I really hate talking about issues like this because I expect better reasoning from Muslims and even from secularists. Muslims know that their religion spread by the sword and offensive conquests so they try and do one of two things. The first one is to say that it was defensive and the second one is moral equivalence. How are their expansions equivalent? Well, we have the crusades. If a Muslim ever brings this up again, here is how to answer him. I recently had to do this to some Muslim on Twitter who tried to justify Islamic conquests and say that Christians did similar things.
So the crusades came up. The crusaders controlled parts of the Holy Land from 1099 until 1291 when the last crusader kingdom fell. Less than 200 years did these foreigners occupy the portions of the Holy Land. For the sake of argument let’s assume the crusades were 100% imperialist and evil.
The crusades were called in 1095 by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in France. When the army went to the Holy Land and captured Jerusalem they took it over from the Fatimids, which were a North African Shia Empire. In other words, they were foreigners. The Fatimids had taken it over from from the Seljuk Turks who were from central Asia and had just moved into that region.
Now, when the last crusader kingdoms fells, it was at the hands of the Mamluks who were another African Empire based out of Egypt. More foreign rule. Eventually the Ottomans(central Asians now based out of Constantinople) took it from the Mamluks in 1517. These foreign rulers held control over this land until 1917; 400 years total. Crusader control of the region was less than 200 years long.
The holy land has pretty much always been under foreign control. There are only two foreign occupiers who the Muslims complain about: the crusaders and Israel. They’ve never complained about foreign Muslim empires who ruled that area for 3 to 4 times longer than the lifespan of the crusader states and Israel combined.
It should also be pointed out that Saladin, the Muslim leader who won several battles against the crusaders was a foreigner to the region as well. He was a Kurd from Tikrit in Northern Iraq. He had as much connection to that land as a Catholic crusader from France. But he’s a Muslim so he doesn’t get condemned.
Whenever a Muslim brings up the crusades, tell them to condemn the foreign Muslim occupiers of the holy land who ruled it for much much longer. This includes the Fatimids, Seljuks, Mamluks, Ottomans and many other foreign Muslim empires. Bring this up to the secularists as well. Some people simply don’t know history.
Here’s a graphic I made and put on Twitter. I wanted it to go viral but it didn’t. Maybe one of my readers can help me out?
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