| Abstract: | At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II (1088–1099) called for a holy war against the Muslims who had wrested Jerusalem from Christian rule and who continued to threaten the Byzantine Empire. His audience responded enthusiastically and undertook a campaign commonly known today as the first crusade, which established several crusader states in the Levant. Some 10 years after the council, a Damascene jurisprudent named ‘Alīb. Tāhir al-Sulamī (d. 499–500/1106) publicly dictated the earliest extant call for a Muslim counter-offensive against these states. Al-Sulamī's message met with little success, unlike Urban's: only 14 years later, at the Battle of Balat (also called Ager sanguinis or the Field of Blood), do Islamic calls to jihād (holy war) seem to have started to have significant effect. Despite marked disparities between the religious traditions of each faith, the entreaties of Urban II and al-Sulamī parallel one another in many ways. On the most basic level, they have identical purposes: both call for a military campaign against people of another faith. Yet their similarities go much deeper than this. The two preachings reveal a common mindset toward religious or holy war that is all the more striking because Christian views on holy war and Muslim doctrines of jihād developed in isolation. Moreover, both demand similar responses from their listeners – responses that subordinate secular interests to sacred ones. So although these calls to action came out of separate theological traditions and addressed audiences in quite disparate social contexts, their similarities appear to reflect cross-cultural medieval attitudes toward holy war. Indeed, they suggest that there were certain basic ideas associated with holy war that were common to the medieval mindset, regardless of the individual's cultural background. |
