"An accursed race,
"a race absolutely alien to God, has invaded the land of Christians."
These were the words,
recorded by eyewitnesses, that Pope Urban II used
to describe Muslims.
They launched one of the bloodiest wars in the history of Christianity.
The Crusades.
Their task was to end the rule of Islam over the holy places.
In the West, the Crusades are a chapter of Christian history
that has little impact on our lives today.
But what few people realise
is that today's Islamist suicide bombers
believe they are still fighting the Crusaders.
I believe that people in the West urgently need to understand
why the Crusades still matter to people in the Middle East.
Reporting from this region, I was repeatedly struck
by how people see the politics of today
through the prism of the Crusades.
What is it about this period in history 1,000 years ago
that so defines the divisions between East and West,
and between two of the world's greatest religions,
Islam and Christianity?
In September 2001,
the West's relationship with the Muslim world was changed forever.
In the wake of 9/11,
the US government launched what it called a new kind of war
against a new kind of threat.
But one seemingly casual reference from the American President
led many Muslims to believe that history was about to repeat itself.
This is a new kind of evil
and we understand, and the American people are beginning to understand,
that this crusade...
This war on terrorism
is gonna take a while.
But I can assure the American people,
it is time for us to win the first war of the 21st century decisively.
I was in the Middle East at the time
and remember the instantaneous disbelief
caused by his use of that one word, "crusade".
For many of my fellow Muslims, it sounded like George Bush
was relaunching Christianity's holy wars of over 900 years ago.
It was a gift to terror groups like al-Qaeda.
Bush, you thought you would be
remembered by history
as the president who waged a series
of successful Crusades against the Muslims.
Instead, you will go down in history,
not only as the president
who embroiled his nation
in a series of unwinnable and bloody conflicts in the Islamic world,
but as the president who set the United States off on its...
What President Bush didn't understand
is what the word crusade really means.
The concept first emerged in the late 11th century,
a time when Europe and the Middle East
were divided between two rival faiths,
Islam and Christianity.
Central to both religions was the holy city of Jerusalem,
the site of Jesus Christ's resurrection
and the prophet Muhammad's ascent into heaven.
Muslims had ruled the holy city for over 400 years,
when in 1095, Pope Urban II,
called for the conquest of Jerusalem in the name of Christ.
They destroy the altars, after having defiled them
with their uncleanness.
They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision
they either spread upon the altars
or pour into the vases
of the baptismal font.
Urban's speech resonated throughout Europe
and led to a new form of Christian holy war.
This church was built by the Knights Templar,
an order of holy warriors
founded during the Crusades.
As Jesus Christ taught his followers to turn the other cheek,
I've always wondered how the Church could condone violence in any form?
The answer lies with the fifth century theologian St Augustine
and his Christian theory of "just war".
He takes the idea of the individual having a right intent,
that you don't fight wars for fun,
for sadism, for greed.
They're defensive essentially.
And the purpose must be either defensive
or the restitution of rights.
In a perfect world there would be no war, in the actual world,
in a sinful world, there is war
and certain wars fought for certain reasons can be justified.
But this does not make the actual fighting itself holy or legitimate.
It remains sinful.
By the late 11th century,
the Church had developed a new form of holy war.
A war that could be free from sin.
Holy war is different from a just war.
Holy war is a religious act that is commanded by God
and the Crusades were initially holy wars.
The peace of a troubled world
and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you.
These tyrannical states do not care for the sanctity of human life.
The terrorists delight in destroying it.
The extraordinary thing for me is that when you read the whole idea
of "just war" in Christian thought,
it's absolutely the same things that I've read
when looking at the words of Western politicians
talking aboutpre-emptive war and even humanitarian intervention.
It's very similar, isn't it?
It's more than similar. It's actually identical, except without religion.
One of the legacies of the Crusades
is to put "just war" theory at the heart of international relations.
It's interesting that the rhetoric of Tony Blair for the Iraq war
was solely based on "just war" theory,
which is why lawyers crawled all over it and said it was rubbish.
Whereas George Bush, his rhetoric is much more akin to a holy war.
War on terror.
An absolutist duty.
In the West, the word crusade
is used to describe a noble and just cause.
