Medievalism, Imagination, and Violence: The Function and Dysfunction of Crusading Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Political World (original) (raw)

2019, Engaging The Crusades, Vol. II: The Crusades in the Modern World

Since the events of 11 September 2001, and the deployment of a political, social, and cultural discourse around the ‘War on Terror’, perhaps no area of medieval studies has enjoyed more of a resurgence than crusade scholarship, attempting to connect this modern-day phenomenon with its historical iterations. The original crusades, a series of military engagements that took place largely in the Middle East and were sponsored by the Catholic church and powerful European warrior princes, are generally held to have spanned the 200 years from 1095 to 1291, and laid the groundwork for a millennium of troubled relations between ‘the West and the Rest’: a supposedly incompatible frontier of competing cultures, embedded in a distinct values-hierarchy. In this model, whereas one (the West) is rational, secular, forward, progressive, tolerant, humane, and civilised, the other (the Rest) is irrational, sectarian, backward, static, intolerant, inhumane, and uncivilised. This problematic paradigm, articulated most influentially in Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, has been central to the crafting of U.S. foreign policy over decades. The rise of ISIS has also featured a nearly ubiquitous characterisation of it as ‘medieval,’ ‘barbaric’, or otherwise synonymous with the ‘stone age’, with a strong implication that this sort of violence is unknown to the Western societies they are attacking. The role of an ‘imagined medieval’ in this particular conflict is thus paramount – and arguably quite dishonest.