Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

210 t CHAPTER EIGHT
have been parsed by some as national wars but by other Jewish
mujahideen as genuine crusades fought to realize the divine pledge
of “next year in Jerusalem” or, even more grandly, to take and
hold Eretz Israel, the “Land of (or for) Israel” that was promised
in the Bible and never foresworn.
The Christian Church is not a state as such and so cannot formally
declare or conduct a war. It has, however, on occasion permitted
and even encouraged both warlike acts and formal wars in
the name of religion. An example is the Crusades, the first of which
was called for by Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1095. The Crusade—its
formal title was peregrinatio in armis, “armed pilgrimage”—had
as its stated objective freeing the Christian holy
places in Jerusalem from the Muslims (Jerusalem fell to the crusaders
in 1099, was retaken by the Muslims in 1187), and it was
garlanded with the Church’s spiritual rewards and indulgences for
those who voluntarily participated in this and later attacks against
Muslim lands.
Originally the Crusades had nothing to do with attempts to persuade
or force the Muslims to convert—European Christian missionary
activity among the Muslims was rarely attempted and notoriously
unsuccessful—but the later Crusades began to adopt it as
an objective, particularly as attempts at taking and holding Jerusalem
and Palestine began to seem increasingly illusionary. Coerced
baptism never found much favor among the Church’s canon lawyers.
It was just such a canon lawyer, however—Innocent IV, as he
was known when he was elevated to the papacy in 1243—who
defined the Church’s position: though nonbelievers might not
be coerced into conversion, the pope, as vicar of Christ on earth,
had the authority to order even non-Christian powers to admit
preachers of the Gospels into their lands, and, if they refused, to
authorize Christian states to use force to effect their entry. Thomas
Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica (1265–1271), echoes Innocent’s
reason and adds three other grounds that justify a state’s use
of force against the infidel: the latter’s hindering the Christian faith
by “blasphemies, evil suasions, or open persecutions.”