Asbridge never explicitly connects the events of the Crusades with those of more recent history — that he leaves to the reader — but some of the connections are obvious. There is, for example, the parallel between the “foreign” ideology of the Crusaders and the similarly incomprehensible ideology of Muslims suicide bombers. Modern scholars have focused on economic or material causes for the Crusades in part because it seems unbelievable that people would travel more than 3,000 miles because they really believed in a religious cause.
Similarly, modern pundits have often focused upon material and economic reasons for why people would join extremist religious movements or become suicide bombers. The idea that people would do this because they really, truly believe that God wants it and will reward them for their faith is discounted; yet it’s just as much the key to understanding their actions as it is to understanding the Crusades.
Then there are parallels in the way the Crusades have been used for ideological purposes. People may have embarked on the Crusade because they really believed, but that doesn’t mean that cynical leaders didn’t manipulate those beliefs in order to encourage the soldiers. Similar behavior can be seen today — but perhaps more often with Muslim leaders like Osama bin Laden who base their arguments in part on the idea that the Crusades never really stopped. It is believed by many Muslims that Israel is a European colony or a newly revived Crusader state, for example.
The connection between the Crusades and more recent events doesn’t mean that recent history is just a continuation of the Crusades (as bin Laden argues) or that recent events are an inevitable consequence of the Crusades. Few, if any, events in history are truly inevitable — but people seem to like to believe that they are, perhaps because that would relieve us of the responsibility for what happens around us.
There are many reasons for these connections, but the most basic probably goes right back to ideology. The Crusades were pursued for ideological reasons and exploited for a variety of social, religious, and political ideologies over the centuries by both Muslims and Christians. By this point, it’s not possible to ignore or forget the Crusades — or at least the mythic Crusades that are now part of popular consciousness. The Crusades and our modern problems are not connected so much by history as they are by the ideological agendas of people today.
If anything is inevitable, it’s that people will continue to try to use the Crusades for their purposes, and therefore that the Crusades will continue to play a role in our thinking. The Crusades are a part of the intellectual, moral, and ideological fabric of both the Christian West and the Muslim East. It didn’t necessarily have to turn out that way, but that’s the situation we now have.
We might be able to avoid the worst uses of the Crusades, though, by having a better understanding of what they really were and how they have been (mis)used in the past. If we really understand what the Crusades were all about, we won’t be easily fooled by ideologues such as Osama bin Laden or his various Western counterparts.
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