Sir Walter Scott's Crusades and Other Fantasies
Ibn Warraq exemplifies the rarely combined qualities of courage, integrity, and intelligence.—Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, author ofThe Arabs in History(1950),What Went Wrong(2002) and many others.With his usual wit, erudition and humanity, Ibn Warraq considers a literary subject and draws lessons from it of philosophical and political importance.—Theodore Dalrymple, author ofLife at the Bottom,Farewell Fearand many others.Ibn Warraq’s latest book,Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies, sheds new and important light on the 1400 year old conflict between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Ibn Warraq, a scholar of impressive erudition, begins by using Sir Walter Scott’s description of twelfth Century England in his novel,Ivanhoe,with its conflicts between Norman, Saxon, and the recently arrived Jews, to give his readers an understanding of what Sir Walter got right and what wrong. He does the same in the next chapter for Scott’s novel of the Crusades, The Talisman,with its fictional description of .the relationship of Richard the Lion Hearted and Saladin. In reality, they never met. Scott depicts Saladin as a humane, compassionate leader in contrast to the crude and cruel Crusaders. As Ibn Warraq points out, Saladin did not hesitate to have prisoners tortured and decapitated.  He also points out, Scott was enormously influential and many of his views became conventional wisdom for later generations, including scholars who should have known better.According to Ibn Warraq,  Scott had a better understanding of the precarious situation of the Jews in twelfth century England. His depictions of Isaac and his daughter Rebecca,Ivanhoe’sheroine, are excellent. One of the novel’s most harrowing, but historically accurate, accounts depicts the Grand Master of the Knights Templars’ attempt to have Rebecca burned at the stake because her successful healing of a Templar was for him proof of her witchcraft!There is much more in this valuable book. Ibn Warraq has a well-researched examination of the anti-Semitic Rhineland massacres of 1096 which led to Jews largely, but not entirely, to abandon Germany and Western Europe and migrate to Eastern Europe.  He challenges Sir Steven Runciman and other historians for holding that Muslim intolerance was largely a result of the Crusades. On the contrary, there were large-scale Muslim massacres of Jews before 1096. Ibn Warraq is especially effective in debunking the myth of a “Golden Age” in Muslim Spain in which Jews were treated almost as the equals of their Muslim neighbors and overlords, a myth that unfortunately has lost little of its potency among some influential Jews today in spite of the fact, as Ibn Warraq shows, that the roots of Muslim anti-Semitism go back to the Qu’ran itself.Finally, the author deals with the craven willingness of Western governments and institutions to surrender their citizens’ hard-won, constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of expression whenever Muslims find content of that expression offensive. As Ibn Warraq warns, if we continue thar surrender, “we risk losing all to Islamist thuggery.”Both the scholar and the layperson have much to gain from this book.—Richard L. Rubenstein,President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Bridgeport and Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University, author ofAfter Auschwitz,Jihad and Genocide.and many others.--New English Review--PJ MediaIslam, so say apologists, is a religion of peace. If so, how come that Muslims happen to be fighting Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and animists right across the world? The official body representing Muslim countries has recently put out a statement that the question reveals prejudice they like to call Islamophobia. For them, the price for freedom of speech is too high, and they recommend banning criticism of Islam altogether.As it happens, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale are now standing trial for the murder and partial decapitation of a soldier in an open London street in front of passers-by. Of Nigerian origins but born British, they are both converts from Christianity to Islam. They plead not guilty and express no regret on the grounds that they are “soldiers of Allah,” engaged in war with enemies. On account of many passages in the Koran, they explain, “We must fight them as they fight us.”The evidence that the faith conditions Muslims to fight for it is by now overwhelming. Yet every horror precipitates Western leaders to parrot that Islam is a religion of peace. This is a classic case of transference in the jargon of psychology, whereby the aggressor and the victim exchange roles and responsibility.Apologetics of the kind are escapes from reality, a refusal to look at consequences, accepting blame that belongs to others in the hope that a quiet life will follow. A Muslim who calls himself Ibn Warraq is the only writer I have come across who addresses this crucial phenomenon. Why I am Not a Muslim, an early book of his, openly condemns Islam as backward and bigoted, totalitarian and unreformable. He was the first to point out that Western apologists for Islam are simply not telling the truth. Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies, his new book, is a bit more specialized but still for the general reader. He makes the point that Arabs conquered the Middle East and it was only after centuries of abuse and persecution that Christians tried to recapture it. Popes and presidents apologizing for the Crusades are out of order, absurd even. Walter Scott put in place the falsification reaching down to the present that Muslims are peace-loving gentlemen and Crusaders war-mongering thugs. Not even Ibn Warraq can explain the transference, but his description of its sources is enough to clear the air.In that great anti-totalitarian novel 1984, the hero Winston tries to reassure himself that people don’t really surrender to deception and lies, thinking, “If there’s hope, it lies with the proles.”  Today, if there’s hope it lies with finding many more Muslims like Ibn Warraq.—David Pryce-Jones--National ReviewIn this spare and yet sweeping book, he traces the development of the conventional view of the Crusades as an unprovoked and imperialistic attack on Muslims who far more noble, intelligent and cultured than the invaders. Examining the works not just of Sir Walter Scott but of Edward Gibbon and numerous other historians and writers of fiction, he details the development of this idea, and how it superseded the general view of earlier historians that the Crusades were defensive and, for all their acknowledged enormities, generally justified.This investigation is immensely relevant for today’s public debate, for underlying so much of Western foreign policy is the unspoken assumption that the conflict between Islam and the West is all our fault – including the violence and intolerance of Islamic jihadists -- and that we can achieve reconciliation by means of various hearts-and-minds initiatives. Ibn Warraq shows here that that assumption is rooted in analyses going back centuries, burnished by the endorsement of some of the world’s leading historians.However, he concludes, “this will not do as history.” Speaking specifically of anti-Semitism among Christians and Muslims, he rejects the claim that Islamic anti-Semitism is an import from Christian Europe: “Even a cursory glance at the plight of Jews under Muslims before the Crusades would be enough to refute Sir Steven’s rosy picture of an earlier interfaith utopia. All the persecutions of both Christians and Jews stem directly from the precepts and principles enshrined in the canonical texts of Islam: the Koran; the Sira, that is, Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad; the Hadith, that is, the Traditions, the record of the deeds and sayings of Muhammad and his companions; and the classical Muslim Koranic commentaries.”“Reputable” historians, however, today generally gloss over, ignore, or deny these truths outright. To state them would be to invite both death threats from Islamic jihadists and charges of “Islamophobia” and “bigotry” from their Leftist and “moderate Muslim” enablers. The latter portion of this book is devoted to that self-censorship. Ibn Warraq shows how historical myths such as those surrounding the Crusades are all too often propagated by people who have been intimidated into thinking that to question those myths would in itself be an illegitimate and unacceptable exercise in “intolerance.” He uses the threats against the creators of the cartoonSouth Park, and their subsequent removal of a cartoon of Muhammad, as the starting point of a disquisition on the need to defend our own values -- particularly the freedom of speech and freedom of expression.With so much public policy today built on fantasy and wishful thinking,Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades & Other Fantasiesis a welcome antidote and reminder that no matter how often and insistently lies are repeated, they can never ultimately overwhelm or drown out the truth. Even ifSir Walter Scott’s Crusades & Other Fantasiesis the last utterance of truth before a new Dark Age dawns, and it could well be, Ibn Warraq has given his example to future truth-seekers; such is human nature that someone, somewhere, sometime, will take up the torch.In the meantime, he has done in this book and others what his contemporaries who were born in Western nations have failed to do: construct a clear, compelling case for the survival, defense and new flowering of Western civilization. We can only hope it will be heeded before the magnificent edifice he loves and admires so much, and writes about so eloquently, comes tumbling down.—Robert Spencer--Jihad Watch