map, and you will discover that Jerusalem is still at the centre.
And less than six months from now, when the world will celebrate what according to the Christian calendar is a new millennium, fanatics of every stripe will descend on that fateful city which by then will be widely recognised as ground zero. But don't worry. You won't miss it. CNN will bring it to you live. And who knows? Perhaps even the Palestinians will be celebrating. Don't forget that Sultan Khalil of Egypt expelled the Crusaders in 1291 (690). If nothing else, if you believe that history repeats itself, this means that by then the foreign occupation will be half over.
* The writer is assistant professor of history at the American University in Cairo.
