The Crusades, Christiantiy, and Islam

The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam
by Jonathan Riley-Smith
Columbia University Press, 2008

This surprisingly brief work, numbering just eighty pages in length by one the most well known authors of Crusader History, is likewise one of the clearest and most eloquent analysis of the past and present view of the crusade movement.  Taken from series of lectures that he presented at Columbia University in 2007, Dr. Riley-Smith attempts to contextualize each of his title's three subjects in a way that transcend the medieval events up to the present.

While this work covers some well known ground, addressing the connection of Christian violence justified by medieval minds in conjunction with St. Augustine's Contra Faustum Manichaeum, Riley-Smith reminds his readers of the world in which people lived, much more violent than modern day critics would like to imagine.  The focus is not on Christian Europe alone, for which an argument can be made that by far it was a Christianity not as recognizable today in modern Protestant and even Catholic circles, but that even the east and the worlds of Syria and Egypt were not so much more advanced in their ideas about war or a chivalrous outlook.

The major contribution of this work to thinking on conflicts between western and eastern people and ideas, lie in the special point Riley-Smith makes that crusading and the notion that justified violence for religious or ethical reason is dead, is simply not true.  Chapter three of the book entitled Crusading and Imperialism, address 19th century evidence that the concept of war for the right reasons, in other words a crusading endeavor focused on revitalized military orders, was not altogether dead.  Turning to the fourth chapter entitled Crusading and Islam, Riley-Smith illustrates a resurgence of perceived past crusader oppression as justification in the modern world for Islamic resistance, even acts of terrorism, based on a concept of a great civilization destroyed and humiliated by a western consortium of rival powers.

Riley-Smith is as I have said, eloquent and conveys his point easily, and this work is definitely a short and accessible read for anyone intrigued by a question demanding explanation; how doe the crusades impact today's modern world.  More than an attempt to illuminate, Dr. Riley-Smith ends with a note of warning that reminds the reader that war and atrocities of violence which seem so foreign in the modern and advanced society, are indeed not so far away as we think.  Ethical war has "manifested itself recently in wars waged in the names of imperialism, nationalism, Marxism, fascism, anticolonialism, humanitarianism, and even liberal democracy."  This work is a call for peace and rational thinking, only understood when a modern world can see the suffering caused otherwise.

- John Lowe (J. Sharp)