The centrality of bin Laden

On News Hounds, I had said, "just as Hitler was Nazi Germany, so too is bin Laden al-Qaeda. So long as he is free, it is free; capture him, and it will be broken." Another poster expressed doubt that this was the case, and I composed a detailed response for him. Since I've been meaning to put together a post on this topic for quite some time, I am posting it here as well.

Osama bin Laden is the lynchpin that holds al-Qaeda together. Even before 9/11, al-Qaeda was very strongly focused on him; his lieutenants swore an oath of fealty to him personally, which is unheard of in other such organizations. After 9/11 seared his name into history, he became almost mythical. His immense prestige is what prompted other such organizations to join forces with him.

It is important to remember that al-Qaeda is organized in a very unusual way. It does have a very firm, hierarchical structure, but the nature of that structure is very different from that of, say, a military. In militaries, location in the hierarchy is based solely on authority; in al-Qaeda, it is based primarily — though not exclusively — on deference. In other words, the various components of al-Qaeda work together not because they have to, but because they want to. Now, this does not mean that you can just change your mind and go your own way — just ask Zarqawi — but such insubordination is usually not an issue. Furthermore, individual components are autonomous, and are thus not often called upon to show deference.

In the al-Qaeda of today, there is no question that the regional commanders defer to bin Laden. To suggest otherwise is just silly. Whether or not they would show the same deference to bin Laden's successor, though, especially if we had already gotten Zawahiri, is another matter entirely. It is entirely possible that al-Qaeda would break up into its component organizations, and even if it didn't, the inability of its new leader to gain such unquestioning authority would mean that the whole system would eventually break down. Even if it remained intact, though, it would lose most of its momentum.

Radical web of Islam's Terror

A new generation of Islamist terrorists is connecting through the Internet, not al-Qaeda. Their lack of central organization makes them even more terrifying than their forebears

The world's most dangerous jihadists no longer answer to al-Qaeda. The terrorists we should fear most are self-recruited wannabes who find purpose in terror and comrades on the Web. This new generation is even more frightening and unpredictable than its predecessors, but its evolution just may reveal the key to its demise.

[snip]

WHY THEY FIGHT

Any strategy to fight these terrorists must be based on an understanding of why they believe what they believe. In other words, what transforms ordinary people into fanatics who use violence for political ends? What leads them to consider themselves special, part of a small vanguard trying to build their version of an Islamist utopia?

The explanation for their behaviour is found not in how they think, but rather in how they feel. One of the most common refrains among Islamist radicals is their sense of moral outrage. In the 1980s, the most significant source of these feelings was the killing of Muslims in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, it was the fighting in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. Then came the second Palestinian intifada beginning in 2000. And since 2003, it has been all about the war in Iraq, which has become the focal point of global moral outrage for Muslims all over the world. Along with the humiliations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Iraq is monopolizing today's conversations about Islam and the West. On a more local level, governments that appear overly pro-American cause radicals to feel they are the victims of a larger anti-Muslim conspiracy, bridging the perceived local and global attacks against them.

In order for this moral outrage to translate into extremism, the frustrations must be interpreted in a particular way: The violations are deemed part of a unified Western strategy, namely a "war against Islam." That deliberately vague worldview, however, is just a sound bite. The new terrorists are not Islamic scholars -- jihadists volunteering for Iraq are interested not in theological debates but in living out their heroic fantasies.

How various individuals interpret this vision of a "war against Islam" differs from country to country, and it is a major reason why homegrown terrorism within the United States is far less likely than it is in Europe. To a degree, the belief that the United States is a melting pot protects the country from homegrown attacks. Whether or not America is a land of opportunity, the important point is that people believe it to be. A recent poll found that 71% of Muslim Americans believe in the "American Dream" -- that's more than the American public as a whole (64%). This is not the case in Europe, where national myths are based on degrees of Britishness, Frenchness or Germanness, and non-European Muslim immigrants do not truly feel they belong.

Feeling marginalized is, of course, no simple springboard to violence. What transforms a very small number to become terrorists is mobilization by networks. Until a few years ago, these networks were face-to-face groups. They included local gangs of young immigrants, members of student associations and study groups at radical mosques. The group acted as an echo chamber, amplifying grievances, intensifying bonds to each other and breeding values that rejected those of host societies. These natural group dynamics resulted in a spiral of mutual encouragement and escalation, transforming a few young Muslims into dedicated terrorists willing to follow the model of their heroes and sacrifice themselves for comrades and cause. Their turn to violence was a collective decision, rather than an individual one.

