In fact, even then, the word ‘crusade’–already disassociated from religion–was starting to be detached in the English language from its medieval roots. In 1915 the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George described the First World War as ‘a great crusade’ in a rallying speech. By the time of the Second World War, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s D-Day orders, issued for 6 June 1944, contained the exhortation to Allied troops: ‘You are about to embark on a great crusade.’ Eisenhower’s 1948 account of the war was entitled Crusade in Europe.12

Modern Islam and the crusades

After a sustained period of marked disinterest, the Muslim world began to exhibit the first flickers of renewed curiosity about the crusades in the mid-nineteenth century. Around 1865, the translation of French histories by Arabic-speaking Syrian Christians led to the first uses of the term al-hurub al-Salabiyya (the ‘Cross’ wars) for what before had been known as the wars of the Ifranj (the Franks). In 1872, an Ottoman Turk, Namik Kemal, published the first ‘modern’ Muslim biography of Saladin–a work seemingly written to refute Michaud’s triumphalist history that had recently been translated into Turkish. Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1898 visit to the Near East either coincided with, or perhaps fuelled, another burst of interest, for in the following year the Egyptian scholar Sayyid ‘Ali al-Hariri produced the first Arabic history of the crusades, entitled Splendid Accounts of the Crusading Wars. In this book al-Hariri wrote that the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1908) recently had sought to characterise western occupation of Muslim territory as a new ‘crusade’, and al-Hariri stated that the sultan ‘rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a crusade against us in the form of a political campaign’. Around the same time, the Muslim poet Ahmad Shaqwi wrote a verse questioning why Saladin had been forgotten by Islam until the reminder provided by Kaiser Wilhelm.13

In the years that followed, Muslims from India to Turkey and the Levant began to comment on the similarity between medieval crusader occupations and modern western encroachments–a comparison that, of course, had been espoused vocally and enthusiastically in the West for decades. A gathering fascination with Saladin as a heroic Muslim figurehead is also evidenced by the opening of a new university in Jerusalem named after the sultan in 1915. These two related phenomena were accelerated by events towards the tail end of the First World War: the establishment of the British and French mandates in the Levant; the extensive reporting of Allenby’s supposed reference to the crusades; and the widespread popularisation of historical parallelism in Europe. By 1934 one prominent Arabic author was moved to suggest that ‘the West is still waging crusading wars against Islam under the guise of political and economic imperialism’.

The critical change came, however, after the Second World War, with the UN-mandated foundation of the state of Israel in 1948–the realisation of what has been called Zionism. That October, the commentator ‘Abd al-Latif Hamza wrote that ‘the struggle against Zionists has reawakened in our hearts the memory of the crusades’. From 1948 onwards, the Muslim world engaged in an increasingly active re-examination of the medieval war for the Holy Land. Arab-Islamic culture already had a long tradition–stretching back to the central Middle Ages and beyond–of seeking to learn from the past. It is not surprising, therefore, that across the Near and Middle East, scholars, theologians and radical activists now started to refine and affirm their own historical parallels; to harness crusade history for their own purposes.14

The principles of ‘crusade parallelism’

This process of historical appropriation continues to this day. The crusader period was, and is, exceptionally well suited to the needs of Islamic propagandists. Having come to an end almost 800 years earlier, the precise events of this era are sufficiently cloudy to be readily reshaped and manipulated: useful ‘facts’ can be selected; any uncomfortable details that do not correlate with a particular ideology are easily discarded. The crusades can also be used to construct a valuable didactic narrative, because they encapsulate both ‘western’ attack and eventual Islamic victory. Jerusalem’s role likewise is critical. In reality, the political and even the devotional importance accorded by Muslims to the Holy City varied and wavered in the course of the Middle Ages, even as it did in later centuries. But the medieval struggle for dominion of this site helps modern ideologues to cultivate an idea of Jerusalem–and most especially of the Haram as-Sharif, or Temple Mount–as a sacred and inviolable stronghold of the Muslim faith.

Over the past sixty years, a wide range of Islamic groups and individuals, from politicians to terrorists, have sought to draw comparisons between the modern world and the medieval crusades. On points of detail and emphasis there are important differences in the messages and ideas they propagate, but there is also a relatively consistent substructure underpinning all of their various arguments, dominated by two ideas. The first is that the West, as an invading colonial power, is now committing crimes against the Muslim world, just as it did 900 years ago; recreating the medieval crusades in the modern era. However, Israel’s creation, with Western support, added a new strand to the story. In the twentieth-century incarnation of this struggle, it is not just imperialist crusaders but also Jews who are seeking to occupy the Holy Land. Together they are supposed to be joined in a ‘Crusader-Zionist’ alliance against Islam. Propagandists seek to lend an aura of credibility to this strange juxtaposition by pointing out that Israel occupies roughly the same territory as the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. In recent decades, however, the geographical focus of this ideology has rapidly been expanded. New western, and notably American-led, interventions in the Near and Middle East and Central Asia have been positioned alongside the Arab–Israeli conflict and the plight of the Palestinians, adding to the crimes of the so-called ‘Crusader-Zionist’ alliance. These include the two Gulf Wars, the struggle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the stationing in the sacred Muslim territory of Saudi Arabia of US troops, described by Osama bin Laden as ‘Crusader hosts [who] have spread in it like locusts’.15

The second pillar of ‘crusade parallelism’ relates to the supposed capacity for Islam to learn valuable lessons from the medieval era. In 1963, the Muslim author Sa‘id Ashur published a two-volume History of the Crusades in Arabic, in which he claimed that the situation facing modern Muslims was very similar to that of the Middle Ages, and therefore it was ‘incumbent upon us to study the movement of the crusades minutely and scientifically’. Numerous Islamic ideologues have sought to find inspiration in the medieval war for the Holy Land. Some have argued for the unification of Islam, by force if necessary, and the unflinching and relentless pursuit of jihad, in supposed imitation of the Muslims of the Middle Ages. Many propagandists suggest that Islam must be willing to patiently face a long battle–after all, it took eighty-eight years to reclaim Jerusalem from the Franks and almost two centuries to destroy Outremer. Crucially, Muslim ‘heroes’ of the crusader era have also been raised as exemplars–most notably Saladin. Indeed, in the course of the twentieth century, the Ayyubid sultan has been widely mythologised as the central Islamic champion of the medieval war for the Holy Land. It is now Saladin, not Sultan Baybars, who has gained cult status across the Arabic-speaking world. His defeat of the western Christians in the Battle of Hattin is revered as one of the greatest victories in Muslim history, and his subsequent recapture of Jerusalem is the subject of intense pan-Islamic pride and celebration.16