Kingdom of Heaven
I am very much interested in seeing this movie. However, I read a review by someone named Kirk Honeycutt here. In it, he says the following:
"Kingdom" fulfills the requirements of grand-scale moviemaking while serving as a timely reminder that in the conflict between Christianity and Islam it was the Christians who picked the first fight.
Ahem...I certainly hope that Ridley Scott does much better than this simplistic nonsense. Did Mr. Honeycutt or Mr. Scott (or anyone ever to think about the Crusades) ever stop to think how the Muslims first arrived in Jerusalem? (Or for that matter the vast majority of the regions now predominantly or significantly Islamic - Indenosia I believe is the only exception.)
As memory serves, when Omar took Jerusalem it was in the hands of the Christian Byzantine Empire round about 638AD and I am going to guess that they didn't welcome the Muslim army with open arms with the understanding that Muslim rule was such a carnival of paradisical fun, freedom, and joy as we are too often lead to believe. Ask some of our Orthodox martyrs.
If this movie plays that politically correct rubish my accompanying friends had better be ready for a good old fashioned James-tirade over the beers afterwards. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying the Crusades were a great thing, but let's get over this western self-abnegation and realize that the west really wasn't doing anything that the Muslim armies had more succesfully done: military conquest. Save for the 4th's detour, theirs was an attempt at reconquest...if you lump european east and west together. (Which likely isn't fair.)
Mr. Honeycutt and Mr. Scott would do well to remember that there were innumerable Christians in Jerusalem and in many places throughout the Middle East long before Muhammed was even born.
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I don't know (Am I a Christian? How would I know for sure?)...regardless, they certainly saw themselves as such and I defer to their choice of titles. Surely they were as Christian as Omar's caliphate was Muslim.
neither side expressing any real display of their religious tenets.
Are you sure? I'm not.
My point was this: to claim that the crusades were "christians" throwing the FIRST punch at "muslims" is absurd. And its absurdity is shown by the fact that "Christians" (I'll let you be the judge of whether they were REAL Christians) were in "possession" of that land first and thus the Crusades came AFTER something else happened that had changed that situiation.
So if we wanna try and say who hit who first, well you gotta go back ALOT further than the Crusades.
I have greeted the news of a movie about the crusades with great trepidation. Indeed a sense of personal angst gripes my reins and heart.
Orthodox Christians should remember that it was the crusaders and their aftermath that destroyed the Christian majorities in Antioch and Jerusalem, and Egypt. Without exculpating the Islamic response, the crusaders themselves did a great deal to weaken Eastern Christians.
Well before the much noted sacking of Constantinople, the very first crusade expelled the Orthodox Patriarch of ANtioch, who, by the way had not yet remove the Pope from his dipychs!! The Latin Patriarchate of Antioch continued to the 1960's. (this does not include the 3 or 4 uniate Pat.s of Antioch.)
American Orthodox today seem to possess so little historical memory, or fail to possess as their own the historical memory of our Orthodox forefathers and foremothers. Taking sides with the West against Islam has ALWAYS been a disaster for Eastern Christians. One might consider even more recently the position of the British Empire in the CRimean War.
Even today we have can watch, if we are paying attention, the coup de grace given to the Assyro Chaldeans.
We Orthodox have MORE to complain about the crusades than muslims.
We would realize our historical position better if we read such scholarly and indeed irenic works as "The Christian East and the RIse of the Papacy" by Fr. John Meyendorff and Papadakis, and quite publishing and reading culture war pulp fiction like "The Great divide" recently and regretably released by Regina.
Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered!
Reader Yousuf Rassam
Fr. Meyendorff and Papidakis' book was actually required reading for my coursework and I'm glad for it - highly recommended.
I would argue that the Crusades were bad for all around...but I stand by my original point that it can in no way be characterized as a "first strike."
I'd also argue that the Orthodox have suffered from both the Muslim East and the Christian West. Our Greek, Armenian, and Balkan Orthodox have many a martyred saint at the hands of Muslims, so we certainly cannot candy coat THAT relationship. So it's not precisely pulp fiction, lest we deny our Churches extensive hagiography or chose to believe Turkey's absurd denials...a greater pulp fiction I think that needs to be avoided is that Muslim conquest and domination of these predominantly Christian regions was a sunday walk in the park for them.
