Glimpses #172: Christians and Muslims; A Story Written in Blood.
Format: 4-page bulletin insert
Our Price: $2.00 per pack (each pack contains 25 copies). Back issues are available only in packs of 25 copies.
Product Description: No one who has lived or traveled in the Middle East can be unaware of the lingering resentment felt toward the "Latins," as the Crusaders are called. This bitterness extends beyond Muslims to Greek Orthodox Christians, who have never forgotten the trauma of the Fourth Crusade of 1204. On that occasion, Crusaders from the West, marching under the banner of the cross, raped and pillaged Constantinople, doing to their fellow Christians what no Muslim army had been able to do up to that point. Missiology expert Ruth Tucker has written of the lingering effects of the crusading mentality on Christian missions: "So bitter was the animosity of Muslims toward Christians, as a result of the savage cruelty manifested during the Crusades, that even today the memory has not been erased, and evangelism remains most difficult among people of the Muslim faith."
Seen from another perspective, the crusades were but a delayed reaction to earlier Muslim aggression. Beginning with the fall of Jerusalem in 636, Muslim armies captured, blitzkrieg-like, all of the major urban centers of early Christianity--Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria, and Carthage (the city of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine). In 1453, Constantinople itself fell to the Ottoman Turks, the ruling force in the Muslim world at that time. During the Reformation, the armies of Islam in the 1520s were pressing on the gates of Vienna. They continued to do so periodically until they were finally turned back in 1683. Leaders of the Christian West were not being paranoid when they saw their civilization threatened by militant Islam.
The crusades were a violent, sporadic, and ultimately ineffectual response to this threat.
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