But if Western politicians
were more aware of historical events in this French town,
I doubt they'd ever use the word again.
In November 1095, the Pope was on a preaching tour of Europe.
Hundreds of Christians gathered here to listen to what he had to say.
I'm in the midst
of the Christmas fair, right in the heart
of the town of Clermont Ferrand
in the middle of France.
People are enjoying themselves, and they're probably oblivious
to the fact that the man depicted in that statue
Pope Urban, made a radical speech,
which would launch a Holy War in the name of Christianity against Islam.
It is a war
whose effects we are still living with to this day.
At Clermont, the Pope commanded the knights of Europe
to capture what he believed were rightfully Christian cities,
and kill any Muslim that stood in their way.
"Holy men do not possess those cities.
"Nay, base and bastard Turks
"hold sway over our brothers."
Did Urban intend this as specifically
a war against Muslims for Christianity?
I think definitely so, yes. That was Urban's original intention.
That there was a Muslim threat
posed to the outskirts of Christendom
and he wanted people to go and counter that threat.
He talked about attacks on pilgrims
who were trying to reach the Holy Sepulchre.
For example, some of them would have their heels cut open
or others were used for target practice for arrows.
These were the things
that he was deliberately talking about in his speech
to kind of get people angry enough to go on Crusade.
"Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre.
"Rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves."
People don't really understand how damaging and violent it truly was.
It was a holy war.
The fanaticism that we would associate with fundamentalists today
could very well be applied to the Crusaders
on the First Crusade,
who responded to Urban's message in a very literal sense.
Following Urban's speech, tens of thousands of Christians
signed up to what became known as the First Crusade.
They set off to the Holy Land from every corner of Europe.
Knights and peasants side by side, many bringing their entire families.
One of the first crusaders came from the town of Le Puy,
in Southern France.
His named was Raymond of Aiguilles,
a priest who took services at the Church of St Michael.
He was typical of the Christian warrior class
Urban was appealing to.
What was France like back then? What kind of society was it?
France wasn't a country in any sense that we recognise.
It was a mosaic of petty lordships.
Lordships which fought with one another constantly.
Although it's a very violent society, it's a society which has
a very profound belief in Christianity.
For centuries, Western Christendom had been plagued by local wars
in which Christians killed other Christians.
In launching the First Crusade,
Urban convinced the knights of Europe
to stop fighting each other
and turn their attentions towards a common enemy.
Urban had a very powerful sense, I think,
of the Muslim threat to Europe, and it was a very real threat.
Therefore, his crusade can only be seen in terms of rolling back
the tide of Islam which he knew had swept across the Mediterranean
many centuries before.
The message which he gives
to the French aristocracy is salvation through slaughter.
They were aware of their sins.
They knew that when they faced their Maker,
they had many, many sins to make good for.
Urban offers them salvation, a path to salvation, through slaughter.
By doing what they did every day, as it were,
killing, maiming, murdering,
they could actually find eternal life.
For us in the 21st century,
this is one of the places where we get most close to the Crusades,
because the man who wrote the history of the Crusades
was actually the priest who served this altar.
In this very church?
In this very church.
Raymond of Aiguilles was one of many chroniclers
who left behind detailed eyewitness accounts of the Crusade.
They were chronicling God's work.
They were continuing, in a sense, the Bible.
The Bible story is a history
and they were telling another history of God's deeds on Earth.
Many of the chronicles bear witness
to the religious fervour of these Western Christians.
"Behold, we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine
"and take vengeance upon the Muslims."
Today, it's shocking to think that such language was once used
by committed Christians.
But the desire to drive infidels from the holy places
is still with us today.
We shall continue to strike back hard.
This year, next year,
the year after that, and so on,
until the last Crusader goes home,
whether waving a white flag or lying in a flag-covered casket.
For the Western world,
it is Islam today that is associated with religious fanaticism
and the whole idea of holy war.
But 900 years ago, it was completely the other way round.
It was the Christian Crusaders who were the holy warriors,
who were determined, by war or whatever it took,
to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims.
It would be what they did in Christianity's name
that would leave an indelible mark on the Islamic world forever.