All that said...I'll take my religious freedom here in the west rather than the freedom our Patriarch in Constantinople has or the Christians who perhaps reside in Saudi Arabia.
Deatr James,
I did not say that Islamic rule was nice for Eastern Christians, I did not say that the martyrologies are pulp fiction, I did not even try to candy coat or otherwise obscure or even much describe dhimmitude for Eastern Christians. I did not say those things, I will not. God forbid! And much less will I mount an apologetic for the Turks or Saudis
I did not even mean to criticize the rejection of the Crusades as a first strike, but to raise certain complications. It is not simple.
The Crusades are the first great expedition of the West as it self defines after the dark ages. I think it fair to call them a first strike against Eastern Christians.
Whatever the first intent, the Crusades very very quickly abandoned any sense of a war liberating the Christian majorities still remaining in Antioch and Jerusalem.
I called "The Great Divide" culture war pulp fiction because it presents an idealized Christianity vs. a negatively idealized islam, all to be judged by the author's version of enlightenment liberation. It criticizes the Orthodox saints and councils because the author can not tell when they are asking women to cover their heads and when to veil completely. It mounts a defense of the Crusades, and unbelievably was printed by an Orthodox press. It is subtitled something like "the triumph of the West" the author seems willing to allow Orthodox into his Western club, but on his own terms. The far famed Samuel Huntington puts us on the other side of the divide.
Without describing Ottoman rule as good, pleasant, cany coated or otherwise, it is a historical fact that what annhilated Christianity in Asia minor was a new secular and democratic Turkish nationalism of Attaturk, which doesn't stop the Turks from being hailed by the US as a model islamic democracy.
As for the Saudis, the Saud family and their Wahhabi sect were confined to the Western deserts of the Arab pennensula until the Brits and allies installed them over all, replacing the HAshemites.
In Christ,
Chance's neighbor.
I've not heard of it.
It sounds like you are trying to blame the west for the problems in the Middle East. I don't buy it. What role did the US or Britain play at Kosovo fields in 1389? (or pick a hundred other examples.)
I cannot and will not discount the violent errors of Islam in causing inumerable problems in the world. On every front of the Islamic world there is strife.
Huntington's work is fascinating and I think he is right in many ways...but I am a committed "orientalists" ala Bernard Lewis. I think Islam is AT LEAST as much (and likely much more) to blame for Middle Eastern problems than the "evil west." Middle Easterners have time and time again shot themselves in the foot and now are trying desperately blame others for their fall from power. Naturally we westerners with our engrained guilt complex are buying it wholesale. But of course I try to remember the fact that western secularization is just as dangerous as Islamism in the east. As I said though, I'd rather be free in the secular west than a dhimmi in Iran.
Secular as Ataturk was, most (maybe all) of our Orthodox martyrs were given the choice to die or embrace Islam. Ataturk simply provided a legal arena for it to happen...which of course they still are trying to deny.
Curious that Mein Kampf is such a big seller there today.
Going to see the movie tonight...the more and more I read the more it seems that the Crusade is simply a backdrop for a more personal story.
:)
I think Ridley Scott just couldn't quite capture what he wanted. It was as if I kept waiting for something prfound to happen and all it could muster was a Rodney King "Can't we all just get along?"
Truly epic battle scenes worthy of the big screen, but it was overall a disjointed film.
Historically it was awful. There were bad christians and good christians and the Muslims were simply responding to which of the two were in power. As if Saladin needed to have his sister murdered in order to convince him to attack Jerusalem? Please.
And then Balain refuses to see one real nasty guy murdered and then take his wife as his own in order to preserve the peace of Jerusalem and keep the authority in the hands of good christians...because it would be immoral. Of course Balain had already SLEPT with the guy's wife...HELLO!
Balain was real, but his character is so distorted in the film that you'd hardly know it. That irks me because if you are going to do historical fiction and you want to jaz it up, please insert a fictional character for us.