Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The reader must approach this book very carefully, because Armstrong's thesis does not work. She links the past of almost one thousand years ago and argues that today's problems in the Middle East must be understood as a development of the Crusades and that the mistrust and hostility that Muslims and Arabs (not the same thing, but often the terms are confused) in general feel toward Europeans and/or Westerners, and vice-versa, stem from the legacy of the Crusades. My problem with Armstrong is that she selectively goes to a certain chapter in History, then she selectively decides what to mention, and finally she selectively connects that past with the 20th century. This would do for shallow journalism, but not for History, and Armstrong, although apparently not a historian, tries very hard to write History with a capital H. Islam invaded the lands of the Christians first. How many times must this be stressed? Armstrong writes about the pre-Crusades Muslim conquests but she is not critical, on the contrary, her attitude is so pro-Muslim that her credibility suffers: if the teritory is conquered or attacked by Christians, it is a catastrophe. If Muslims do the conquering, then it is a positive development. Armstrong does not see that, however ambitious the popes, barbarian the Normans, and greedy the Europeans in general, Christianity had every right to feel threatened by Islam throughout the Middle Ages and well into the 17th century. The Moslem Arabs had invaded Christian North Africa and eliminated Christianity from there. Then they invaded the Levant, which had belonged to the Byzantine empire. They also invaded the Christian civilization of Roman and Visigothic Spain in 711 AD. They invaded Sicily, Southern Italy, sacked Rome, and kept on pushing against Byzantium in the East. Then, and only then, came the Crusades, which ended in total defeat for the Latin Christians and so weakened the Byzantine empire that it could not resist the new wave of attacks that the recent converts to Islam, the Turks, unleashed. The problem in "Holy War" is that the Muslim invasions of Christian and non-Christian lands count for nothing. Those invasions followed a policy of imperialism, since the Muslims attacked the Zoroastrian domain of Persia and later Hindu India as early as 712. Also, it counts for nothing that, after the Crusades were over and the Christians had been defeated, a very triumphant Islam proceeded again to conquer. If Islam lost Spain and Portugal by the end of the 15th century, it made up the loss by conquering the Byzantine empire, invading all of Asia Minor (today's Turkey), Greece, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and reaching the gates of Vienna. This little chapter of history, spanning several centuries, practically does not exist for Armstrong. The pages that deal with the rise of the Ottoman empire and the rise of Europe serve mostly to show how "bad" both Europeans and Turks were for thwarting the Arabs. The author has tunnel vision: at one end of the tunnel, the Crusades; at the other end, the Modern Middle East. All of what happened before the Crusades, and all the centuries of Muslim expansion and conquest that came after, are treated as unimportant. The one star is because the book has many endnotes, providing the reader with plenty of additional material for independent research, and because by reading it some people may become more interested in the Crusades, or Medieval Europe, or history in general. But, again, beware of the thesis: its flaw makes it untenable. If you want to read about the Crusades, try Riley-Smith's "Brief History of the Crusades" and, as editor, "Atlas of the Crusades." Also, Billings' "The Cross and the Crescent" is good and not long. Runciman's "History of the Crusades" (3 vols.), although biased against the Latins, is excellent. Regarding anti-Semitism (or Judeophobia, a better term) read Bernard Lewis' "Semites and anti-Semites," or Netanyahu's "Origins of the Inquisition in 15th century Spain." Armstrong's book has an interesting thesis that simply does not work. She, and all the authors who want to link the Crusades to the present, should also link the Crusades with a medieval Christianity besieged by a powerful and very militant Islamic empire, both before and after the period between the 11th and the 13th centuries. To ignore Islamic imperialism while castigating the European/Christian variety is to be dishonest.