We live in an era when Islamist terrorists
carry out indiscriminate acts of violence around the world.
Their main target is the West,
whose governments Osama Bin Laden refers to as "Crusaders".
I think Al Qaeda describes Westerners as Crusaders
because of events 900 years ago,
when a defining characteristic of western Christianity
was religious fanaticism.
In 1096, the crusaders
began arriving at the first battleground in their holy war.
They had travelled across Europe,
to take back Jerusalem and defend the Christian empire of Byzantium
against the Muslims of Asia Minor.
The Crusaders expected the people of Constantinople
to greet them with open arms.
But when they arrived at the walls of the city,
they struck terror into its Christian population.
In the summer of 1096 the first Crusaders
arrived at the walls of Constantinople,
and the emperor's daughter, Anna Komnene, was so amazed at the sight
that she described them as looking like tributaries
joining a river from all directions.
"They screamed towards us," she wrote, "in full force."
And it must have been a shocking sight
because this is not what the Emperor Alexios
and the rest of the inhabitants of Constantinople were expecting.
They were expecting a small, disciplined force of mercenaries.
Instead, what they got was this huge, teeming mass of holy warriors
from western Europe, many of whom had brought their entire families.
In the 11th century, Constantinople was the capital of a Christian empire
that had once stretched from Greece to Egypt.
The jewel in Byzantium's crown was the Hagia Sophia.
It was then the biggest church in the Christian world.
This is one of the great buildings of the world,
and for a medieval Crusader, there's no comparable building
in western Christendom.
Rather than seeing them as allies, the Byzantines thought the Crusaders
were a dangerous mob intent on plundering their empire.
They think a Holy War is just a cover story.
They think it's a cover story to take the riches of Constantinople.
And the fact you've got people in the crusading army
who've attacked Byzantine territory before makes it all seem a bit more suspicious to them.
What's more, Emperor Alexios
found the idea of Holy War profoundly un-Christian.
The idea of fighting for religion does not work for the Greeks.
The Holy War that takes place in their mindset
is monks fighting the Devil in the cloister.
To fight for a spiritual reward in the world just doesn't work.
This difference in attitude is an important one
because it shows how this new form of Christian Holy War
was invented by western Christians.
That's why today many Muslims
associate crusading not with Christianity, but with the West
and its so-called imperialist governments.
Many people think that all Christianity
was united behind the first Crusades, and to be honest that's what I thought.
But the truth is very different.
There was a lot of division and tension,
particularly on this issue of Holy War.
And whilst Alexios was willing to help the Crusaders
when it served his purposes, the truth is
when it came to the ultimate goal of the capture of Jerusalem,
the Crusaders were on their own.
From Constantinople, the Crusaders marched into Asia Minor
and won two early victories against the Muslim Turks,
at Nicaea and Dorylaeum.
Historical accounts of the battles made me think of "shock and awe".
The chronicles are filled with horrific atrocities committed by both sides.
One Islamic chronicler wrote,
"The crusaders cut the Turkish army to pieces.
"They killed, pillaged, and took many prisoners.
"When this event, so shameful for Islam, became known,
"there was real panic."
When the Crusaders reached what was then northern Syria,
they faced the first real test of their faith in Holy War.
In October, 1097, the Crusaders arrived at Antioch,
one of the holiest cities on their journey to Jerusalem.
TRANSLATION: When the Crusaders came here they set up camp in this area,
and, of course, they realized that it would be difficult to overcome
thehigh and magnificent fortifications.
When the siege of Antioch began,
some Crusaders had been on the march for almost two years
and were 1,500 miles from home.
TRANSLATION: They were suffering so much hardship
that they thought God was punishing them. So, in spite of the fact
that they were at the point of starvation,
they decided to fast.
Imagine, they decided to start fasting.
The Crusaders at this point began to hold prayers, they fasted,
they had religious processions,
all of it geared to reinvigorate their sense of mission
and the sanctity of their mission.
Nine months into the siege, in June 1098,
the Crusaders' prayers were finally answered.
A traitor from Antioch's population offered to help break the siege.
He was an Armenian Muslim named Firuz.
TRANSLATION: Here we are at St George's Gate.
