Юдаизмът и християнството са насилствени, колкото исляма?: Разлика между версии

Фактът, че тези теории идват от бивши монахините, които страхливо осъждат  кръстоносците (в сравнение с всичко, което е извършено от Исляма), е доказателство, че тези теории са леснопродаваеми. Подобни изказвания пренебрегват факта, че още 400 години преди да се появят кръстоносците, християни отбелязват, че Ислямът се разпространява с меч<ref>Виж например писанията на Софроний, ерусалимския патриарх по време на мюсюлманското завладяване на Светия град, само години след смъртта на ЮМухаммад или в хрониките на Теофан Изповедник.</ref>. Разбира се, авторитетни мюсюлмански историци, пишещи векове преди кръстоносците, като Ахмад ибн Иахиа Ал Баладхури (умрял 892г.) и Мухаммад бин Ярир [[Ал Табари]] (838-923г) ясно показващи, че Ислямът се разпространява с меч.

The fact remains: The Crusades were a counter-attack on Islam—not an unprovoked assault as Armstrong and other revisionist historians portray. Eminent historian Bernard Lewis puts it well,

Even the Christian crusade, often compared with the Muslim jihad, was itself a delayed and limited response to the jihad and in part also an imitation. But unlike the jihad, it was concerned primarily with the defense or reconquest of threatened or lost Christian territory. It was, with few exceptions, limited to the successful wars for the recovery of south-west Europe, and the unsuccessful wars to recover the Holy Land and to halt the Ottoman advance in the Balkans. The Muslim jihad, in contrast, was perceived as unlimited, as a religious obligation that would continue until all the world had either adopted the Muslim faith or submitted to Muslim rule. … The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic law.<ref>Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 233-4.</ref>

Moreover, Muslim invasions and atrocities against Christians were on the rise in the decades before the launch of the Crusades in 1096. The Fatimid caliph Abu 'Ali Mansur Tariqu'l-Hakim (r. 996-1021) desecrated and destroyed a number of important churches—such as the Church of St. Mark in Egypt and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—and decreed even more oppressive than usual decrees against Christians and Jews. Then, in 1071, the Seljuk Turks crushed the Byzantines in the pivotal battle of Manzikert and, in effect, conquered a major chunk of Byzantine Anatolia presaging the way for the eventual capture of Constantinople centuries later.

It was against this backdrop that Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) called for the Crusades:

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians [i.e., Muslim Turks] … has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.<ref>"Speech of Urban—Robert of Rheims," in Edward Peters, ed., The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 27.</ref>

In fact, far from suggesting anything intrinsic to Christianity, the Crusades ironically better help explain Islam. For what the Crusades demonstrated once and for all is that irrespective of religious teachings—indeed, in the case of these so-called Christian Crusades, despite them—man is often predisposed to violence. But this begs the question: If this is how Christians behaved—who are commanded to love, bless, and do good to their enemies who hate, curse, and persecute them—how much more can be expected of Muslims who, while sharing the same violent tendencies, are further commanded by the Deity to attack, kill, and plunder nonbelievers?