During the past two or three years, however, face-to-face radicalization has been replaced by online radicalization. The same support and validation that young people used to derive from their offline peer groups are now found in online forums, which promote the image of the terrorist hero, link users to the online social movement, give them guidance and instruct them in tactics. These forums have become the "invisible hand" that organizes terrorist activities worldwide. The true leader of this violent social movement is the collective discourse on half a dozen influential forums.

At present, al-Qaeda Central cannot impose discipline on these third-wave wannabes, mostly because it does not know who they are. Without this command and control, each disconnected network acts according to its own understanding and capability, but their collective actions do not amount to any unified long-term goal or strategy. These separate groups cannot coalesce into a physical movement, leaving them condemned to remain leaderless, online aspirations. Such traits make them particularly volatile and difficult to detect, but they also offer a tantalizing strategy for those who wish to defeat these dangerous individuals: The very seeds of the movement's demise are found within the movement itself.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

There has been talk of an al-Qaeda resurgence, but the truth is that most of the hard core members of the first and second waves have been killed or captured. The survival of the social movement they inspired relies on the continued inflow of new members. But this movement is vulnerable to whatever may diminish its appeal among young people. Its allure thrives only at the abstract fantasy level. The few times its aspirations have been translated into reality -- the Taliban in Afghanistan, parts of Algeria during its civil war and, more recently, in Iraq's Anbar province -- were particularly repulsive to most Muslims.

What's more, a leaderless social movement is permanently at the mercy of its participants. As each generation attempts to define itself in contrast to its predecessor, what appeals to the present generation of young would-be radicals may not appeal to the next. At present, the major source of appeal is the anger and moral outrage provoked by the invasion of Iraq. But as the Western footprint there fades so will the appeal of fighting it.

The U.S. strategy to counter this terrorist threat continues to be frozen by the horrors of 9/11. It relies more on wishful thinking than on a deep understanding of the enemy. The pursuit of "high-value targets" who were directly involved in the 9/11 operation was an appropriate first step to bring the perpetrators to justice. And the United States has been largely successful in degrading the capability of al-Qaeda Central. But this strategy is not only useless against the leaderless jihad, it is precisely what will help the movement flourish. The main threat to radical Islamist terrorism is the fact that its appeal is self-limiting. The key is to accelerate this process of internal decay.

Terrorist acts must be stripped of glory and reduced to common criminality. Most aspiring terrorists want nothing more than to be elevated to the status of an FBI Most Wanted poster. "[I am] one of the most wanted terrorists on the Internet," Younis Tsouli boasted online a few months before his arrest in 2005. "I have the Feds and the CIA, both would love to catch me. I have MI6 on my back." His ego fed off the respect such bragging brought him in the eyes of other chat room participants. Any policy or recognition that puts such people on a pedestal only makes them heroes in each other's eyes -- and encourages more people to follow the same path.

It is equally crucial not to place terrorists who are arrested or killed in the limelight. The temptation to hold press conferences to publicize another "major victory" in the war on terror must be resisted, for it only transforms terrorist criminals into jihadist heroes. The United States underestimates the value of prosecutions, which often can be enormously demoralizing to radical groups. There is no glory in being taken to prison in handcuffs. No jihadi Web site publishes such pictures. Arrested terrorists fade into oblivion. Only martyrs live on in popular memory.

This is very much a battle for young Muslims' hearts and minds. It is necessary to reframe the entire debate, from imagined glory to very real horror. Young people must learn that terrorism is about death and destruction, not fame. The voices of the victims must be heard over the bragging and posturing that go on in the online jihadist forums. Only then will the leaderless jihad expire, poisoned by its own toxic message.

Via the National Post. H/T Muslims Against Sharia.


Comment:

While I'm not by any means convinced of their explanation of the source of Apostasy, they do still make a number of good points.

Hirabah versus Jihad

Rescuing Jihad from The al Qaeda Blasphemy

By Jim Guirard

Over two months ago, with little or no comment or praise—either then or later—from the Bush Administration, the West Europeans, the media, the foreign policy experts or the Muslim-American community, the traditionally soft-on-terrorism Saudi Arabian government did a rather remarkable thing.

Its harsh condemnation of the May 12, 2002 suicide bombings in Riyadh contained unprecedented Islamic religious frames of reference—charging al Qaeda terrorists with not only a secular and ideological crime but with a heinous and mortal sin against Allah, as well.

