Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
The Holy Terror
By Eamon Duffy
God's War: A New History of the Crusades
by Christopher Tyerman
Harvard University Press, 1,024 pp., $35.00
In a speech delivered in 2001 on the first Sunday after September 11, George W. Bush pledged America to a war on terrorism, which he referred to as 'this crusade.' There was an immediate outcry across the Islamic world. Did the term 'crusade' hint at some grand confrontation between opposed civilizations, and, behind that, a hungry Western imperialism? According to a prominent European Muslim leader, the Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseilles, the President's 'most unfortunate' invocation of the Crusades recalled 'the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world,' perpetrated with savagery over centuries by medieval Christian knights intent on the 'recovery' of the Holy Land, and Jerusalem in particular.
Review, 4373 words
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