August 8, 2023 Show with Raymond Ibrahim on “Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam” (Part 2)

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Setting Up Part Two of the Crusades Discussion

And I'm thrilled to have back on the program a returning guest for part two of a discussion that we began last Tuesday on August 1st, part two of Defenders of the West, the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, and that is the title of the latest book by Raymond Ibrahim, who is a translator, author, columnist, widely published expert on the Middle East and Islam.

He is the Distinguished Senior Shulman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Raymond Ibrahim.

Hello, Chris, very good to be with you again. I look forward to our part two conversation.

Yes, and I will give our listeners our email address right now if they have a question. It is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. And just as I did last time, I want to give a caveat in the beginning of the program that my guest and I have significant theological differences.

He is from an Eastern Orthodox background and I am from a Reformed Protestant background, although I was raised Roman Catholic. I abandoned Roman Catholicism in my 20s and embraced the gospel that I believe to be the true biblical gospel and the true biblical Christ and so on.

So this is a different kind of a program where we're focusing on a very significant series of wars from history. And one of the reasons I thought this would be a valuable program and even have two parts is because there is even debate amongst Protestants and even my fellow Reformed Protestants on whether or not we are to view the Crusades as a positive or negative thing.

And, of course, there is always the possibility that many will believe that there is a combination of both, as with most things on this earth. But I just wanted to let you know that I am still on a journey into understanding the Crusades in a deeper way.

So I'm not even 100 percent sure where I stand yet on this issue. And let's just at least summarize what we took care of in our discussion last time. The Crusades, if you could remind our listeners, the period of time in history where these wars were taking place, where the Roman Catholic Church was basically protecting Western Europe from invading Islamic armies, if I'm not mistaken, but you could pick it up from there.

Sure, Chris. So the Crusades really begin in 1095 A .D. That's when they were called for, and I'll get to that. But I think the most important aspect, and to recap, as you said, is to really present the Crusades not in a vacuum, which is often what happens, but to sort of give you the history, the backdrop of how we got to the Crusades.

So after the Prophet Muhammad dies and basically a caliphate rises to power and essentially declares what's known as jihad on the Christian world. So at the time, Christianity was understood to be spread all over North Africa, the Middle East.

All these, of course, is where, you know, the Middle East is where Christianity was born, obviously. So that makes sense. And in parts of Europe, southwest of the Danube and the Rhine, meaning not in Germany, not really in Scandinavia.

I'm talking about the 7th century. At any rate, if you look at a map of what was Christian then during this jihad that was declared, three quarters of it was conquered. So all of North Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Spain, into France.

We know the famous Battle of Tours in 732. And then later on in the East, you get the Turks. They become Muslim. They declare jihad. They embrace the jihadist ideology. They quote the same Koran verses and so forth, and they enter and conquer Eastern Europe, the Balkans specifically.

And as late as 1683, they reached Vienna. So now the Crusades, where do they fit? So basically, after the initial conquest of North Africa and the Middle East, and Europe was really the word, the West, when we use it, when we refer originally to Europe, what that really meant was the westernmost bastion of Christianity that did not get swallowed up in this Islamic revolution that overwhelmed the Christian world.

So it was continuously harried in warfare and so forth, as I mentioned. But right before the Crusades, right around 1070, the Turks, as I was mentioning, they went into the Balkans. But before that, they started going to the Balkans in the 1300s and so forth.

Before that, in 1070, they started conquering what's known as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire. And a big chunk of it was in Asia Minor, what we call today Turkey. And during those wars, literally the sources talk of Christian peoples, Eastern Orthodox Christians, being by the thousands and tens of thousands, being massacred, enslaved, burned alive, everything you can imagine.

There are churches, thousands of churches. Most of them were actually Armenians, but also Greeks. And this is ironic, because when people speak of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of Turks, they often are talking about the early 20th century and late 19th century.

But actually, you go back a thousand years ago, as I am, in the mid -11th century, and it was the same sort of horrific tale. At any rate, the Eastern Roman Emperor Alexius called for Western aid to stem this tide of this renewed jihad, which was swallowing up new lands of the Byzantine Empire, Asia Minor.

And that was what brought about the Crusades. So the Franks, that's what they're called in the sources, basically the European knights, the Franks, mostly centered in Francia, modern-day France, but also German nations and Northern European nations, all basically heard the call in Clermont.

