Modern Misuse of "Crusade"

By Professor Edward Peters

Many political figures and the media in the Muslim/Arab world, and a few in Europe, now refer to the American and European presence in the Middle East as a “Crusade.” The usage derives neither from an ages-old polarity between East and West nor from a continuous memory of the Crusades in either culture. Instead, it is the product of events dating from the nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, the Crusades had long since been fought, lost, and largely forgotten. The one Enlightenment view that survived was that they had been launched for financial and territorial gain rather than religious motives. In the early nineteenth century, a new set of historians began to argue for a return to original sources and an understanding that took account of the values and standards of those who waged the Crusades. At the same moment (1830) France launched its invasion of Algeria, and politicians and historians proudly identified the new colonizing movement with the old Crusades. Here is the beginning of the French mission civilisatrice. The increased French and English military, diplomatic, and economic presence in the Middle East generated resistance from the Ottoman Empire and much of the Turkish and Arab intelligentsia. By the end of the nineteenth century, virtually every component of late twentieth-century conceptions of the Crusades—both honorific and pejorative—was in place in Western Europe.

The Ottoman Empire and the Arab world had much to complain about in this respect, including a long history of European contempt for the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam. But neither Arab nor Turkish historiography retained much memory of the Crusades, nor did either language have a word for them. They soon acquired one. The work of French Crusade historians had begun to be translated into Arabic and Turkish around the middle of the nineteenth century. In these translations there appeared for the first time the Arabic word, al-hurub al-salibiyya, "the Wars of the Cross," which added a religious dimension to Ottoman and Arab perceptions of modern European incursions. Turkish response to European histories in precisely this context launched the career of Saladin (1163?-1193), first as a Turkish but later as a universal Arab/Muslim hero.

In 1899 the first Crusade history written by a Muslim, the Egyptian historian Sayyid ‘Ali al-Hariri, praised Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) for denouncing a European Crusade against the Ottoman world. In the same year, the Muslim scholar Syed Ameer Ali, whose sources were largely the Enlightenment critics, published his widely-read Short History of the Saracens, in which the Crusades were depicted as the product of European greed and savagery. Here is the Arabic/Muslim origin of such uses of the term in circles as different as Tariq Aziz
and Osama bin Laden.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 brought a greater European presence and degree of control to the region. The U.S. was first included among the Crusaders in the polemic of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1950s because of American support for Israel.

The odd legacy of nineteenth-century historiography and popular imagery as well as colonialism and the consequences of World War I have been taken up by political leaders, historians, and polemicists, creating in many minds a convenient label. That designation is widespread in print media and has made its way down to the Arab street and even into textbooks for primary and secondary schools.

A fabricated historical identification of twelfth- and twentieth-century events does nothing to clarify today’s important and urgent issues. We would do far better without anyone calling for—or perceiving—a Crusade where none has been intended or launched. n

Edward Peters is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History. This essay is based on a lecture given on May 3, 2003, at the History Institute for Teachers, sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research Institute at American College, Bryn Mawr, PA.