The strife is fierce, the warfare long
Andro Linklater
JERUSALEM: THE ENDLESS CRUSADE by Andrew Sinclair Century, f17.99, pp. 295 Anyone who seeks evidence of the power of religion need only look towards Jerusalem, where the founders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all ended their mortal lives. In the 4,000 years since the death of Abraham, more blood must have been shed there, lower depths of depravity must have been plumbed there, and richer insights of the human condition perceived there, than in any other single place under the sun — all in the name of Yahweh, Christ or Allah. By the end of Andrew Sinclair's sanguinary tale, one feels that religion is to God as sex is to love — the former gives expression to the latter but in a form which may cast the gravest doubts upon the latter's existence.
The pattern was set first by the children of Israel who dealt with the existing inhabi- tants according to the divine instruction 'thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them nor show mercy unto them'. Given the present milksop state of Christianity and bloodthirsty outlook of Islam, it is salu- tary to be reminded that thereafter, until the age of reason tamed them, the follow- ers of the loving Christ were even more prone to slaughter, disembowelment and pillage than were those of Allah the merci- ful or Yahweh the just.
Wonderful sights were to be seen [wrote Raymond of Aguilers of the Crusaders in 1099]. Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets . . . in the Temple and porch of Solomon men rode in blood up to their knees and bridles. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God.
In this lucid survey of what the city has meant to the followers of the three monotheistic religions for whom it is holy, Sinclair sets a great question about the nature of religious faith: why should what is taken to be divine revelation provoke such inhumanity? 'If only you had seen your Muslim enemy trampling down your altars and holy of holies, cutting the throats of deacons, priests and bishops', the 13th- century Sultan Baybars wrote gleefully to his vanquished foe, 'your castles wiped off the face of the earth, the Church of St Paul utterly destroyed, you would have said "Would to God I were dust".'
The conventional answer owes much to Mary Douglas's flawed arguments in Purity and Danger. By its very nature, it is suggest- ed, monotheism is exclusive and hostile to outside influence. In fact each religion, in its more confident periods, is not only tol- erant of the other two, but enriched by them. Christianity owed its first knowledge of chivalry, mathematics and science to contacts with Muslims; for centuries, Judaism's intellectual capital was Baghdad where the Abbasid caliphs fostered Talmu- dic academies; and the discovery of Greek philosophy and medicine that brought glory to the court of Haroun al-Raschid and inspired the writings of Avicenna came to the Muslim world from Nestorian Chris- tians in Syria.
The only example of this cross- fertilisation explored here is the relatively unimportant matter of freemasonry transmitted by the Knights Templar from a confusion of ideas about Solomon's Temple. I was glad to learn about its historical connection with business (the Templars were also the Crusaders' bankers) and the reason for the primacy accorded to Scottish lodges (Robert the Bruce gave the Templars their last Euro- pean stronghold), but it is not enough to balance the melancholy saga of murderous rivalry. Like the good writer he is, Sinclair has blended a wide range of secondary sources into an intelligent, easily read narrative, but by emphasising the moments of sterile conflict rather than the centuries of fertile harmony, he leaves one to sup- pose that the future of Jerusalem must belong to those kinky, hooded religiopaths, the followers of Meir Kahane and Hamas. I cannot help feeling this is a distortion. What deviants do to get their rocks off always makes a better read, but in religion as in sex the reality is that most of us prefer it straight and loving.
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