Pope Urban basically said what I've been saying. And he gave many anecdotes and examples of what the Turks were then doing to Christians in the East and to churches. And they were also doing the same thing in Jerusalem, which was a place of pilgrimage for Europeans.

And they were attacking the Europeans and killing them and raping them and enslaving them and all sorts of things. So that was the origin. That's what made the Catholic Church call for the Crusades. It was understood in the concept of just war theory, meaning that the aggressors were the Muslims or the pagans, as they're known in the sources, and it is incumbent on Christians.

And they often would quote the church father, Augustine. It's incumbent on Christians to fight them back because they're the aggressors. Innocents are being killed. And if we just stand by or turn the other cheek, then that's a bad thing because the aggressors live on and the innocents die.

So that's actually that's what propelled so many Europeans to give up everything in Europe and go on this horrific trek into the Middle East, where even before they reached the Holy Land, they were dying of starvation and thirst and battles with Turks and other Muslim groups and plagues and so forth.

But to them, it was worth it because they were fulfilling Christ's command to love your fellow man, with all your heart, which they understood in that sense dealt with Jerusalem. That's the land pre-modern Christians had a very deep rootedness to the sense of land and regions and places.

So for the for Muslims to be doing that in Jerusalem, where Christ lived, died and was resurrected was a travesty. So that also propelled them. But that's anyway, that's in a nutshell. And I think what I just said is very different from what how the Crusades are usually presented.

Usually, like I said, they're presented in a vacuum and people don't tell you. I've read historians. They'll make it sound as if Islam and Muslims were peaceful with Christians and they did nothing for centuries.

And then all of a sudden, the Catholic Church decided to go and cause mayhem. But in fact, it was a response, a belated response, as Bernard Lewis, the historian famously said, to four centuries of nonstop jihad and basically swallowing up Christian territory and slaughtering Christians.

So this was a war of defense that the Church of Rome had waged.

Yeah, it was seen as a just war, which would mean a war of defense. The Christians did not see themselves as initiating the conflict. It was seen as a rebuttal, a response to what the Muslims had been doing for the reasons that I had given.

And earlier, I identified my guest, Raymond Ibrahim, as Eastern Orthodox. More specifically, he is a Coptic Christian or from that background. And they are sometimes called Oriental Orthodox. But I learned from my guest that that the Coptics do not like that label.

Am I right?

Yeah, I mean, it's because it's sort of redundant. Oriental means Eastern. And then you have the Eastern Orthodox. So it's sort of a semantic distinction, I suppose. But itself, it's kind of a meaningless word.

You could just as well say Eastern, right?

Right. And this book, as you have informed me, to remind our audience or to tell them for the first time if they missed part one, it is not any kind of defense of Roman Catholic theology other than the just war theory.

You are not Roman Catholic yourself. So neither you or I, myself being a Reformed Protestant, had a dog in this fight or should I say our specific people, although there is a much more close harmony between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholicism, there are also stark differences that remain today.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not Catholic, never have been, never plan on being. And I'm approaching it with a historian's lens. And in fact, yeah, the Catholic Church and the Coptic Church actually have been at odds as well.

So I have no reason to be standing up for Catholicism. I'm essentially approaching it from a historical perspective. But having said all that, I can also say that if it wasn't for the essentially Catholic defense of Europe, there's a good chance that Europe could have turned Islamic all those centuries ago because it was the Catholic.

It's ironic to me when I look at Pope Francis, and he's so open to Islam, so tolerant. He gives talks in areas that have Muslims and covers up the cross and does all sorts of things, says bring down the walls.

And it's ironic to me because he's the exact opposite of what his forebearers, the original Catholic popes were. They were actually the most militant and called for defense against Islamic incursions.

So if it wasn't for that, there's a good chance if it wasn't. And remember, when I say Catholic, I don't mean it's sad because when you say the word Catholic, it brings this whole connotation. But I'm just talking about pre-modern Christians who, in a sense, weren't even really called Catholics.

The whole Catholic term comes up in juxtaposition to Protestantism. So you understand the distinction. But they just when you look at the sources, they call themselves, they describe themselves as Christians.

