"Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted." Galatians 6:1 (NASB)

That means if you see something wrong on this page. Mail me and we will discuss it. If I truly am in error I will apologize and remove or fix the error. Never be afraid to speak up.



"But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed." Galatians 1:8 (NKJV)

Why I will Never Convert to Islam

Qur'an al-Imran 54
ومكروا ومكر الله والله خير الماكرين 3:54

Wamakaroo wamakara Allahu waAllahu khayru almakireena

And they cheated/deceived and God cheated/deceived, and God (is) the best (of) the cheaters/deceivers.

Allah is the best of deceivers....


http://www.muhammadtube.com/

What Would Muhammad Do?
What Really Happened in the Middle East
Erwun Caner Shares His Journey Through Islam
Who is a True Prophet? [Muhammad's Prophet Test]
How Jesus Christ fulfills the Old Testament
MUSLIM JESUS VS. BIBLICAL JESUS
Islam and the Final Beast
The Religion of Peace™
Answering-Islam
Jihad Watch
WikiIslam
A Muslim Journey to Hope
http://www.prophetofdoom.net
http://inthenameofallah.org/
JIHAD THE TEACHING OF ISLAM FROM ITS PRIMARY SOURCES - THE QURAN AND HADITH
The Noble Qur'an (so you can see it for yourself)
The Bible (with many different translations)


If Jesus is God, then Mohammed was wrong and therefore a false prophet.
If Jesus was NOT God, then He could not be a prophet of God
since therefore He lied and blasphemed
so then Mohammed was wrong, and therefore a false prophet.
..
..

I Listen to M88 And KNKT

"The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God."~ John Piper


"For my own part, I believe that in dealing with skeptics, and unbelievers, and enemies of the Bible, Christians are too apt to stand only on the defensive. They are too often content with answering this or that little objection, or discussing this or that little difficulty, which is picked out of Scripture and thrown in their teeth. I believe we ought to act on the aggressive far more than we do, and to press home on the adversaries of [Biblical] inspiration the enormous difficulties of their own position." -J.C. Ryle (1816-1900)


"The Church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering society. There are things for which an uncompromising stand is worthwile." -Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Hung in Germany for resisting the Nazi's in 1945)


"Jesus Christ Himself is the final exegesis of all truth. He is all that we need to know about God, and He is all that we need to know about man." Major W. Ian Thomas





"Christianity is...rarely understood by those outside its bounds. In fact, this is probably one of the greatest tasks confronting the apologist-to rescue Christianity from misunderstandings." -Alister E. McGrath

o9.0 JIHAD (O: Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spirtual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad,

"We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad."

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus (def: b7) is such Koranic verses as:

(1) "Fighting is prescribed for you" (Koran 2:216);

(2) "Slay them wherever you find them" (Koran 4:89);

(3) "Fight the idolators utterly" (Koran 9:36);

and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

"I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah";

and the hadith reported by Muslim,

"To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it."

Details concerning jihad are found in the accounts of the military expeditions of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), including his own martial forays and those on which he dispatched others. The former consist of the ones he personally attended, some twenty-seven (others say twenty-nine) of them He fought in eight of them, and killed only one person with his noble hand, Ubayy ibn Khalaf, at the battle of Uhud.On the latter expeditions he sent others to fight himself remaining at Medina, and these were forty-seven in number.)

From: Reliance of the Traveller: A Classis Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (pages 599-600)




o9.8 The caliph (o25) makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians (N: provided he has first invited them to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya, def: o11.4)- which is the significance of their paying it, not the money itself-while remaining in their ancestral religions) (O: and the war continues) until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax (O: in accordance with the word of Allah Most High,

"Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden-who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until the poll tax out of hand and are humbled" (Koran 9:29)

the time and place for which is before the final descent of Jesus (upon whom be peace). After his final coming, nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus' descent (upon him and our Prophet be peace), which is the divinely revealed law of Muhammad. The coming of Jesus does not entail a separate divinely revealed law, for he will rule by the law of Muhammad. As for the Prophet's saying (Allah bless him and give him peace),

