A Clash of Civilisations?
In Bethlehem this year, Christmas has been cancelled. More precisely, the city's Palestinian mayor has been forced to cancel the Christmas celebrations due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. But what has this to do with the Crusades?
The Crusades are often seen as part of an ongoing 'clash of civilisations'. It is often assumed that there is some inevitable and irreconcilable conflict between East (Islam, Asia) and West (Christianity, Europe), of which the crusades were one historic phase, and the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Palestine are the latest. Samuel P Huntingdon, a Harvard Professor, has even written a book on this theme, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the New World Order, arguing that the world is divided into 'civilisations' which are essentially incompatible with one another. In his view, wars such as that in Afghanistan represent the 'civilised' West taking on an Islam which is 'bloody... in its innards' and therefore creates bloody conflict along its borders.
However, the example I used at the start shows that the truth is more complex. Today, the Christians 'defending' the Holy Places for which the crusaders fought are Arabs; the occupier, a nominally Jewish state backed by the 'Christian' West. In a recent armed incursion into the supposedly independent Palestinian enclave of Bethlehem, the windows of the Church of the Nativity, one of the holiest sites in Christendom, were allegedly smashed by Israeli gunfire, paid for by the 'Christian' United States.
The present-day population of Israel/Palestine, like the population at the time of the crusades, is ethnically and religiously mixed. The Palestinian Arab population includes large Christian and even Jewish minorities. The 'Jewish' state of Israel itself contains a sizeable Arab minority, not to mention the huge range of different cultural backgrounds among the Jewish population. To add to the mix, there are Armenian Christians (who have their own quarter of Jerusalem's old city) and Druze (a mysterious Muslim sect, who often identify more with Israel than with the Palestinians). In this kaleidoscope of populations, simplistic divisions between Arab and Jew, and between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, make little sense. We can only speculate what kind of pluralist society might have emerged in Palestine had the region's history been more fortunate.
At a more fundamental level, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have a great deal in common. All three faiths see themselves as descendents of Abraham, whose two sons Isaac and Ishmael are said to be the ancestors of the Jewish and Arab peoples. Christianity is of course a breakaway faith from Judaism; the two religions share those scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament. Islam in turn shares with Judaism the old Hebrew prophets, and with Christianity its reverence of Jesus, who Muslims see as a great prophet, second only to Muhammad. When Islam first emerged in the seventh century, Greek Christian writers, trying to understand the new faith, often saw it as a heresy of Christianity, so close were its beliefs to their own.
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