Crusades imagery was redeployed to recast Muslims as the West’s timeless enemies

Evidence

The word “crusades” evokes images and ideas that overpower its technical definition. This is especially the case when the subject is religion, and specifically, the religion of Islam: the adversary that European Christian forces fought against to reclaim the Holy Land during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Tying Islamophobia to imperialism and unveiling it as a global phenomenon requires a return to its formative roots, the Crusades, when “notions of race and of Muslims as inferior beings could come to the fore in a context where European nations were in a position to actually challenge and eventually dominate once-powerful Muslim empires.” The orientation of Islam as the sworn enemy of the West, and Muslims as the irredeemable bloc wed to dismantling “Western civilization,” is seeded in the overpowering imagery and ideology of these elevenththrough thirteenth-century battles. The Crusades painted those in the Christian West as sanctified heroes and the Muslim factions as warmongering interlopers in a Manichean struggle between good and evil. As law scholar Leti Volpp observed in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, the tropes tied to the Crusades were powerfully “redeployed” to repaint Muslims—nearly a thousand years later—as the inimical and ominous rivals of Christendom and Western civilization. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing framing of Islamophobia as a coordinated global condition alongside Iftikhar’s global-synthesis view.
• DEFINE: Establishes that ‘crusade’ carries ideological imagery overriding its technical definition.