"I am the last, there will be no prophet after me,"

this does not contradict the final coming of Jesus (upon whom be peace), since he will not rule according to the Evangel, but as a follower of our Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)).

o9.9 The caliph fights all other peoples until they become Muslim (O: because they are not a people with a Book, nor honored as such, and are not permitted to settle with paying the poll tax (jizya)) (n: thought according to the Hanafi school,peoples of all other religions, even idol worshipers, are permitted to live under the protection of the Islamic state if they either become Muslim or agree to pay the poll tax, the sole exceptions to which are apostates from Islam and idol worshipers who are Arabs, neither of whom has any choice but becoming Muslim (al-Hidaya sharh Bidaya al-mubtadi' (y21), 6.48-49)).

From: Reliance of the Traveller: A Classis Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (pages 602-603)




"Crusading was so unpleasant, dangerous, and expensive that the more on considers crusaders the more astonishing their motivation becomes. What did they think they were doing? And why did catastrophes, which might be expected to induce cynicism, indifference, and despair, only heighten their enthusiasm? What was in their minds? "
(Source: Riley-Smith, Jonathan Editor The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades Pg. 75)






"Soon after Muhammad’s death in 632, the Jihad manifested itself on the European mainland, outside the walls of Constantinople, in the year 668, when Muslims first laid siege, unsuccessfully, to the capital of the Byzantine empire. The Jihad has been part of European history ever since. Its first big triumph in Europe was the invasion and occupation of Spain in 711. Nearly eight hundred years of fighting and occupation followed. The conquest, and subsequent reconquest [the Reconquista] by the Portuguese and Spaniards, lasted until 1492, but most Europeans still know virtually nothing about it. … The Jihad has affected and engulfed far more countries that the Palestine-bound Crusades. The Crusades, … were concentrated on the Holy Land and all took place between the years 1096 and 1270 [some would argue that it goes as far as Napoleon], not quite two hundred years in all. The Crusaders wanted to establish themselves in the Holy Land, formerly Christian. Islam’s motives, through Jihad, were far grander. The Muslims wanted to take and occupy Europe and hopefully, to Islamize it. A large part of Europe was taken, occupied for centuries, sometimes devastated, and some of it was Islamized. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and eastern and southern Russia were all Jihad battlefields where Islam conquered or was conquered. Many of those lands were Occupied by the Muslims, in some cases by Arabs and Moors, in others by the Ottoman Turks, usually for hundreds of years: Spain 800 years, Portugal 600 years, Greece 500 years, Sicily 300 years, Serbia 400 years, Bulgaria 500 years, Rumania 400 years, and Hungary 150 years. Hungary, particularly, was ruined, plundered and ravaged and took 200 years to recover from Muslim occupation. By comparison, the European occupation of the Muslim countries of the Near and Middle East and of North Africa lasted less than a century and a half."
(Source: Fregosi, Paul Jihad In The West: Muslim Conquests From The 7th To The 21st Centuries Pg. 23-24)



"The Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian [Byzantine] lands. Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While some individual Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, till today in Southern Sudan, Kashmir, Chechnya, South Thailand, South Philippines (Mindanao) the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword." (History of the Crusades against Jihad)



"It should be noted that the response of western Europeans to the First Crusade did not depend on a developed hatred of Islam and all things Muslim. There existed, to be sure, crude stereotypes and misapprehensions: it was supposed that Muslims were idolatrous polytheists, and fabulous stories circulated about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. But such ideas fell far short of amounting to a coherent set of prejudices which could motivate people to uproot themselves from their homes and families in the dangerous and costly pursuit of enemies in distant places. … it is significant that the crusaders experienced mixed feelings once they had grown familiar with their enemies’ methods. They were so impressed by the fighting qualities of the Turks that they speculated whether their resilient adversaries might in fact be distant relative, a sort of lost tribe which centuries before had been diverted from its migration towards Europe and Christian civilization. This was no idle compliment in an age when character traits were believed to be transmitted by blood and stories about the descent of peoples from biblical or mythical forebears went to the very heart of European’s sense of historical identity and communal worth. Popular understanding of the crusades nowadays tends to think in terms of a great conflict between faiths fuelled by religious fanaticism. This perception is bound up with modern sensibilities about religious discrimination, and it also has resonances in reactions to current political conflicts in the Near East and elsewhere. But it is a perspective which, at least as far as the First Crusade is concerned, needs to be rejected. … Crusading used to be regarded as operating on the margins of western Europe’s historical development: it was a series of rather exotic and irrational episodes of limited significance. The study of the crusades, moreover, tended to be dominated by scholars who approached the subject from specialisms in eastern Christian or Muslim culture, which meant that their judgments were often unduly harsh. But now medievalists have become more concerned to integrate crusading within the broader history of western civilization. An important element of this approach has been an examination of those features of western Europeans’ religious cultural, and social experience which can account for the enthusiastic interest shown in the crusades."
(Source: Riley-Smith, Jonathan Editor The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades Pg. 17-18)