According to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz: “This is because the Saudi people, will not permit a deviant few to shed the blood of the innocent which God almighty, in his infinite wisdom and justice has sanctified.”

The Saudi chief-of-state went on to proclaim: “As revealed in the Holy Qur’an, ‘He who kills a resident living in peace among you will never breathe the air of Heaven.’ “ And he concluded: “These messages, which do not require any interpretation, provide clear evidence that the fate of these murderers is damnation on earth and the fury of Hell in the thereafter.”

By repeatedly injecting the element of Hellfire into the picture, the Saudis were at least for the moment rejecting the pseudo-religious, Wahhabi-supported language of so-called “Jihadi martyrdom.” Mindlessly parroted by all too many Westerners and Muslims alike, this is the patently false mantra which paints a highly seductive picture of so-called Jihad (Holy War) by so-called mujahiddin (holy warriors) and shuhada or shahiddin (martyrs), supposedly on their way to Paradise.

On its face, the Saudi assault on this al Qaeda scam implies that if Osama bin Laden and his suicidal killers are not waging a truly holy “Jihad,” they must be waging unholy war, instead. Indeed, according to the Crown Prince, it is warfare so unholy and so evil as to be leading its fomenters into eternal Hellfire—the Islamic term for which is Jahannam.

In this situation, three major questions need answering:

• First, will we Americans support and join in this new Saudi line of attack aV which relies not only on Western secular words but also on the language of the Qurfan to condemn al Qaeda suicide mass murderers as the Jahannam-bound evildoers and blasphemers they really are?

• Second, will Saudi Arabiafs intolerant and reactionary Wahhabi sect of Islam, which has been all too supportive of al Qaeda-style terrorism, quietly acquiesce in this new interpretation—or will it be attempting to undermine those who have spoken such religiously-powerful words? (Already, an indication of the latter seems evident in the Ministry of Information’s May 27 firing of the outspokenly anti-al Qaeda editor in chief of the provincial Al Watan daily newspaper.)

• Third, if we Americans fail to support this appropriate new Qur'anic condemnation of al Qaeda at a time when the Wahhabis are surely quite busy protesting and undercutting it, will the Saudi government be bold enough to repeat and to strengthen this message?

If Not “Jihad,” What Is It?

Only time will answer these inter-connected questions. But in order for any of us to begin changing the proper terminology for al Qaeda-style terrorism from holy to unholy and from godly to satanic, we urgently need to call it what it is—rather than carelessly calling it what it is not.

Although not in the typical Muslim's active vocabulary, this is the ancient word Hirabah—pronounced hee-RAH-bah. Not found in the Qur’an because it came later, its meaning in the Islamic Jurisprudence, the Fiqh, is that of “unholy war” and forbidden “war against society.”

Used in centuries past to condemn barbarians and brigands who would pillage, terrorize and decimate entire tribes and communities, renowned University of Michigan scholar Abdul Hakim (a.k.a. Sherman Jackson) reports that it became for a time “the most severely punished crime in Islam.”

In modern-day parlance, such wanton killing might best be called genocidal terrorism or crime against humanity. Its perpetrators are the “evildoers” (mufsidoon) of whom President George Bush speaks and the “deviants” (munharefoon) of whom Crown Prince Abdullah speaks.

In Islamic religious context, both of these words mean essentially the same thing. In effect, they are evildoers because of their willful deviancy from authentic Islam, and their deviancy consists of their ruthless and unIslamic evildoing. The words are two sides of the same coin.

Among other transgressions against the “peaceful and compassionate and just” Allah of the Qur'an, here are several of the most sinful—earning for their perpetrators what Crown Prince Abdullah calls “the wrath and curse of Allah” --

•Wanton killing of innocents and noncombatants, including many Muslims;
• Committing and encouraging others to commit suicide for the purpose of intimidation;
• Fomenting hatred and envy among communities, nations, religions and civilizations;
• Waging genocidal warfare against nations where Islam is freely practiced;
• Falsely defining all Christians and Jews (and many Muslims) as “infidels”—when authentic Islam calls them all “Children of the Book” (the Old Testament);
• Issuing unauthorized and un-Islamic fatwas (religious edicts), especially bin Laden’s illegitimate 1998 call to aggressive military “Jihad;”
• Misquoting and distorting passages of the Qur’an and the Islamic Jurisprudence, the Fiqh.