It was here that Firuz suspended a rope ladder for the Crusaders.
The Crusaders used it to climb up onto the ramparts.
They first captured that bastion over there and then opened the gate below.
The people inside were shocked.
Firuz effectively single-handedly changed the course of history,
that were it not for the fact of his actions,
the Crusaders would effectively still be on the outskirts of the city, starving,
many of them still losing heart, and it basically would have failed,
and history would not have been the same.
What followed was the first major massacre of the Crusades.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Muslims were butchered here.
From now on, this kind of wholesale slaughter
would be the calling card of Crusaders in many of the cities they conquered.
It's very easy to think of the Crusaders only as holy warriors,
but they saw themselves as much more.
In fact, in their own eyes they were also pilgrims,
on their way to liberate Jerusalem in Jesus Christ's name.
And that's why, whilst they were slaughtering people here in Antioch
and leaving the dead bodies littering the city,
they still described themselves as being "in imitatio Christi" - in imitation of Christ.
Just like today's terrorists,
who murder innocents in the name of Allah,
the Crusaders believed that Jesus condoned their massacres.
In June 1099, 10,000 Muslims looked on in awe
as the Crusaders arrived at the walls of Jerusalem.
This city is still at the heart of the struggle for control of the holy land,
and 900 years ago it was the Crusaders' ultimate prize.
Some of the Crusader descriptions of the battle
show the kind of fanatical devotion one now associates with Al Qaeda.
"One could see marvellous works.
"Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded.
"Others, tortured for a long time,
"were burned to death in searing flames."
To understand the Crusades we must understand first of all
that this is a spiritual enterprise.
It was a brilliant move of the Pope
to offer those sinners who are knights, who are fighting people,
a penance which was their greatest passion,
which is to kill other people,
that is, killing, fighting as a kind of penance.
As a spiritual act, cleansing act.
Yes, yes, cleansing act, yes,
and cleansing Jerusalem of pollution by the Saracens,
as they called the Muslims.
After just one month, the Crusaders conquered the city
and began cleansing it of so-called "Muslim pollution".
It was one of the bloodiest massacres of the Middle Ages.
What kind of things did the Crusaders do?
Well, here is an eye-witness, Raymond of Aguilers.
"Some Saracens" - Muslims - "whose fate was easier,
"merely had their heads cut off.
"The Christians gave over their whole hearts to murder
"so that not one suckling, little male child or female,
"not even an infant of one year,
"would escape alive the hand of the murderer."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Muslim historians
have grossly exaggerated the extent of the massacre.
But what is extraordinary
is that the Crusader chroniclers did the same.
Early Christian chroniclers
speaks of 10,000 Saracens, Muslims, killed.
But very recently a new Muslim source came to light,
and he says that 3,000 were killed in Al-Aqsa.
But let's remember that on 9/11,
in New York, in a population of millions,
there were less than 3,000 dead,
and still we remember this with horror.
If you take this figure of 3,000,
this was not done by machine guns and grenades,
this was done by people with swords and axes.
I mean, it was butchering people, literally, like animals.
Exactly. They do it out of conviction
that this slaughter is divinely ordained,
that it pleases God, and this is why,
at the very end of the massacre and the pillage,
all of them turned to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
and as our sources say, "When the killing and the plunder were over,
"all came rejoicing and weeping from excess of gladness
"to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour, Jesus."
I wonder, what would Jesus, who preached peace and love to all,
have made of the fact that Jerusalem
was once stained with the blood of Muslims, murdered in His name?
SINGING
During the Middle Ages,
it was commonplace for both Christians and Muslims
to commit violence in God's name.
But what was unique about the Christian Crusaders
is that they saw their Holy War as an act of Christian devotion,
every bit as important as prayer.
For the Crusaders, this, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
was the prize, and as soon as they walked in they prayed,
even though they were absolutely drenched in blood
from the slaughter in Jerusalem.
for them there was no contradiction between slaughter and holiness,
because the act of killing infidels in itself was an act of purification
that would allow them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Crusaders had endured countless hardships
as they fought their way to Jerusalem.
Nearly three quarters of those who set out had perished along the way.