"what was the political climate of the Muslim Near East in the middle of the eleventh century? The caliphate of Baghdad, formerly controlled by the Buwayhids of Daylam, was governed by the Seljukids Turks, the defenders of the Sunna. Henceforth real power lay in the hands of the Sultan while the Caliph symbolized religious authority. The Muslims principalities squandered their resources squabbling amongst themselves. The neighboring Byzantine Basileus and the Armenians supported first one emir and then another until the Seljukids, led by Alp Arslān, reacted violently, defeating the troops of the Byzantine emperor Romanus Diogenes at Malāzgird, in the Lake Van region in 1071 (463 H.), and taking the Emperor himself prisoner. This victory precipitated the progressive settlement of Anatolia by the Turks … Byzantium panicked and sent requests for help to Western Europe, which responded with the Crusades, but the Franks, instead of helping the Byzantines, installed themselves in the Near East where they founded Latin states."
(Source: Madden, Thomas F. Editor Blackwell essential readings in history: The Crusades Pg. 223)



”Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? ...Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors...unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? ...And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood...condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?”
(Source: Madden, Thomas F. http://www.thearma.org/essays/Crusades.htm)



"In spite of its often flamboyant trappings, crusading was as much a devotional as a military activity, and the notion of a devotional war suggests a form of war-service which can be compared to saying a prayer. In preaching the First Crusade, therefore, Pope Urban had made a revolutionary appeal. The notion that making was could be penitential seems to have evolved in the 1070s and 1080s out of a dialogue between Pope Gregory VII and a circle of reform theorists which had gathered around his supporter Mathilda of Tuscany. Urban took the idea, which was without precedent, and made it intellectually justifiable by associating warfare with pilgrimage to Jerusalem. … And a commentary on the crusade as something deliberately created so that nobles and knights could function as soldiers not just beneficially but devotionally, is to be found in Guibert of Nogent’s famous statement, … ‘God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in its wake … might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain in some measure God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with the liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.’ … So radical was the notion of a devotional was that it is surprising that there seem to have been no protests from senior churchmen. If the First Crusade had failed, there would surely have been criticism of the association of war with pilgrimage, but its triumph confirmed for participants and observers alike that it really was a manifestation of God’s will. ‘The Lord has certainly revived his miracles of old’, wrote Pope Paschal II. One of the most striking features of the letters from crusaders and the eyewitness narratives is the growing feeling of astonishment that prevailed in the army which crossed into Syria in 1097 and proceeded to Antioch and eventually to Jerusalem, with the heavens glittering with coincidental but actual pyrotechnics-comets, auroras, shooting stars-and the nights disturbed by visitations: Christ, the saints, and ghosts of crusading dead who returned to assure the living of the validity of relics or the certainty of heavenly rewards. The crusaders became convinced that the only explanation for their victorious progress was that God’s hand was intervening to help them physically and that God did approve of holy war’s association with penance and pilgrimage."
(Source: Riley-Smith, Jonathan Editor The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades Pg. 77-80)