Their motivations, often a lot of these crusaders who I chronicle in my books are very altruistic. They'll talk about they're willing to die for Christ, et cetera, et cetera. So it doesn't necessarily ring a Catholic bell in the sort of, you know, the stereotypical sense that I think we have today.

Why the Crusades Are Misrepresented

Yes. And I'd like to also remind our listeners or inform them for the first time if they didn't hear part one, that this book has been highly praised by one of my favorite political commentators on Fox News, Victor Davis Hanson.

He stands far above, in my opinion, the vast majority of political experts on Fox News or anywhere else for that matter. And he was very frequently on Tucker Carlson, who I miss greatly. I didn't always agree with Tucker Carlson.

I have my questions about his understanding of Christianity and theology. But he is definitely a superb political talk host. And I know that Victor Davis Hanson was just as upset, if not more, as I was when Tucker was forced out of there.

But that's just to give you kudos that somebody as highly respected as Victor Davis Hanson also wrote the forward to this book. So that's something to seriously consider and was definitely a part of the reason that I gave this book more serious attention and wanted to interview you.

Now, as you already have said, and as I brought up last time, the majority of people, and I would say including Roman Catholics today, have a knee jerk reaction to the Crusades and will automatically identify it as a horrible, wicked blight on the history of Christendom.

And I think, if I'm not mistaken, I'm almost certain that the last three popes, John Paul II, Benedict and Francis, have all apologized and asked for forgiveness from the Muslims for the Crusades. I don't recall anybody from the papacy apologizing for the torture and murder of Protestants, but they did, I'm nearly certain, ask for forgiveness of the Muslims for the Crusades.

Did you ever share that opinion? Was this something that you grew to understand as being not only a positive thing but a necessary thing for the survival of Christianity in the West? And was this journey of understanding the situation more deeply brought about while you were writing the book, or did you already have a settled opinion before the book?

Well, in my earliest youth as a teenager and in my early years in college, I just assumed the Crusades were what they were presented, which was basically a hostile Catholic church that just went and committed atrocities against peaceful Muslims.

That was already sort of in the air. It's not as bad as today, of course, in the so-called woke culture. But as I studied in college, I majored in history, including the medieval era, and you mentioned Victor Davis Hanser.

He was my professor, actually, and so that was definitely a blessing. But I learned a whole lot because one of the things I learned to do quickly was to really rely on primary sources. And I also read Arabic, and so I could read European primary sources, I could read Arabic-Islamic primary sources, and they just were a complete different story from how the Crusades were being represented by so-called secondary histories, meaning modern-day historians of today who supposedly have accessed, looked at, analyzed the primary sources, and now they're telling us what it was all about.

Well, the way they represented it is not how the primary sources represent it. And the primary sources represented it the way I just mentioned it, including the Muslim ones. So the Muslim sources are very clear that they conquered Christian lands, that Christianity is an abomination, that the cross must be broken, that Christians must be subjugated, etc., etc.

And the Koran also has very, you know, teaches that, essentially calls them infidels, Christians. It says they must be warred on until they are subjugated, etc., etc. And the European sources were also the same and unequivocal about all the damage that occurred all throughout Europe in the beginning of the Muslim conquests, for example, in Spain as well, and the Mediterranean islands, and then, of course, the time right before the Crusades.

So I learned quickly that it was very much, and I believe intentionally, being misrepresented, the Crusades, and from what they were. Again, and I don't have a dog in the doctrinal or theological argument between Protestants and Catholics.

The only theological concern I would have is did it conform to just war theory, and it did. So, you know, in and of itself, that's the main point, and it did conform to it. So I could call it a Christian crusade in that sense, because it was part and parcel of just war theory.

But yeah, I've also come to learn that so much of history, the more you dig into it, the more you find out it's very much being misrepresented. The totality of Islam's relations with Western world and non-Muslims in general is very, very skewed.

And I've taken courses in elite colleges, including places like Georgetown University. If you study the history of Islam, it almost invariably begins with the colonial era. And the reason for that is because after a thousand years of warfare, and finally the Europeans actually managed to turn the tide, and they actually entered the Middle East, and Africa, and India, and so forth, and began to colonize.

So you can see them as the aggressors in that sense. But history begins just with that, without telling you how they had been at war for a millennium, and the colonialist powers actually understood that war, and entering into those lands was partially motivated by trying to defang the innate violence that Islam had, including by bringing them up to speed with progress and civilization and so forth.

