Nothing in history stands alone

Received this note the other day:

Dear Mr. Webster:

I’m writing to comment on a portion of your brief review of Kingdom of Heaven , which I believe is inaccurate.

The review states that the movie takes us back to the 12th century, “when the seeds to Middle East religious and ethnic conflict were first sown.” This is inaccurate – by about five centuries. In the decades after the death of Muhammad in 632, Islam undertook an aggressive expansionist policy, conquering, among other countries, Palestine, Syria, Persia, and Egypt.

In the 700s, Islam turned its attention to Europe, conquering much of Spain and Portugal. From there they crossed the Pyrenees and attacked what is now France; they were driven back by the French under Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.

In the 800s, Islam conquered Sardinia and Corsica, and in 902 conquered Sicily. In the 800s, they captured portions of southern Italy and on numerous occasions even marched on Rome, but were driven back in a series of battles in the 900s and the early years of the new millennium.

Please, this is not some sort of anti-Islamic diatribe. The behavior of many of the European Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries cannot be justified. But the seeds for the conflict had been sown much earlier, and many of those seeds were sown by Islam, which invaded Europe long before Europe invaded Palestine. Nobody’s hands were clean.

The line in the movie review might be dismissed as, well, just a line in a movie review that is at least partially true, and movie reviews are not history texts, so no big deal. But this kind of historical inaccuracy is ultimately damaging and contributes to this ongoing notion that somehow the West and Christianity are bad, having picked a fight that the Middle East did not want, and that all might be peaceful today had it not been for European Christians. But for centuries, Europeans, on their own soil, had been fighting off an aggressive threat to their way of life, and I believe that part of the story has to be told as well. It strikes me as analogous to telling the story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without mentioning Pearl Harbor .

Thank you for hearing me out.

Best regards,

Michael J. O’Neal, Ph.D.
Moscow, Idaho