"The response to the summons to the [first] crusade was large enough to cause comment at the time, but just how large is now difficult to judge. Leaving aside the numbers on the third wave of the crusade – the so-called Crusade of 1101 – which were affected by the news of the liberation of Jerusalem, the following can be suggested very tentatively. Around 5,000 knights gathered on the second wave before Nicaea (Iznik) in June 1097. One should multiply that by a factor of four to include their supporters (grooms, shield bearers and so forth) and add something for foot soldiers. So c. 25.000 might be a fair estimate of the number of combatants. There were also many poor people with the crusade and with them its size may have reached c. 40,000. Crusaders continued to to overtake the army right up to the fall of Jerusalem and beyond, even though the numbers during the siege of Jerusalem had fallen to 15,000. We should add c. 5,000 for late departures. The armies of the first wave were at least as large as those of the second and might have comprised another 40,000 persons. This gives us a total of 85,000, of whom perhaps 7,000 would have been knights. We then have to take into account the substantial number who took the cross but did not leave; perhaps 42,000 or 50 percent of the number departing would be reasonable. So we end up with an estimate of 127,000 recruits, of whom about 10 percent would have been knights. These are guesses of course, but even much lower estimates produce figures which were very substantial for the time and beg the question why so many responded."
(Source: Riley-Smith, Jonathan The Crusade: A History Second Edition Pg. 17-18)



"During their march through Asia Minor and even more during the coming struggle in Syria and Palestine, the crusaders profited from the state of disarray in Islam. Since the Muslims were unable to grasp what was about to hit them, they saw no reason to abandon their own internal feuds. Medieval Arabic, like Medieval Latin, developed no word for “crusade”. The crusader they called simply Franks )the First Crusade being predominantly French in character), and the crusader states were the Frankish territories in the Holy Land. That a religious war could serve any purpose other than that of spreading one’s own religion was incomprehensible to the Muslims, whose idea of a holy war, Jihad, was entirely based on this conception. To the Seldjuks the crusade must have looked rather like another Byzantine military expedition, the kind of thing to which they were thoroughly accustomed."
(Source: Mayer, Hans Eberhard The Crusades Second Edition Pg. 49)



"Although initial Muslim response to the coming of the crusades were inevitably confused and often couched in inappropriately archaic forms, some Muslim leaders swiftly came to grips with the full significance of the Christian invasion and set about trying to organize a counter-crusade. ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (1039-1106) was a Sunni Muslim religious scholar attached to the great mosque of Damascus. His Kitab al-jihad (1105) was the first treatise on the Holy War to be produced after the arrival of the Franks in the Near East. Unlike some of his contemporaries, al-Sulami did not confuse the crusaders with Byzantines. Rather, he regarded the expedition of the Franks as part of a Christian ‘Jihad’ from the West, which had the aim of helping native Christians as well as conquering Jerusalem. He presented the triumph of the crusaders in Syria as a symptom of the moral and political decay of Islam and of the enfeebled state of the caliphate, but he also offered his readers the certainty of future victory, since the Prophet Muhammad had predicted that the Muslims would lose Jerusalem for a while, but then they would not only retake it, but they would go on to conquer Constantinople. … Although al-Sulami’s was the first jihad treatise to be written on response to the crusade, it was not the first book to be written on the subject. The ultimate authority for jihad is to be found in the Qur’an itself.

Prescribed for you is fighting, though it be hateful to you (Qur’an II. 216)

Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden-such men as practice not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until they pay tribute out of hand and have been humbled. (Qur’an IX. 29)

And fight the unbelievers totally even as they fight you totally; and know that God is with the god-fearing. (Qur’an IX. 36)

Jihad, which is commonly translated as ‘holy war’, literally means ‘striving’: that is striving to advance Islam. according to traditional Sunni Muslim doctrine, leadership of the holy war to extend the territories of Islam was vested in the caliph. In the eighth and ninth centuries it had been one of the duties of the Abbasid caliph to direct the jihad. Harun al-Rashid, for example, led his troops against the Byzantines every other year; in the alternate years he led the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Jihads were also launched in the eastern lands against the pagan Turks in Transoxania and central Asia as well as against idolatrous Hindus in northern India. Volunteers for these and other holy wars were known as ghazis. They fought in the expectation of booty and, if they fell in the course of campaigning, they were assured of the status of martyrs. "
(Source: Riley-Smith, Jonathan Editor The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades Pg. 225-227)