Secular Muslim Dictators and the Danger of Islamist Takeovers

And one thing that I did not ask you last time, I don't know if you have an opinion on this, but there are people that I know and a couple whom I have interviewed who are Christian apologists who engage Muslims in debate and dialogue, and a couple of them have said one of the greatest errors of the United States in regard to the use of our military and being involved in wars overseas that do not directly affect the United States.

Some of these men, or at least a couple of them, these Christian apologists, have said that it is a grave mistake to topple a dictator who is a more nominal or secular Muslim, because even though we may be dismayed and repulsed and infuriated and disgusted by some of their behavior, or much of their behavior, at the same time they have kept the militant, chronically faithful, those who are faithful to the Hadith and so on, Muslims at bay, who are in reality a greater threat, especially to Christians.

And so these apologists have totally opposed, before and after, the toppling of, let's just say, Muammar Gaddafi, for instance, even though he was a tyrant, he was a more secular Muslim. Would you agree with that ideology or worldview?

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that, and I've actually written much in agreement with it. And it's a basic simple fact. The older generations of Muslims were more progressive, if you like to use that word, or less radical.

And this is a whole different topic of why radical Islam so-called has made such an ascendancy in recent decades. But these earlier ones were definitely more secular, and they were the main stalwarts against their own people, the radicals amongst them.

It includes Saddam Hussein, it includes Muammar Gaddafi, it includes Assad and his father before them in Syria. And the proof of it is if you look wherever you look and these dictators get ousted, it gets so much worse.

And one of the ways it gets worse is for Christians. And so that's a litmus test itself, you can see. So, for example, in Iraq, I never heard about Christians really being persecuted there. And then once Saddam was toppled, and then you saw in Syria where they also almost toppled Assad, but they took parts, that's where you got ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

That's where they came to power. Same thing in Libya, some of the worst Islamic, the 21 Coptic Christians who were beheaded on the beach in Libya, that was after Muammar was toppled. And oftentimes, sadly, it's the U .S. and other Western powers that aid these Islamic terrorists, but then they're called freedom fighters.

And this was, of course, the same story with Al-Qaeda. When we were fighting with Russia or in the Cold War in Afghanistan, we funded and supported Al-Qaeda, but they were called freedom fighters. And we saw how that ended up.

So it's the same thing, Western elements continue funding and sponsoring Islamic terrorists, and then they present them to the West as freedom fighters against dictators. But what they are is Sharia fighters, really.

And they really take their countries down a very dark hole, much worse than their dictators. And like you said, the dictators aren't that great either. But at least in this sense, we're on the same page in that they, too, don't want the radical Muslims around or definitely not in charge.

Right. Well, we are going to go to our first commercial break. And when we return, we're going to immediately delve into some of the specific heroes by name of which my guest Raymond Ibrahim has written in Defenders of the West, the Christian heroes who stood against Islam.

We didn't get too much involved in identifying specific individuals last time. And as soon as we were over on part one during the phone conversation I had with Raymond off the air after the show was over, he said we didn't even really get to identify some of the Christian heroes specifically.

So I wanted to give him an opportunity to do that. That's one of the main reasons we have part two today. So you'll be hearing that. And we invite you to send in your questions to Chris Arnzen at Gmail dot com.

C .H .R .I .S .A .R .N .Z .E .N at Gmail dot com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state and your country of residence. If you live outside the USA, only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with our guest today, Raymond Ibrahim, and we are discussing part two of a discussion that we began last Tuesday on August 1st, Defenders of the West, the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, and our email address is chrisorenzen at gmail .com.

If you have a question, chrisorenzen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence only remain anonymous. If your question involves a personal and private matter like the one I am about to read, before you get into the specific identities of these Christian heroes who stood against Islam, I think this would be a great question to get a response from before we get into that.

We have an anonymous listener who says I'm remaining anonymous because I am in a church who is another one of those churches that views the Crusades only in a negative light. And I was wondering, being a Protestant myself, are you aware of what any of the reformers had to say about the Crusades since the Crusades ended centuries before the Reformation?

Yeah.

I think what happened is during the time of Martin Luther and the earliest reformers, it was strategic to bring up anything negative about the Catholic Church, including the legitimate complaints to make the case against the Catholic Church.

