Saladin Crusaders Bin Laden

I've gathered together excerpts from various articles giving some background for bin Laden's jihad. They cover briefly Saladin, parts of the Crusades, the glory of the Caliphate, and at the end, an article explaining the declaration of jihad itself. I apologize for the overall length, but I've already left out as much as I felt I could. I recommend reading each of the linked articles in its entirety for a more complete picture. I also cannot vouch for historical accuracy; please seek independent verification as you see fit. The general picture is reasonably clear, though.

Bin Laden's declaration of war, issued in 1998 and as explained by Professor Bernard Lewis, is very clear. The US has shown itself to be in a war against God, the Prophet, and Muslims, in Arabia, Iraq, and Jerusalem. The war must be fought until "the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram Mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."

Lewis concludes, "To most Americans, the declaration is a travesty, a gross distortion of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia. They should also know that for many -- perhaps most -- Muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad. [...] At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders."

So, again, the war is being brought by Islamic extremists, not by Islam in general.

This article is posted on the web at:

http://www.istori.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SaladinCrusadersBinLaden

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Peter Kaminski, 2001-10-04

http://www.templemount.org/allah.html

The Crusader occupation was relatively short-lived. The Muslim leader Saladin (Salah al-Din) proclaimed a jihad, or holy war, to retake the land of Palestine. After ninety years of Crusader control, Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin's army on October 2, 1187. In contrast to the brutality of the Crusaders, Saladin treated the defeated Crusaders with kindness and mercy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4267441,00.html

George Bush, who referred initially to the war on terrorism as a "crusade", would do well to learn from the actions of the Arab warrior, Saladin, rather than the Christian crusaders.

In 1099, when the Christian crusaders took Jerusalem, they slaughtered every Muslim and Jew - men, women and children - beginning in the afternoon and carrying on through the night. One of the crusaders wrote about walking knee-high through corpses in the city's narrow streets.

When Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 he spared everyone and the next day allowed followers of each religion to worship at their holy places within the city.

http://slate.msn.com/Assessment/01-09-13/Assessment.asp

Bin Laden is the most notorious advocate of a potent strain of militant Islam that has been gaining popularity in the Muslim world for 30 years. It is simultaneously theological and cultural. Its fundamental tenet is that the Muslim world is being poisoned and desecrated by infidels. These infidels include both outsiders such as the United States and Israel, and governments of Muslim states -- such as Egypt and Jordan -- that have committed apostasy. The infidels must be driven out of the Muslim world by a jihad, and strict Islamic rule must be established everywhere that Muslims live. These extreme "Islamists," as Bin Laden biographer Yossef Bodansky dubs them, hope to re-establish the Caliphate, the golden age of Muslim domination that followed the death of Muhammad. They regard the Taliban's Afghanistan as a model for such Islamic rule.

This Islamist militancy has ancient roots -- Saladin's expulsion of the crusaders in the 12th century is one starting point -- but it was galvanized in the 1970s by several events. The growing influence of secular Western capitalism in the Muslim world, the military triumphs of Israel, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan horrified Islamic traditionalists. The Afghanistan invasion was the culminating moment: It persuaded Bin Laden and thousands of others of the need for Islamic holy war.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010924/opinion/24john.htm

But that does not mean we are in a battle against Islam. The vast majority of Muslims want no part of terrorism, and many Muslim states are as nervous about extremism as we are. The problem is a religious subculture that cannot cope with openness, change, rules, democracy, secularism, and tolerance -- and that wishes to destroy those who can.

For some in this culture, the Crusades have never ended. For others, like bin Laden, the dream is to restore the caliphate, the glorious age of Muslim domination that flourished after the death of Mohammed.

'Crusade' Reference Reinforces Fears War on Terrorism Is Against Muslims

The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2001

[Laith Shubeilat asks,] "The question is, do you want to market the cowboy image, 'dead or alive,' or the principles of Washington and Hamilton?"

"In the crusades," he continues, "they said it was for Christ, when it was in reality for trade, or for Venice. Today, [American] people would not fight if you told them it was for Texaco. But people will fight for an idea."

In the Mideast, that idea, increasingly, seems to be Islam, whose history and teachings speak of a bygone glory that many Muslims long to recreate, scholars say. The cry of Muslim ideologues -- "Islam is the answer!" -- is now a common refrain on bumper stickers in some Arab states.

"When you emasculate a people for 200 years and consistently deny them a say in their own history -- most recently in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq -- they will target your own sacred symbols," says Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University in New York.