Confirming the blasphemous nature of such offenses and the Hellfire awaiting those who commit them, Executive Director Dr. Sayyid M.Syeed of the Islamic Institute of North America (ISNA) has explained in authoritative terms: “The Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet emphatically distinguish the term Jihad from Hirabah, a destructive act of rebellion committed against God and mankind. Hirabah is an act of terrorism, a subversive act inflicted by an individual or a gang of individuals, breaking the established norms of peace, civic laws, treaties, agreements, moral and ethical codes.... Individuals and groups indulging in Hirabah are condemned as criminals, subjected to severe deterrent punishments under Islamic law and warned of far more punishment and humiliation in the life after life.”

Professor Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, confirms in equally expert fashion: “Properly understood, this is a war of ideas within Islam—some of them faithful to authentic Islam, but some of them clearly un-Islamic and even blasphemous toward the peaceful and compassionate Allah of the Qur’an.... As a matter of truth-in-Islam, both the ideas and the actions they produce must be called what they actually are, beginning with the fact that al Qaeda’s brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions and cultures do not constitute godly or holy “Jihad”—but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of Hirabah.”

Eventual End of al Qaeda

Imagine, then, how difficult it will be for al Qaeda’s mufsidoon (evildoers) to inspire the suicidal zealotry of young Muslims—or to sustain the sympathies of their families, friends and faithful Muslims of any sort—once their forbidden Hirabah (Unholy War) and their tajdeef shaitaniyah (satanic blasphemy) against Allah and the Qur’an are widely recognized as such.

And imagine their own well-deserved terror—repeat, T-E-R-R-O-R—once they envision themselves spending eternity not in a virgin-filled Paradise but in a demon-filled Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire), instead.

At long last—but with virtually no acknowledgement or words of encouragement from us—the Saudi government, long viewed by many as part of the problem rather than part of the solution, has begun to paint this new true-to-Islam picture. Surely, it is high time that we, too, begin changing our language with reference to the al Qaeda scam of so-called “Jihadi martyrdom.”

For us to continue calling the al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other suicide mass murderers “Jihadists” (in effect, “holy warriors” and “martyrs” on their way to Paradise) makes no more sense than our pathetic decades-long mistake of calling the fascist-left Soviets, Maoists and Castroites “people’s democrats” and “liberationists” and “progressives.”

Lenin and Stalin called this American and West European practice of linguistic self-destruction “useful idiocy.” The late, great Senator Pat Moynihan complained of it as “semantic infiltration”—our tendency to use the language of our enemies in describing political reality. They were all correct.

Of equal importance to U.S. military might, the fundamental elements of truth-in-language and truth-in-Islam are best able to solve the long-term crisis—by gradually turning all faithful Muslims against the pseudo-Islamic blasphemy of bin Ladenism. Who, after all, are better able than properly motivated Muslims themselves to root out these deadly enemies of Islam from their midst?

In this context, their holy motivation in the Will of Allah would not be that of “saving America or the West” or “bringing criminals to justice” or even “promoting world peace” but of saving their own beloved religion from being perverted into nothing but a hate-filled perpetual killing machine.

Now that the Saudis have belatedly begun the process of demonizing The al Qaeda Blasphemy in Islamic religious terms, we can ill afford to stand by in ignorance and in silence—or to continue relying only on Western secular terms which mean little or nothing to “the Arab Street.”

Via The American Muslim

Time to forget the Crusades

The following is an editorial written by John Tolan for Al Jazeera:

French historian Joseph Francois Michaud (1767-1839), in his Histoire des Croisades, affirmed that the Crusades had proven the superiority of Europeans over Muslims and showed the way to the conquest and civilisation of Asia.

Shortly thereafter, Louis Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, commissioned a Salle des Croisades at Versailles, replete with monumental romanticised paintings of scenes from the Crusades. It is perhaps no accident that at the same time the French were embarked upon the conquest of Algeria.

For numerous French and British of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the Crusades were a precursor to their brave new colonial adventures in the Orient.

In reaction, Turkish and Arab writers denounced the European colonial enterprise as a re-enactment of the fanaticism and violence of the Crusades.

The Crusades have long stirred emotions of admiration or revulsion, from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1580) to Youssef Chahine's film Saladin the Victorious (1963) and beyond.

Arguing the clash

The legacy of crusading, simplified and distorted, is evoked to argue the inevitability of a present and future "clash of civilisations".

When Osama bin Laden speaks of countering the attacks of American and European "crusaders", he taps into a 19th-century European tradition of seeing the medieval crusades as precursors to the colonial (and subsequently post-colonial) relations between Europeans and Arabs.

