In a previous article on The Stream, we examined one of the most egregious examples of fake history: Georgetown University Professor John Esposito’s claim that
Esposito is saying that, from the very start, Muslims and Christians had always lived in “peaceful coexistence,” until those vile European Christians decided to ruin it all with the First Crusade.
In reality, however, and as I discussed more thoroughly in that article, those “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” featured Islam violently conquering three-quarters of the Christian world, with all the usual massacres, mass enslavements, and the systematic destruction of churches — 30,000 of them in 1009 alone. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Christians were slaughtered or enslaved by Muslims in the decades before Pope Urban II finally responded to cries for self-defense by launching the First Crusade.
Now, Esposito is offering even more outlandish lies.
Fresh Falsehoods
After mentioning how Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, and how all the Christians in attendance eagerly embraced it, crying Deus Vult (meaning “God wills a crusade be launched”), Esposito writes,
The scholar that Esposito quotes is Francis E. Peters, from his essay, “Early Muslim Empires.” Clearly this academic is as delusional or dishonest as our Georgetown professor. To claim that “there is certainly no evidence that the Christians of Jerusalem” desired aid against their Muslim overlords who were terrorizing them, or that “nothing extraordinary was occurring to Christian pilgrims,” is itself extraordinary — extraordinarily fake.
Here, for example, is what William of Tyre (b. 1130), a contemporary chronicler, said of Christian experiences in Jerusalem right before the First Crusade:
William is saying that, under the Turks, who conquered Jerusalem from the Egyptians in 1071, Christians suffered even worse abuses than under the Fatimids of Egypt and the Abbasids of Persia, which were bad enough. He proceeds to offer a typical example:
Christians Felt Freed by Crusaders
As for European pilgrims to Jerusalem prior to the First Crusade, Michael the Syrian (b.1126) writes:
Such was the fate of one German pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1064. According to one of the pilgrims:
Then there is the fact that, whichever city the First Crusaders liberated on their long trek to Jerusalem, its indigenous Christians regularly hurled themselves at and kissed their feet in gratitude. According to Fulcher of Chartres (b. 1059), a participant and eyewitness of the First Crusade
In another instance, near Bethlehem, Fulcher writes, “when the Christians, evidently Greeks and Syrians [somewhere near Bethlehem]… found that the Franks had come, they were especially filled with great joy.”
Christians also turned on the Muslims and sided with the Franks on multiple occasions, most notably during the liberation of Edessa. This is further proof that they preferred to be ruled by these strange newcomers from the West rather than by the devil they knew.
A Millennium Later
But Esposito denies all of that by quoting, not eyewitnesses to and contemporary sources of those events, as I have been, but his own contemporary, the late Francis E. Peters, who only passed away in 2020. Peters sarcastically claims that,
Why all this lying? Simple: to “prove” that the Crusades were unprovoked and unjust wars (which, among other travesties, brought an end to “five centuries of peaceful coexistence”). Thus, in the very next sentence after quoting Peters’ absurd claim that nothing “extraordinary” was happening to the Holy Land’s Christians to justify a Crusade, Esposito makes his grand point:
So, there you have it: more flagrantly fake history, all in the usual service of demonizing Christians and making victims of Muslims—even though, in reality, it was the Muslims who were tormenting and massacring Christians. But since the latter dared fight back, they must forever be condemned, lest their modern-day descendants — which include you — get any funny ideas.
Incidentally, the importance of all this is less that academics such as John Esposito or Francis Peters distort history to demonize Christians and victimize Muslims, but rather that theirs is the mainstream narrative.
After all, Esposito’s book, Islam: The Straight Path, was published by the extremely prestigious Oxford University Press, ensuring that countless students of history will read, imbibe, and spread its lies.
