A History
The Roots of Conflict
Between Christianity
And Islam
Thomas Asbridge
(Oxford)
They have circumcised the Christians, either spreading the blood from the circumcisions on the altars or pouring it in the baptismal fonts. And they cut open the navels of those whom they choose to torment with loathsome death, tear out their most vital organs and tie them to a stake, drag them around and flog them, before killing them as they lie prone on the ground with all their entrails out.
"What shall I say of their appalling violation of women," he went on, "of which it is more evil to speak than to keep silent?"
On whom, therefore, does the task lie of avenging this, of redeeming this situation, if not only you, upon whom above all nations God has bestowed outstanding glory in arms, magnitude of heart, litheness of body and strength to humble anyone who resists you.
It worked. Not unlike an American political candidate, he repeated the same speech in various parts of France, and within months had managed to get 100,000 soldiers together for the 3,000 mile trip by horse or by foot --- no troop carriers in those days --- all the way around the Mediterranean to the first major city, Antioch. Where the servants of the Divine "spared no Muslim on the grounds of age or sex, the ground ... covered with blood and corpses. All the streets of the city on every side were full of corpses, nor could anyone walk along the narrow paths of the city except over the corpses of the dead."
Soon afterwards, the Crusader's wrath knew no bounds when, after taking the city of Marrat, they found no gold, silver or jewelry. "When the plunder proved disappointing, they tortured to death the hapless Muslims in their reach."
Some of our men had the experience of leading the Saracrens through the streets, hoping to locate the spoils of war, only to find their captives would lead them to wells and then suddenly jump headlong to their deaths ... Because of their intransigence all submitted to death.
This scene of Christian vengeance was to be repeated at the walls of Jerusalem --- with special pizzazz: the invaders constructed a series of "siege weapons." But instead of catapulting stones, they rained down heads of the newly dead "pagans" to terrorize the enemy.
Once they reached Jerusalem, the Christians outdid themselves. As the Provençal crusader Raymond of Aguilers reported, "With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers, one could see marvelous works. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were running to and fro over corpses."
Contrary to the words of Urban II, Muslims of the time were suprisingly tolerant of other religions. But the crusades that Urban II set in motion with his colorful but cruelly false accusations were to continue for another two hundred years, changing forever the relationship between Islam to Christianity. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were to learn the force and bloodlust of the soldiers of the Prince of Peace. As Asbridge writes, "Unrelenting papal propaganda advanced the ideals of religious intolerance in the course of the twelfth century, and soon those earliest crusaders were being celebrated as much for their brutal attacks on Islamic foes as for the dramatic recapture of Jerusalem."
For those of us of the Western world, the Crusades have been fogged into elegiac poems, romantic fairy tales, and pictures of gallant Knights of the Round Table and damsels in castle towers. For the inhabitants of Islam, even eight hundred years later, the bloodshed that came to them out of the blue courtesy of the Catholic Church has never been and can never be forgotten.
And if we think that the Crusades are finally over, one only has to read the current press. In this month's LRB Andrew O'Hagen reports his interview at the Republican Convention with a delegate from Iowa (wearing "a cloth elephant on her head.")
"The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom," she said. "They don't have any culture and they hate us for having a great one. And they hate the Bible." O'Hagen said,
"Really ... The Iraqis had a culture for thousands of years before Jesus was born."
"What [are] you saying?"
"I'm saying Muslims were building temples when New York was a swamp."
"You support the Iraqis?"
"No."
"You support the killing of innocent people going to work? People who have to jump out of windows?"
"You aren't listening to me."
"No buddy. You aren't listening. These people you support are trying to kill our children in their beds. Where you from anyway, the New York Times?
A Memoir
Hilary Mantel
(Picador)
Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly ... It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves
- You are impelled to move, to pace in a small room. You force yourself down into a chair, only to jump out of it ... pressure rises inside your skull. Your hands pull at your clothing and tear at your arms. Your breathing becomes ragged. Your voice is like a bird's cry and your hands flutter like wings. You want to hurl yourself against the windows and the walls. Every fiber of your being is possessed by panic. Every moment endures for an age and yet you are transfixed by the present moment, stabbed by it; there is no sense of time passing, therefore no prospect of deliverance. A desperate feeling of urgency --- as need to act --- but to do what, and how? --- throbs through your whole body, like the pulses of an electric shock.
After the rather plodding, overly-detailed history of Ms. Mantel's first twenty years, these ghastly medical woes do pick up the story-line, make the reading more, dare we say, lively. But Giving Up the Ghost turns into a litany of pain --- pains in the head (migraines), pains in the belly (endometriosis), pains in the brain (akathisia) --- along with various incurable, nonstop, ego-damaging, undiagnosed aches and woes that go on and on.
We think that a good editor might have slimmed it all down a bit, as Mantel herself was slimmed down by ceasing to overdose on cortisone (another wrong-headed medical treatment that made her fat and moon-faced.)
For ailing writers, there is always the problem about how to describe about what they call "undying pain." It is as difficult as writing about ceaseless clinical depression which may depress the reader. Stories of endless agony, it pains me to report, can become painfully boring.
Giving up the Ghost begins and ends with meditative essays on living here and there in the Midlands of England. At times, Mantel shows a nice force of words: "Once thirty years ago I dreamed I was eating bees. And ever since I have lived with their milk-chocolate sweetness and their texture." Or, "I sat in my stifling upstairs room, coaxing out of my computer the novel concealed somewhere in its operating system."
At the conclusion, one must admire the fact that in the midst of all this vortex of woe Ms. Mantel could produce several novels and a history of the French Revolution. Then there is her subplot --- surroundings, home, where to live. We find that her most recent abode, the one she seems to love the most, is an apartment in a "converted lunatic asylum ... one of a loop of great institutions flung around London to catch and contain its burgeoning mad population, the melancholic and the syphilitic, the damaged and the deluded, the people who had forgotten their manners and the people who had forgotten their names." With her history, it is appropriate that her favorite spot is the balcony, looking out over this defunct looney-bin, where she can admire "the flickering tongues of the gargoyles."