But, the Crusades played little part in Arab conceptions of history from the 14th to the 19th centuries.

Until that time, the Crusades were a relatively minor phenomenon in the broad sweep of Muslim history. Of course, chroniclers such as Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al Qalanisi or al-Maqrizi, close to rulers who fought against the Faranj (rulers like Saladin, al-Kamil, Baibars), made much of the threat posed by the Europeans and the heroic exploits of the sultans who defeated them.

Ibn al-Athir explained that the attack on the Muslim Mashreq (Middle East) was part of a movement of Faranj that included the Castilian capture of Toledo (in 1085) and the Norman conquest of Sicily (1072-91).

Yet for other Arab writers of the Middle Ages, the invasions of the Faranj were a minor inconvenience: they were simply another group of Christians who, like the Byzantines or Armenians, could seize small territories and pose threats to local Muslim rulers.

The Mongol threat

Far more troubling were the invasions of the Mongols, who captured and plundered large swaths of the Muslim heartland, sacking Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus several times.

The Mamluks' victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut in 1260 was far more vital than their victories over the string of small and powerless crusader enclaves such as that of Acre, which the Mamluks captured in 1291, ending the Crusader presence in the region.

Ibn Khaldun, in his great works of historiography, the Muqaddima and the Kitab al-'Ibar, has little to say of Crusades and Crusaders, much more about Mongols (including Timur, whom he met) and about the Berber dynasties of the Maghreb.

Few Arab authors of the following centuries take much interest in the Crusades, which are largely seen as a footnote to the sweep of Muslim history.

In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades, and their failure to galvanise and unify European Christendom, were an obsession to many authors. In the aftermath of the loss of Acre in 1291, various Europeans called on kings, princes and popes to organise fresh crusades against the Mamluks and increasingly against the Ottomans.

Most of the anti-Turkish "crusades", like those of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1443) ended in crushing defeat for the European troops. But various European Christian authors continued to use the language of the Crusades to try to fire their co-religionists into attacking the Ottomans or other enemies, including Protestants and "heathen" American Indians.

The historians and philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, in contrast, vilified the notion of war in the name of God: for them, holy war represented the epitome of medieval fanaticism. Voltaire depicts the Crusaders as blood-thirsty fanatics, while portraying their opponents, particularly Saladin and al-Kamil, as wise and just monarchs.

European nationalism

Yet this negative vision of crusading is swept aside in 19th-century Europe by three powerful forces in European culture: Romanticism, nationalism, and colonialism.

The Romantics rehabilitated the Crusades which they portrayed as, at times, bloody and senseless, yet redeemed by a remarkable and admirable idealism. This idea is embodied in the novels of Walter Scott, such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the Talisman (1825).

Francois de Chateaubriand, in his Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), takes umbrage at those who speak ill of the Crusades.

On the contrary, for him, despite their shortcomings the Crusaders were imbued with a faith and a selfless sense of mission that pushed them to abandon wives, children, lands and material riches to wrest Christ's tomb from the grasp of the Muslims.

In Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Chateaubriand was dubbed into the Order of the Holy Sepulcher by a Franciscan friar wielding what was supposed to be the sword of Godfrey of Bouillon, knight and first ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.

Chateaubriand and other Europeans dreamed of a return to the heroic age of the Crusades.

European colonialism

Their dream was not long in the waiting. Beginning in 1830, French troops undertook the conquest of Algeria. French Crusader historians Francois-Joseph Michaud and Jean-Joseph Poujoulat praised kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe as new incarnations of Saint Louis.

In a preface to a school textbook on the Crusades, the authors present the feats of medieval French Crusaders as models for the youth sent off to conquer Algeria: "The narration of the great events of olden times shall serve as lessons of patriotism for our youth."

When Napoleon III addressed the troops ready to set off for Lebanon in 1860, he exhorted them to be "the worthy children of those heroes who gloriously carried Christ's banner into those countries".

The British similarly painted their victories over the Ottomans in the first world war: Richard the Lionhearted, who failed to take Jerusalem from Saladin, appears in the pages of Punch in December 1917, in the aftermath of Allenby's capture of Jerusalem, saying "At last, my dream come true!"

One could multiply the examples of British and French authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries who affirmed that their colonial empires were reviving the best traditions of medieval crusading: its idealism, its mission to bear European civilisation into the heart of the Middle East.

Independence dashed

At the Versailles peace conference at the close of the first world war, when the French and British argued over the partition of the Arab lands wrested from the Ottoman empire and the Arab envoys increasingly realised their hopes for independence would be dashed, one of the French representatives tried to ground his claims on French prominence in the Crusades.