In hitting back, Mr. Dabashi warns, the U.S. had better be sure it doesn't give its extremist enemies more fodder with which to spread hatred. "What's needed is a public, civic debate on U.S. policies in the region," he contends, adding: "It's the height of arrogance and hubris to assume that if the oil flows and the market is open, everything in the region is OK. It isn't."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101011001-175979-2,00.html

The question many Arabs ask the U.S. and the West in general, says Professor Jean Leca of the Institute of Political Science in Paris, is, "Why are you leaning so heavily on us when we already had a civilization while you were still living in caves?"

The brutality of Christendom's efforts to conquer the Holy Land from the Muslims in the Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries is not forgotten in the Middle East (making President Bush's early use of the word crusade to describe America's antiterror effort an unfortunate choice). An even greater sore is the sense that, in the centuries since, so much dignity has been lost, and to an inferior people. In Islamic belief, Muhammad is God's last prophet; he built upon the revelations of Moses and Jesus to propound a superior, perfect faith. But the world that faith created was broken apart: after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the colonial powers of France and Britain carved the Middle East into arbitrarily drawn mandates and states governed by handpicked local leaders. "Many Arabs and Muslims feel they had 10 centuries of great cultural achievement that ended with European colonialism," says John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. "Now they feel impotent. The West, they feel, looks at them as backward and is only interested in their oil. Their sense of self-worth and identity is wounded."

[...]

Egyptian writer Abd al-Salam Faraj wrote their manifesto, a pamphlet called The Neglected Duty, in which he argued that holy war was necessary to defend not just Muslims but Muslim dignity. Faraj, like many other Muslim radicals, singled out those parts of the Koran and the Hadith, the collected sayings and deeds attributed to Muhammad, that seemed to support his argument.

Bin Laden has come to fulfill the Neglected Duty. He talks a lot about dignity. Of the terrorists who killed 24 U.S. servicemen and two Indians in attacks in 1995 and 1996 in Saudi Arabia, he once said, "They have raised the nation's head high and washed away a great part of the shame that has enveloped us." Bin Laden fancies himself a modern-day Saladin, the Muslim commander who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders. "I envision Saladin coming out of the clouds," bin Laden says in a videotape released earlier this year to his supporters. "Our history is being rewritten."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101011001-175979-3,00.html

On the other hand, it is the triumphalist religious convictions of bin Laden that make him and his followers so dangerous. "This is not violence in the service of some practical program," says Steven Simon, a former member of the National Security Council who is writing a book on religiously inspired terrorism. "It is killing infidels in the service of Allah. To a secular person, it's crazy. How can that be an end in itself? The facts speak for themselves: there is one objective here, to kill an enormous number of people and humiliate the Satanic power. There is no claim of responsibility because there is only one audience, and that is God."

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/Search/document_briefings.asp?i=19981101facomment1428.xml

On February 23, 1998, Al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arabic newspaper published in London, printed the full text of a "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders." According to the paper, the statement was faxed to them under the signatures of Usama bin Ladin, the Saudi financier blamed by the United States for masterminding the August bombings of its embassies in East Africa, and the leaders of militant Islamist groups in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The statement -- a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose -- reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar. Bin Ladin's grievances are not quite what many would expect.

The declaration begins with an exordium quoting the more militant passages in the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, then continues:

"Since God laid down the Arabian peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with its seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these Crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, crowding its soil, eating its fruits, and destroying its verdure; and this at a time when the nations contend against the Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food."

The statement goes on to talk of the need to understand the situation and act to rectify it. The facts, it says, are known to everyone and fall under three main headings:

"First -- For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.

Though some in the past have disputed the true nature of this occupation, the people of Arabia in their entirety have now recognized it.

There is no better proof of this than the continuing American aggression against the Iraqi people, launched from Arabia despite its rulers, who all oppose the use of their territories for this purpose but are subjugated.

Second -- Despite the immense destruction inflicted on the Iraqi people at the hands of the Crusader-Jewish alliance and in spite of the appalling number of dead, exceeding a million, the Americans nevertheless, in spite of all this, are trying once more to repeat this dreadful slaughter. It seems that the long blockade following after a fierce war, the dismemberment and the destruction are not enough for them. So they come again today to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third -- While the purposes of the Americans in these wars are religious and economic, they also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it.

There is no better proof of all this than their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest of the neighboring Arab states, and their attempt to dismember all the states of the region, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Sudan, into petty states, whose division and weakness would ensure the survival of Israel and the continuation of the calamitous Crusader occupation of the lands of Arabia."

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/Search/document_briefings.asp?i=19981101facomment1428.xml&nb=10

These crimes, the statement declares, amount to "a clear declaration of war by the Americans against God, his Prophet, and the Muslims." In such a situation, the declaration says, the ulema -- authorities on theology and Islamic law, or sharia -- throughout the centuries unanimously ruled that when enemies attack the Muslim lands, jihad becomes every Muslim's personal duty.