And it's shocking to think
that it was all for the sake of this tiny tomb,
the traditional site of Christ's resurrection.
For people in the West, the Crusader occupation of the Holy Land
is an event that took place 900 years ago.
But for many Muslims, it's something that's still happening today.
TRANSLATION: The Crusader wars are returning to this very same land,
if not from Europe, now from America.
In the West, the Crusades are events in the distant past
which have little bearing on our everyday lives.
But in the Middle East, it's very different.
Take the town of Ma'arrat al-Numan.
For many locals, the Crusader massacre that
took place here over 900 years ago may as well have happened yesterday.
(TRANSLATION) Long ago our grandparents
told the story to our parents.
Our parents told the story to us and now we are telling you.
There was a group who came from the West, from Rome.
They formed an army of thousands.
They opened the citadel gates.
They entered and massacred everyone.
This is amazing because this is, essentially,
a diwan or a guesthouse,
a sortof cafe where people come in to hear poems and stories
retelling what happened in this town
and in Syria at the time of the Crusades.
And I think it's just a measure of how much
that part of history still lives and matters to people.
The people I met in Ma'arra now see all Western involvement
in the Middle East through the prismof what happened here.
(TRANSLATION) They wore the cross under the pretext
that they are Christians supporting their fellow Christians here.
But in reality, they wanted the country's wealth.
(TRANSLATION) History is now repeating itself in Iraq.
America went there in the name of progress, freedom
and to remove an oppressive regime.
Now they're actually killing its sons and taking its wealth.
I met up with Ahmad Ghareeb, the director of the local museum.
He took me to Ma'arra's citadel,
the historical site of the Crusader massacre.
(TRANSLATION) The Crusaders opened people's stomachs,
to see if they'd swallowed any precious jewels.
They also killed children.
Oh, my goodness. Let me just translate that cos that's amazing.
He told in quite, you know, graphic detail
what actually happened in the siege.
They started, with the children, to put them on a spike,
and actually cooked the children and ate them.
So they were cannibals, I mean, they ate people.
Every war is filled with accounts based on myth and propaganda,
in our age and in past centuries,
and I suspect that most people will find it hard to believe
that the Crusaders committed acts of cannibalism.
But these acts were actually recorded by the Crusaders themselves.
"In Ma'arra, our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots,
they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled."
The Crusaders were not the first to carry out acts of cannibalism
in the history of warfare, nor would they be the last.
Although these atrocities were probably a result of acute starvation,
people here see themas acts of Christian fanaticism.
Today, Crusader castles remain
an important feature of the Middle East landscape,
enduring reminders of this bloody period of conflict
between East and West.
The most spectacular is Krak des Chevaliers in northern Syria.
(TRANSLATION) A vast space like this was fairly standard
for a castle containing so many knights.
However, Krak des Chevaliers
is still by far the biggest Crusader castle in Syria.
After the capture of Jerusalem, the Crusaders divided the Holy Land
into so-called Crusader states,
each withits own Western nobleman as ruler.
They might have come to "cleanse" the holy land of "Muslim pollution",
but the Crusaders soon adopted a more pragmatic approach.
Those first Crusaders who settled here,
how did they react with the local population, with the Muslims?
(TRANSLATION) They were looked upon with enmity in the beginning.
Then later on they established friendly relations.
The Muslim knight Osama bin Munqiz wrote of his many friendships with
foreign knights, of visiting their homes and eating their food.
Many in the Middle East have now forgotten
that Muslims and Crusaders signed peace accords
and were happyto trade with one another throughout the period,
but everyone remembers how the native Muslim population
eventually turned against the Crusader settlers.
(TRANSLATION) They could not forget that this land was a Muslim land.
Men of religion wrote books on holy war and about
the religious significance of cities like Damascus and Jerusalem.
All of this led to the creation of a general atmosphere
that was saturated and charged with the spirit of holy war.
This spirit of resistance is what resonates most among many Muslims
when they look at the current state of the Middle East.
(TRANSLATION) Nowadays, the Crusades mean nothing to Westerners,
they're just events which took place in the past.
But for Muslims, it's very different.
The past is returning, but from a different direction.