Amir Faisal, in frustration, shot back: "Would you kindly tell me just which one of us won the Crusades?"

It is through the French and British, principally, that Arabs of the 19th and 20th centuries rediscovered the Crusades. Modern Arabic terms for the Crusades, such as harb al-salib, were coined in the 19th century as translations of European terms; there had previously been no Arabic word for "crusade".

Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) warns that "Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us".

The first book in Arabic devoted specifically to the Crusades is Sayyid Ali al-Hariri's al-Hurub al-Ṣalibiya, published in Cairo in 1899. His work is grounded in both European scholarship and in knowledge of the medieval Arabic chroniclers.

Unify the Arabs!

Al-Hariri, like subsequent Arab scholars, accepted Michaud's assertion that the Crusades were a precursor for European colonialism. Arab nationalists responded by drawing their own historical lessons from this comparison: the new crusaders can be defeated just as their predecessors had been by the unification of the Arabs under leaders who, like Saladin and Baibars in the Middle Ages, will expel the intruders from Arab soil.

Since the middle of the 20th century, if Europeans or Americans compare the Crusades to colonialism, it is in order to denounce one, the other, or both. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, Westerners tend to see the Crusades as manifestations of violent fanaticism, not as expressions of admirable idealism.

It is now principally in the circles of radical Islam that the 19th-century European paradigm equating Crusades with European colonialism lives on.

Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s affirmed that "the Crusader spirit runs in the blood of all Westerners".

Similar statements have been proffered by more recent Islamists, including bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: Crusaders and Zionists are implacable enemies with whom one neither speaks nor compromises.

The mirror term among more extreme western writers is Jihadists: Islamists (or for some, more broadly Muslims) are seen to be inordinately hostile to non-Muslims, against whom holy war is a sacred duty.

What clash?

These Manichean world views fuel pessimistic scenarios such as Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilisations". Yet when one looks closely at the age of Crusades, one finds that the lesson to be drawn is far less simplistic than Huntington or bin Laden would have us believe.

It is a time of trade, when Egyptian merchants bought spices in India and sold them in Spain, when Venetians and Genoese traders sold English or Flemish wool cloth in Alexandria and brought back to Europe Egyptian glass, Damascene metalwork, Indian spices.

Pilgrims - Christians, Muslims and Jews - bound for Mecca and Jerusalem, travelled together on Genoese or Pisan ships, along with merchants, mercenaries and adventurers.

It is a time when storms tossed their ships and all raised their voices to God in a multilingual supplication. Conflict, as always, was endemic, but it often crossed confessional lines.

The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (and the other Crusader principalities) did not, as some have claimed, comprise an "apartheid" regime of boorish European louts lording over cultured but abject Muslims.

Its inhabitants were in fact a cosmopolitan mix of Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Normans, Provencaux, etc.

In religion they were Shia and Sunni Muslim, Druze, Catholic, Monophysite, and Jewish.

The Latin rulers gradually "orientalised", marrying the daughters of prominent indigenous Christians, learning Arabic, eating and dressing like natives, making truces and alliances with neighbouring Muslim rulers and promoting commerce.

Yet one should not imagine an idyllic land of tolerance: social distinctions were real, and often followed lines of religion and ethnicity.

Seeking historical understanding

In this, as in the violence with which they imposed and enforced their rule, the Latins differed little from other contemporary interlopers in Syria/Palestine: Turks, Byzantines, Kurds, Egyptian Fatimids and Mameluks.

The historical fallacy of identifying modern struggles with those of the Middle Ages continues to be an impediment to a real historical understanding of Arab-European (and more broadly Western-Muslim) relations.

The motivations for al-Qaeda's violence have more to do with internal Saudi politics and resentment of US policy in the Middle East than with a supposedly eternal clash between "crusaders" and "jihadists".

The roots of Iranian anti-Americanism can be found in decades of American alliance with the Shah, rather than in centuries of a supposed clash of civilisations.

The solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is to be found in the righting of the wrongs of the past 60 years, not in invoking the age of the Maccabees or Saladin.

It is time to put to rest simplistic notions of the clash of civilisations based on a falsified image of a long-vanished past. Our current problems are real enough to merit being understood on their own terms.

John Tolan is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes (France). He is the author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), and St Francis and the Sultan: An Encounter Seen Through Eight Centuries of Texts and Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; French edition published in Paris: Seuil, 2007).