"The Muslims had established a system that enabled Jews, Christians, and Muslims to live in Jerusalem together for the first time."
- Groundbreaking.
"Muslims had a more inclusive notion of the sacred, however: the coexistence of the three religions of Abraham, each occupying its own district and worshipping at its own special shrines, reflected their vision of the community and harmony of all rightly guided religion, which could only derive from the one God."
- Separate, but equal?
"Since each faith assumes that it--and it alone--is right, the proximity of others making the same claim becomes an implicit challenge that is hard to bear."
- Ha! --> duhhhh
"A plague also wiped out large numbers of the population, and the Bedouin began to invade the countryside, pillaging the towns and villages and fighting their own tribal wars on Palestinian territory. In Umayyad times, the Bedouin had fought for the caliphate; now, increasingly, they became the scourge of the country. The unrest led to the first signs of overt tension between the local Muslims and the Christians in Jerusalem."
- The suspense is killing me.
"...the dome of Anastasis, which was now nearly as big as the Dome of the Rock. The Muslim residents of the city complained bitterly to the imperial commander that the Christians had contravened Islamic law, which clearly stated that none of the dhimmis' places of worship should be higher than or as large as a mosque or other sacred building of the ummah...Construction had long been an ideological weapon in the city...Now buildings were becoming a way for the communities of Jerusalem to express their hostility toward one another."
- Interesting...Does some form of this Islamic law still present itself in the 21st century city & regional planning?
"Muslims accepted the fact that Christians were there to stay. But when the Greeks began their holy war and there was bellicose talk about the liberation of Jerusalem, the tension became unbearable. In 938, Christians were attacked during their Palm Sunday procession and the Muslims set fire to the gates of the Martyrium."
- WWMD (What Would Muhammad Do?)
"...al-Adudi told the caliph, was the ceremony of the Holy Fire, a trick 'that made a great impression on [Muslim] spirits and introduces confusion in their hearts'...In September 1009, the caliph gave orders that both the Anastasis and the Martyrium of Constanstine be razed to the ground."
- So now we have religious warfare, territorial warfare, architectural warfare, AND psychological warfare...Just how far down does this rabbit hole go?
"It was an entirely uncharacteristic act by an Islamic ruler and filled even the caliph's Muslim subjects with unease. Next new legislation introduced measures designed to separate the dhimmis from the ummah and force them to convert to Islam."
- Will forced converts really consolidate a religion? (Answer: No.) What is this seriously accomplishing?
"The 1030 was the first peaceful year that Palestine had enjoyed for almost a century."
- We're gonna party like it's 1030!
"As the century drew to a close, it was time for another of these Western expeditions, but the pilgrims who arrived in the Holy City in 1099 would come with a sword, prepared not only to defend themselves but to fight and kill."
- That is so Christian* of them!
* Christianity: the religion of love and forgiveness.
CHAPTER 13
"There would be the Peace of God in Europe and the War of God in the Near East."
- Apparently, God has many faces.
"It is unlikely that [Pope] Urban would have got the same response if he had made no mention of the tomb of Christ."
- Prove it.
"The lure of Christian Jerusalem thus helped to make anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe."
- At the moment, I can't wrap words around my feelings of this sentence. I am not pleased to say the least.
"For three days the Crusaders systematically slaughtered about 30,000 of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 'They killed all the Saracens and the Turks they found'...10,000 Muslims who had sought sanctuary on the roof of the Aqsa were brutally massacred, and Jews were rounded up into their synagogue and put to the sword. There were scarcely any survivors."
- Muslims massacred: 10,000...Non-Christians slaughtered: 30,000...Claiming Jerusalem for Christianity: Priceless.
"The streets literally ran with blood...The massacre was a sign of the triumph of Christianity..."
- Jesus would be so proud!
"Once Jerusalem had been won, most of their soldiers went home, leaving only a skeleton army behind. Jerusalem was particularly desolate. It had recently housed about 100,000 people, but now only a few hundred lived in the empty, ghostly city."
- Chills run down my spine thinking of this.
"Crusading had been seen as an act of love: the pope had urged the knights of Europe to go to the help of their Christian brethren in the Islamic world; thousands of Crusaders had died out of love for Christ in the attempt to liberate his patrimony from the infidel."
- I have never seen the words "love", "help", "brethren", "died", "liberate", and "infidel" being used in the same thought before this.
"The Qur'an condemns all war as abhorrent but teaches that, regrettably, it is sometimes necessary to fight oppression and persecution in order to preserve decent values."
- It's funny how there are always exceptions to the rules.
"'Christians everywhere will remember the kindness we have done them.' Christians in the West were uneasily aware that this Muslim ruler had behaved in a far more 'Christian' manner than had their own Crusaders when they conquered Jerusalem."
- Imagine.
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