So obviously there were the legitimate complaints, but I think it got to the point where anything from history was immediately also turned around and twisted in a way to attack the Catholic Church, amongst them the Crusades.

I was just going to say, do you know for a fact that was all of them, like not only Luther but Calvin?

No, I don't. No, I can't. No, I just know from my gleamings of readings that various early Protestants would say this or that, usually negative things about the Crusades. But no, I can't really speak to any one specifically.

Well, that is actually a catalyst for me to delve into that myself, to see what Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, John Knox, and others may have said in their opinion about the Crusades, because they, being from Western Europe, might be honest enough to realize that they might have been under Islamic rule and that would have possibly been a much greater hindrance to the Reformation than the tyranny of Rome.

I would think there were early Reformers who would appreciate the Crusades vis-à-vis Islam, but like I said, everything Catholic became seen through a jaundiced lens, including the Crusades, so it got lumped in with all the sins of the Church, basically.

Right. And a listener last time, I thought, brought up a good analogy for those of my Protestant friends and brothers and sisters who have their ire raised and they are, without investigating the facts of this, getting upset that I would allow somebody to defend wars waged by the Roman Catholic Church, in which we have already said were wars of defense.

Keep in mind, our own wars, if you want to bring it much closer to modern history, not only the War of Independence that we had with England, but World War I and World War II, for instance. Do you see value in those wars?

And were these predominantly Christian people, regenerate people, I'm not talking about nominal Christians, but were these, in the majority, regenerate people who were the political leaders and military leaders who were at the forefront of these wars?

I think that you would probably find a tiny minority were actually born again, regenerate people. George S. Patton, who many people view as a military hero of the United States, he was certainly not a Christian.

He actually had very bizarre pagan ideas of his own. He invented his own religion, and I believe he believed in reincarnation and so on. So that's just something to lessen the hostility that you may have if you contemplate that kind of analogy.

Can I add something to what you just said?

Oh, yeah, sure.

It's actually a quote from another historian. He's a Crusades historian. You've probably heard of him, Thomas Madden.

Yes.

And he writes something that very much complements what you just said. I'm going to read it right now. It's a quote. And here's the quote. It is easy enough for modern people to dismiss the Crusades as morally repugnant or cynically evil.

Such judgments, however, tell us more about the observer than the observed. They are based on uniquely modern and therefore Western values. If from the safety of our modern world we are quick to condemn the medieval crusader, we should be mindful that he would be just as quick to condemn us.

Our infinitely more destructive wars, waged for the sake of political and social ideologies, would, in his opinion, be lamentable wastes of human life. In both societies, the medieval and the modern, people fight for what is most dear to them.

That is a fact of human nature that is not so changeable.

Amen. That's a great quote.

Yeah.

Well, if you'd like to... Oh, by the way, I have to tell our anonymous listener, please give us your full name and mailing address. Of course, this will be done through email, so I'm not going to identify you.

Send me an email with your full name and address, because you have won a free copy of Defenders of the West, the Christian heroes who stood against Islam, compliments of Bombardier Books, which is an imprint of Post Hill Press, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com, who will ship that book out to you at no cost to you or Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

If you are a first-time questioner, let us know that as well, because you will also receive a brand new New American Standard Bible, in addition to Raymond Ibrahim's book. But if you could now get into these specific heroes that you wanted to highlight.

Sure. So I basically chronicled the lives of eight different men. And like I think I might have said this earlier in our first interview or not, but I have another book before this. It's called Sword and Scimitar, 14 Centuries of War Between Islam and the West.

And what I did in that book is in eight chapters, I looked at the eight most decisive battles between the West or Europe and the Islamic world, and what came out of those battles and how they really changed the map often.

But what I wanted to do, what I did with this book, Defenders of the West, is I basically looked at the warfares between Islam and Europe and Christians through the lens and the lives of eight men, eight men who identify as being especially impressive in their battles with Islam.

One of the ones that I like and a lot of people like is actually the first chapter, and I'll give you a brief summary of his life. And he's actually a crusader. He's of the First Crusade. So I think that's pretty apropos to discuss him.

His name is Godfrey de Bouillon, and he basically hailed from what today would be modern-day Belgium. But he was basically seen as a Germanic fighter, also seen as a Frank. He was some kind of descendant of Charlemagne, the emperor of Francia.