Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 11
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 11 ‘. . . the advance of Spanish Christians against the Moors of Spain, the advance of German settlers against the Slavs in eastern Europe, the conquest of Ireland by the Anglo-Norman barons of England, the conquest of Languedoc by the barons of northern France, and the conquest of Byzantium itself, and all its empire, by Frankish bar- ons. . . . . . . we realise that those two centuries were centuries of a gen- eral European expansion, and that the Crusades, whether we like them or not, were an inseparable part of that expansion. ’ (p. 29) The Crusades had for a long time been regarded by Western historians as a combined spiritual and material counter-attack of the enslaved West against its Muslim exploiters, and the struggle had been sensationalised as that between East and West, or between Christendom and Islam. Some have even labelled the Crusading movement as a Christian Jihad against the Muslims ! It has been recorded in history that the true and real motives of the Christian Crusaders had been to rescue their Holy places and to save Christianity from being swamped by the infidels. But what their ideals were and how they achieved them are two completely different things. I shall quote passages from the Western writers themselves who admit to the un-Christian-like behaviour of the European Christians during the Crusades. David Hume, an 18th Century historian, saw the Crusades as a ‘universal frenzy, an epidemic fury of fanatical and romantic war- riors, the most durable monument of human folly that has yet ap- peared in any age or nation. ’ (R of CE, p. 28). Leonard W. Levy, Professor of Humanities at the Claremont Colleges in USA, in his widely-acclaimed and controversial book, Treason Against God also talks of the age of the Crusades as incred- ibly savage : ‘The crusaders indiscriminately massacred Moslems and Jews in the Holy Land, not sparing women and children. ’ (pp. 115/116). What was to be a Holy War turned out in the end to be bar- barism on a grand scale. But the Christian writers of that age and