TONY THE LIONHEART

Frank Johnson on what the Prime Minister

can learn from other British leaders as he prepares for a new crusade

MR BLAIR has joined a line of rulers of these islands stretching back via Eden, Attlee, Canning, Disraeli and Gladstone to Richard the Lionheart. He has come into contact with Islam.

Mr Bush has referred to what he is now engaged on as 'a crusade'. Richard knew the word. It was what we would call the 'coalition' in which he participated against Islamic extremism, which in those days took the form of ill-treating Christians in Islamic-ruled Jerusalem.

Islam had spread from what we now call Saudi Arabia in the 7th century. Islamic Arabs took Christian Jerusalem as early as 637, but allowed Christian control of Christian holy places. In about 1070 Seljuk Turks conquered the Holy Land, and showed no such respect to the Christians in Jerusalem. The Crusades had many causes, we are told, but that was one of them. Richard, like Mr Blair, seems to have believed that he should stand shoulder to shoulder with the country with which, through language and kinship, he felt a special relationship: in Richard's case, France. (Norman French was his tongue.)

The philosopher David Hume, in his History, of England, says that the Crusade in question was 'more the result of popular frenzy than of sober reason or deliberate policy. . , Elated with the hopes of fame, which in that age attended no wars but those against the infidels, he was blind to every other consideration.' But the Encyclopaedia Britannica's famous 11th edition (1911) urges that 'the Crusades must be interpreted by the ideas of an age which was dominated by the spirit of otherworldliness, and accordingly ruled by the clerical powers which represented the other world'. It is not for us to question Richard's sincerity any more than Mr Blair's.

Richard was, it seems, a great general, but failed in his greatest ambition: to retake Jerusalem. Then he heard that rivals, including the future King John, threatened his crown in his absence. Richard was thus the first of our rulers whose position at home was made precarious by intervention against an Arab power. Eden was the last. Richard, unlike Eden, kept his job, but only after enduring dangers from Continental rivals on the way home that he would not have had to endure had he stayed in London. Returning through the Germanic lands, he was imprisoned at the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor. Richard's brother-in-law was one of the emperor's enemies. Emperor released king only after securing diplomatic advantages. Let us hope that Mr Blair, unlike Richard, will not find the French and Germans to be unreliable allies.

The rulers of these islands were not directly concerned with the Islamic world either during its centuries of decline, when it was forced from Spain, or during its centuries of revival when the Ottomans conquered the Arab lands and threatened Central Europe. It was not until the mid18th century that British politicians concerned themselves again with Islam as such. This was for two reasons. On conquering India, the British found themselves ruling millions of Muslims. Second, the Ottoman empire was in turn beginning to decline. It started losing wars to a Russia which was expanding south. Later, the Ottomans lost Greece.

British governments had to remain antiOttoman over Greece. British public opinion, and Byron, expected no less. But later came the 'Eastern Question': how could Britain prevent the Ottoman empire being replaced by a Russian empire? Such an empire, or so it was thought, would, by occupying the Middle East, weaken Britain's links with her greatest possession — India — and perhaps conquer it. For the first time an Islamic power, the Ottoman empire, entered British history as an ally, or at least a prop.

Canning (1770-1827), foreign secretary and briefly prime minister, was the first British politician to have to get to grips with this problem for any length of time. His solution was the same as that of today's Western politicians when they are asked what non-Western countries should do. The better to resist Russia, the Ottomans should 'reform'. They should become more like Westerners. A minority of Westerners thought that there was a force that would prevent this happening: Islam. Lord Ponsonby, having been ambassador in the Ottoman capital at Constantinople, questioned the reform policy in a pamphlet: 'Turkey is a sort of Popedom . . . the laws are the Koran and the commentaries upon that book'. If that authority were put down, and another power put up in its place, the Ottoman empire will and must be destroyed'.

Britain's rulers continued to demand reform. The Ottomans sometimes agreed, but did little. If Ponsonby was right, they would have been weaker against Russia if they had. Russia pressed on. Palmerston, allied to Napoleon III, fought and won the Crimean War to keep Russia out of Ottoman lands. To little long-term effect. In the 1870s, during Disraeli's premiership, the Bulgarian Christians rose up against their Ottoman rulers, who then massacred them. The former prime minister, Gladstone, started perhaps our first 'human rights' agitation, demanding imprecise actions against the Turks by Disraeli, who refused; he preferred the traditional policy of using Turkey against Russia. Disraeli was accused of being pro-Islam because he was Jewish; both being 'oriental religions'. By diplomacy and bluffing about war, he forced a Russian retreat. (But when the first world war came, a century of British policy was of no avail. Russia was our ally. Turkey sided with Germany; both being Russia's enemy.) Ottoman weakness had effectively made Britain ruler of Egypt. Whereupon Gladstone, now in office again, became the first British prime minister to engage with what later became known as Arab nationalism. An Egyptian soldier, Arabi. started an uprising. John Morley, Gladstone's official biographer, concedes that Gladstone 'mistook the nature of the Arabist movement', and 'perceived it [to be] no more than a military uprising. It was in truth national as well as military; it was anti-European..

The attitude of a Tory, Lord Randolph Churchill, much differed from that of his father in these matters during the succeed

ing century. He accused Gladstone, 'the idol, the demi-God, of the Liberal party', in the way that liberals will soon accuse Mr Bush and Mr Blair, of 'an act of criminal aggression against Egypt. . . . He came upon them with his armies and his fleets, destroyed their towns, devastated their country, slaughtered their thousands, and flung back those struggling wretches into the morass of oppression. . .. The revolution of Arabi was the movement of a nation.'

The British bombarded Alexandria and put down the revolt. John Bright, who had resigned from the Cabinet over Gladstone's Egyptian policy, pleaded with Gladstone for Arabi's life. Gladstone replied as Mr Bush and Mr Blair would in bin Laden's case: 'Arabi is very much more than a rebel. Crimes of the gravest kind have been committed; and with most of them he stands, I fear, in presumptive — that is, unproven -connection.' Arabi was 'a bad man'. But an Egyptian court martial thought it prudent to spare his life.

Gladstone's policy did not prevent another nationalist revolt breaking out in Sudan; claiming, as it did, Gordon's life at Khartoum. Nor did it settle Egypt to Britain's liking, as Eden discovered at Suez some 75 years later. One aspect of Suez will not be lost on Islamic participants in any new Western-led coalition. When word arrived that Nasser had seized the canal, Iraq's King Feisal and his prime minister, Nun i el-Said, were dining at No. 10. Both supported British action. Because that action failed, thus emboldening Iraqi anti-Westernism, the Baghdad mob lynched both.

But perhaps our last former prime minister should be Attlee. Warning President Truman against mass Jewish immigration into Palestine, he pointed out that 'India', by which he meant what is now Pakistan, has '90 million Muslims who are easily inflamed'.