Now the Crusader wars are coming back to this very same land,
if not from Europe, now from America.
Arabs and Muslims today feel they must do the same with
the new Crusaders as their ancestors did to repel the earlier Crusaders.
This belief among many Muslims that today's Western governments and
the Crusaders are one and the same is what Al Qaeda tries to exploit.
Islam's fightback against the Crusaders
began here in northern Syria.
By the middle of the 12th century, Aleppo's magnificent citadel
was the power base of the largest Muslim lordship in the Middle East.
It was ruled over by
Islam's first true holy warrior for centuries, Nur al-Din.
(TRANSLATION) The leaders here had been more interested
in fighting each other for power
than in fighting the invaders who were coming from Europe.
Nur al-Din was different from the others.
He was abstemious in life.
He lived simply and sensed the importance of holy war
to liberate the region.
The success that Nur al-Din had was in re-invigorating
this concept of jihad, of struggle,
which is what the word jihad actually means,
and the reason is that he convinced Muslims
to come around a unified campaign to drive the Crusaders out,
saying that the Crusaders were fighting a holy war against us
to capture and hold Jerusalem,
and the way that we are going to drive these Crusaders out
is by also launching our own holy warin defence of Islam and Muslims.
One of those inspired by Nural-Din's leadership
was a young Kurd named Salah al-Din Ayubi.
In the West, he is better known as Saladin.
(TRANSLATION) Saladin was Nur al-Din's minister in Egypt,
but later becamethe most powerful personality in the Middle East
and heestablished a state in his own name.
He then went on to launch the great war to reclaim Jerusalem.
But it was events in the 20th century
that transformed Saladin into a cult figure,
and his war against the Crusaders
is now seen as Islam's greatest victory against the West.
He was the last success in Islam of liberating a piece of land by force.
In recent decades, attitudes among many Muslims towards the Crusades
have centered around Saladin, the holy warrior
who brought Christian rule over Jerusalem to an end.
Popular perceptions of Saladin have been influenced
not so much by history as by modern conflicts in the Middle East.
I think Salahuddin was a symbol for liberation from occupation,
regardless of whether people know all the facts
about Salahadin or not, I am sure not.
Most of his stories are a myth.
But a myth that has basis in history,
a myth that can be used again and again.
He was the last success in Islam of liberating a piece of land by force.
Decades of conflict in the Middle East have transformed Saladin
from a holy warrior who fought crusaders
into a timeless symbol of resistance
against Western intervention.
Nearly every 20th century Arab leader
has compared himself to Saladin, creating the myth
that they are engaged in a 900-year war with the West.
And today, Al-Qaeda do the same.
This rebranding of Saladin's story has inspired countless folk tales,
books and films.
Ghassan Massoud is one of Syria's most famous actors.
He even appeared in the Hollywood blockbuster Kingdom Of Heaven,
playing the part of Saladin.
TRANSLATION: Saladin set out to recapture Jerusalem
because it is an Eastern city
and should be for Eastern people,
not for people from Paris, London or Germany.
They were Westerners who had taken the city by force.
Ghassan's views struck me as typical of the mythology surrounding Saladin
that's part of everyday life in the Middle East.
TRANSLATION: A lot of the population in Syria and the Middle East
is Christian and they have been in this land
for much longer than Muslims,
so it isn't right to use the word "Crusaders" to describe them
because the cross is as important a symbol as the Qur'an.
This idea must have been very clear in Saladin's mind
when he waged his battles against the Western armies.
In 1187, at the battle of Hattin, Saladin's army
effectively brought Crusader control ofthe Holy Land to an end.
Over the next 100 years, one by one, the Crusader states
were overrun and destroyed.
This victory was followed by seven centuries of Muslim rule
in the Holy Land.
In the Middle East, Islam's dominance meant the Crusades
faded from public consciousness.
After the end of the 13th century,
the destruction of the Latin kingdom, Jerusalem,
you go back to the normal situation in the Mediterranean,
where Islam is the aggressor, Islam is the dominant force
right through to the 18th century.
And in those circumstances, Islamic culture
and society simply forgets about the Crusade.
For centuries, East and West,
Christians and Muslims, assigned the Crusades to the annals of history.