In the technical language of the ulema, religious duties may be collective, to be discharged by the community as a whole, or personal, incumbent on every individual Muslim. In an offensive war, the religious duty of jihad is collective and may be discharged by volunteers and professionals. When the Muslim community is defending itself, however, jihad becomes an individual obligation.

After quoting various Muslim authorities, the signatories then proceed to the final and most important part of their declaration, the fatwa, or ruling. It holds that

"To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram Mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."

After citing some further relevant Quranic verses, the document continues:

"By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. Likewise we call on the Muslim ulema and leaders and youth and soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils and against those who are allied with them from among the helpers of Satan."

The declaration and fatwa conclude with a series of further quotations from Muslim scripture.

Bin Ladin's view of the Gulf War as American aggression against Iraq may seem a little odd, but it is widely -- though by no means universally -- accepted in the Islamic world. For holy warriors of any faith, the faithful are always right and the infidels always wrong, whoever the protagonists and whatever the circumstances of their encounter.

The three areas of grievance listed in the declaration -- Arabia, Iraq, and Jerusalem -- will be familiar to observers of the Middle Eastern scene. What may be less familiar is the sequence and emphasis. For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but those familiar with Islamic history and literature know, the holy land par excellence is Arabia -- Mecca, where the Prophet was born; Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; and the Hijaz, whose people were the first to rally to the new faith and become its standard-bearers. Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did the Rashidun caliphs, his immediate successors at the head of the Islamic community. Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium. For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compares in significance with Arabia and Iraq.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/Search/document_briefings.asp?i=19981101facomment1428.xml&nb=20

The great counter-Crusade that ultimately drove the Crusaders into the sea did not begin until almost a century later. Its immediate cause was the activities of a freebooting Crusader leader, Reynald of Chatillon, who held the fortress of Kerak, in southern Jordan, between 1176 and 1187 and used it to launch a series of raids against Muslim caravans and commerce in the adjoining regions, including the Hijaz. Historians of the Crusades are probably right in saying that Reynald's motive was primarily economic -- the desire for loot. But Muslims saw his campaigns as a provocation, a challenge directed against Islam's holy places. In 1182, violating an agreement between the Crusader king of Jerusalem and the Muslim leader Saladin, Reynald attacked and looted Muslim caravans, including one of pilgrims bound for Mecca. Even more heinous, from a Muslim point of view, was his threat to Arabia and a memorable buccaneering expedition in the Red Sea, featuring attacks on Muslim shipping and the Hijaz ports that served Mecca and Medina. Outraged, Saladin proclaimed a jihad against the Crusaders.

Even in Christian Europe, Saladin was justly celebrated and admired for his chivalrous and generous treatment of his defeated enemies. His magnanimity did not extend to Reynald of Chatillon. The great Arab historian Ibn al-Athir wrote, "Twice, [Saladin said,] I had made a vow to kill him if I had him in my hands; once when he tried to march on Mecca and Medina, and again when he treacherously captured the caravan." After Saladin's triumph, when many of the Crusader princes and chieftains were taken captive, he separated Reynald of Chatillon from the rest and beheaded him with his own hands.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/Search/document_briefings.asp?i=19981101facomment1428.xml&nb=30

To most Americans, the declaration is a travesty, a gross distortion of the nature and purpose of the American presence in Arabia. They should also know that for many -- perhaps most -- Muslims, the declaration is an equally grotesque travesty of the nature of Islam and even of its doctrine of jihad. The Quran speaks of peace as well as of war. The hundreds of thousands of traditions and sayings attributed with varying reliability to the Prophet, interpreted in various ways by the ulema, offer a wide range of guidance. The militant and violent interpretation is one among many. The standard juristic treatises on sharia normally contain a chapter on jihad, understood in the military sense as regular warfare against infidels and apostates. But these treatises prescribe correct behavior and respect for the rules of war in such matters as the opening and termination of hostilities and the treatment of noncombatants and prisoners, not to speak of diplomatic envoys. The jurists also discuss -- and sometimes differ on -- the actual conduct of war. Some permit, some restrict, and some disapprove of the use of mangonels, poisoned arrows, and the poisoning of enemy water supplies -- the missile and chemical warfare of the Middle Ages -- out of concern for the indiscriminate casualties that these weapons inflict. At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/home/terrorism.asp

Foreign Affairs is making available previously published articles that contribute to an understanding of the tragic attacks on New York and Washington. Several of the essays analyze the nature of contemporary terrorism and the capabilities of the United States to combat it. Other essays provide the Middle Eastern and radical Islamic contexts for so much recent terrorism, including, apparently, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

[There are links to a number of full-text Foreign Affairs articles on the remainder of the page.]

See also Toppling of Arab Regimes Called Wider Goal of Terror. Thanks to Joyce Searls for the pointer.