"It was long believed by modern historians that the crusades were manned by Europe’s castoffs: aristocratic second or third sons with no claim to their father’s lands or title, robber barons, highwaymen, ne’er-do-wells, and greedy monks. In part, this interpretation was an assessment of demographic evidence. Europe’s population soared during the tenth century, which suggested a need for more land. Thus, the crusades were often described as Europe’s first colonial wars, a kind of proto-imperialism visited on the Muslim people. Men with little to lose and everything to gain, it was argued, took the cross merely as a pious pretext to enrich themselves with stolen booty and carve out a new home in a distant land. Historians who lived through Europe’s scramble for empire or the subsequent dissolution of imperialism naturally saw the crusades in that familiar light. In addition, the post-Enlightenment and positivist view of religiosity too often presumed that medieval men and women could not possibly take seriously the pious words they uttered and wrote. For scholars of those schools, religion was not an impetus but a diversion, a ruse for those who spoke of the next world while profiting in this one. Unfortunately, this mistaken view is still dominant in popular works and even in many otherwise fine textbooks. New developments in computer technology have allowed scholars like Jonathan Riley-Smith to analyze quantitatively large numbers of documents relating to the men and women who participated in the crusades. Rather than general impressions, we now have solid evidence concerning those who took up the church’s call and the factors that motivated them."
(Source: Madden, Thomas F. The New Concise History of the Crusades Updated Edition Pg. 11-12)



"The sources warrant the generalization that the mode of Frankish takeover largely determined their fate in each case. When a town was taken by assault, Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were usually massacred or enslaved. The best-known example is Jerusalem, stormed on July 15, 1099, where, as a Frankish eyewitness puts it, “some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, other pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet lay in the houses and streets, and indeed there was a running to and fro of men and knights over the corpses.” Similar scenes occurred in other towns stormed by the Crusaders, such as Ma’arrat al-Nu’mān in 1098, Haifa in 1100, Caesarea in 1101, Beirut in 1110, and Bilbays in 1168. The massacres were hardly ever total, however. In Jerusalem, for example, the Fātimid commander was allowed to depart with his garrison swelled by civilians, while other Jerusalemites were left alive and forced to dump the corpses of their fellow citizens beyond the city walls. The Cairo Geniza reveals that some Qaraite Jews were ransomed by their coreligionists. Muslim sources relate that the Franks took captive Abu ‘I-Qāsim al-Rumaylī, the most celebrated Palestinian hadīth expert of his age and author of tracts on the merits of Jerusalem and Hebron, and offered to set him free for a ransom of one thousand dinars. When the money was not forthcoming, they stoned him to death. … fear of massacre led some Muslims to flee for safety even before the advent of the Crusaders. The two regional capitals of Ramla and Tiberias were deserted when the Franks entered them in 1099, and the same was true of Jaffa, the regions southern edge of the Dead Sea, and some Syrian localities. Probably some of the refugees returned to their hometowns with the consolidation of Frankish rule. The third mode of takeover , following a formal act of surrender, was equally bloodless and did not entail Muslim dislocation. Nablus was the earliest instance. A few day before the fall of Jerusalem, the crusader leaders Tancred and Eustache of Boulogne went on a foraging expedition during the course of which they reached Nablus. The Muslim inhabitants fled to the Turkish-garrisoned castle leaving the Franks free to pillage the town, though native Oriental Christians dissuaded them from setting it on fire. Thereupon the inhabitants who had taken refuge in the castle promised Tancred and Eustache that they would hand Nablus over to them should the Crusaders conquer Jerusalem. True to their word, after the fall of Jerusalem they sent messengers to announce that the Turks had left Nablus and the Tancred and Eustache were welcome to take possession of it. … siege culminating in negotiated surrender was another mode of Frankish takeover. The terms of surrender varied. … The linkage between assault and massacre suggests that the crusader leaders followed, or were largely bound by, prevailing customs of warfare."
(Source: Madden, Thomas F. Editor Blackwell essential readings in history: The Crusades Pg. 241-243)