But that all changed when a new set of Western nations
began to dominate the Middle East once again.
In the 19th century, you have British rulers in India
seeing themselves as Crusaders, you have French rulers in Syria
and North Africa seeing themselves as the heirs of the Crusade.
Now this is an entirely false, romantic idea.
Colonialism is not crusading, it's radically different.
But I believe that that poisoned Islamic-Christian relationships.
And particularly Islamic-Western relationships.
And Islamic-Western relationships, yes, very badly indeed.
It was European colonialism that reawakened ancient memories
for many Muslims, casting these new Western invaders as Crusaders.
In 1917, the European colonial powers
were fighting the most horrific war the world had ever seen.
Germany had allied itself with the Muslim Ottoman empire
which ruled over the Holy Land.
By November, the Ottomans were on the verge of defeat
and the Western army was once more at the gates of Jerusalem.
One word was on everybody's lips...
Crusade.
Nearly 100 years ago, at the end of the First World War, General Allenby
took Jerusalem and he entered the city through this gate,
the Jaffa Gate.
He was well aware of just how sensitive
the whole issue of the Crusades was in the Middle East,
and wanted to persuade the British
not to describe the capture of Jerusalem
as some kind of new Crusade. But he failed.
Once again, these references to the Crusades
simply reinforced the suspisions in the minds of many Muslims.
Well, from a Palestinian point of view, it is irrelevant
whether he tried or not to convince the press in Britain to consider
this occupation of Jerusalem as not a Crusade or an end of the Crusades.
To the local population, it was an occupation of foreign Western power.
The British mandate in Palestine only exacerbated Muslim fears
about the re-emergence of an ancient struggle between East and West.
Since the 19th century, thousands of European Jews
had been emigrating to what they considered their biblical homeland.
As the British supported a Jewish state in Palestine,
many Muslims took the view that Western Jews and Western Christians
were united in a new Crusade.
The Jewish settlement of Palestine
since the late 19th century and nowadays
is very similar to the Crusader way of controlling their country,
where you have demographic cleansing from one side,
establishing independent settlements of one race or of one group.
Therefore, regardless to their aims, regardless of the backgrounds,
the different backgrounds between the Crusaders and the Jews,
the end product is very, very similar.
No matter how controversial such views may sound,
they are widely held in the Middle East.
The ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict just adds to the Crusader myth
which is exploited by terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.
I may not believe that the West is waging a new Crusade,
but millions of Muslims do.
Both East and West share responsibility for
making the Crusades the divisive and destructive issue they are today.
The West needs to come to terms with the fact
that the Crusades were not heroic episodes in Christianity's past.
They were horrific holy wars
which no Western leader should ever be seen to identify with.
Using the word "Crusades" by a Western ruler
with interest in the near East is worse than crass.
It's almost criminal.
And in the Muslim world, people have to realise that
today's conflicts are not part of a 900-year war between East and West.
Colonialism is not Crusading, it's radically different.
But the two became identified, quite falsely,
in the minds of many Muslim thinkers.
Only a thorough re-evaluation of what the Crusades really meant
can end the poisonous effect they now have on the modern world.
I want the West to be aware of my version, not to accept it,
but to be aware to the sensitivity
of history to my culture and to my understanding.
This is the maximum that I ask them, but, the same, I ask my people
to be aware of the Western version of history.
This is what can we say about tolerance.
Both sides need to understand the Crusades for what they were,
and stop blaming the past for the wrongs of today.
In the Muslim world we have too much history.
We see everything that involves the West
and the West's involvement in the Muslim world as a Crusade,
whether it's to do with democracy today, or oil,
or in liberating the Holy Land for Christ a thousand years ago.
It's why Osama Bin Laden and the other leaders of Al-Qaeda
keep referring to their fights being with the Crusaders today,
because, for them, the West's involvement in the Muslim world
is a re-enactment of the Crusades,
and don't underestimate the power of that appeal.
But yet, in Europe, I'm struck by the opposite, by the absence of history
and the knowledge of this chapter of Christian history,
that there was a moment in the history of Europe,
and Christian Europe, in which violence
was an essential part of the Christian faith.
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