"A Crusader of yore. It was their ruthless bravery that helped Europe remain a civilized continent and enjoy a millennium of relative peace and progress with our Renaissance, Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Reason. Had it not been for the Crusaders, we would have all been yelling blood-curdling slogans like “Death to this” and “Death to that” as do the Muslims all over the Muslim world till today." (History of the Crusades against Jihad)



"But were the early crusaders at least in part large-scale plundering expeditions, not unlike those already being launched into Moorish Spain? The pope and the bishops at the Council of Clermont were concerned that men might join the First Crusade ‘for money’. The contemporary historian Albert of Aachen, telling the story of a vision of St Ambrose by an Italian priest, reported the priest’s mental confusion , because

Men hold different opinions about the way (of God). Some say that the wish to go has been aroused in all pilgrims by God and the lord Jesus Christ: others that it was through lightheadedness that the Frankish magnates and the multitudes were moved, and that it was because of this that obstacles hindered so many pilgrims in Hungary and in other kingdoms, so that they could not carry out what they had intended.

There can bo no doubt that crusading attracted violent men, whose appetites must have been sharpened by the disorientation, fear and stress they experienced during campaigns. The march of some of the armies of the First Crusade began with a vicious persecution of Jews in France and Germany, marked by extortion and looting, and the passage of crusades through the Balkans was punctuated by outbreaks of pillaging. The eyewitness accounts of the crusade often contain descriptions of individuals’ desire for plunder, as in the message passed down the lines during the Battle of Dorylaeum in July 1097: “Today, if God pleases, you will all become rich men.’ Jerusalem itself was comprehensively sacked two years later and, according to one account, ‘many poor men were made rich’, although this reference was to the occupation of houses in the city. A victory over an Egyptian counter-invasion force a month later was reported to have brought the Christians large quantities of spoil. How much of this loot would have been dissipated on the return journey and how a crusader would anyway have found the physical means to carry it home with him are other questions. On the other hand, many in the exodus from Palestine in the autumn of 10969 appear to have been impoverished by the time they reached northern Syria. And one cannot disregard the fact that, because the armies of the First Crusade had no proper system of provisioning, plundering was essential for their survival, particularly once they were far from supply points. Even when they had a rendezvous with European shipping, their control of the port of Suwaidiyah near Antioch brought them only limited supplies, although they were now in touch with Cyprus which seems to have been quite a generous provider. All leaders, from great to small, had to live with the reality that their followers expected from them at the very least a subsistence level of provisioning: this alone would account for an obsession with loot."
(Source: Madden, Thomas F. Editor Blackwell essential readings in history: The Crusades Pg. 162-163)

I know that there will be question on the Reliability of Reliance of the Traveller so here is some of its certification.

[Certification of Al-Azhar]

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, MOST MERCIFUL, AND COMPASSIONATE

Al-Azhar
Islamic Research Academy
General Department for Research, Writing, and Translation

Mr. Nuh Ha Min Keller
Amman, Jordan

Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His Blessings,
To commence: In response to your request you have submitted concerning the
examination of the English translation of the book ‘Umdat al-sallik wa ‘uddat al- nasik by Ahmad ibn Naqib in the Shafi School of jurisprudence, together with appendices by Islamic scholars on matters of Islamic law, tenets of faith, and per sonal ethics and character: we certify that the above-mentioned translation corresponds to the Arabic original and conforms to the practice of faith of the orthodox Sunni Community (Ahl al-Sunna was al-Jama’s).
There is no objection to printing it and circulating it.

The stamping of the pages of the above-mentioned work with the seal of the department has been completed.

May Allah give you success in serving Sacred Knowledge and the religion.
Peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His Blessings.

Composed on 26 Rahab 1411 A.H./11 Feb 1991 A.D.

General Director of Research, Writing, and Translation Fath AllahYa Sin Jazar [signed]

Muhammad ‘Umar Muhammad ‘Umar [signed]

Seal of al-Azhar[stamped]
General Department for Research, Writing, and Translation (Page xx, xxi)