The average American knows little about Islam apart from the bare fact that it is a “religion.” From this, certain things follow for that average American. First: Islam is a private matter which the state and all non-Muslims are bound to tolerate. Second: when Muslims fail to practice reciprocal tolerance toward non-Muslims, this cannot be due to their religion per se, but must have its source elsewhere—such as in a mysterious process called “radicalization.”
Americans believe these things because of a revolution in religious thinking carried out within Western Christendom in the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries. This involved a shift away from understanding religion as a comprehensive set of beliefs and rules meant to inform society as a whole and toward considering it an affair of individual conscience. The practical goal of this “privatization of religion” was the worthy one of bringing an end to the destructive wars of religion which shook Europe in the century following the Protestant Reformation.
But the average American is not familiar with this chapter of intellectual history and hence does not understand that the modern ideal of religious toleration is not natural or universal. It is an historical achievement specific to European Christendom. He therefore assumes that the private character of religious belief and the moral requirement upon all of us to tolerate freedom of individual religious conscience are timeless and perhaps even self-evident. This is a good example of what novelist Gore Vidal meant when he famously said that USA ought to stand for the United States of Amnesia. We suffer from the provincialism of time in a way most of our enemies do not.
In fact, the revolution in religious thinking which accompanied the Enlightenment and the rise of liberalism never occurred within Islam. To this day, it is difficult for Muslims even to get their minds around the modern Western conception of religion as something private. For the Muslim, Islam is a total way of life and thinking which governs every aspect of social reality—law, politics, economics, war, and peace—and not primarily a matter of personal conscience. Muhammad taught that it is a duty incumbent upon every Muslim to support the struggle against all other laws and religions until Islam rules over the entire world. Unending warfare against the non-Muslim world is intrinsic to Islam.
Raymond Ibrahim is an American-born writer of Coptic Egyptian ancestry. As such, he has no illusions about Islam. He knows, e.g., that Muslims had to persecute the Christian native stock of Egypt cruelly for some seven centuries before a Muslim majority could emerge there, and that another seven centuries were required to reduce Christians to the 10 percent of the Egyptian population they constitute today. Before writing the work under review here, he produced Crucified Again (2013), an account of Christian persecution in the contemporary Islamic world, Sword and Scimitar (2018), an overview of Islam’s fourteen-century war against Christendom, and Defenders of the West, (2022) a collection of biographical sketches of eight men who led Europe’s defense against the Islamic enemy, including Richard the Lionheart and Spain’s El Cid.
The present book, The Two Swords of Christ, focuses on the Templars and Hospitallers, military and religious orders that played a central role in the Crusades. The title alludes to Luke 22: 36–38, in which Christ tells his disciples: “He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, it is enough.” During the Middle Ages, this passage was interpreted allegorically, as Ibrahim explains: “Christians were to fight two sorts of evils with two sorts of swords—a spiritual sword against spiritual enemies, and a physical sword against physical enemies.”
The Knights of the Temple and the Hospital were embodiments of this principle: they were monks subjected to a strict spiritual rule and soldiers ready at a moment’s notice to sacrifice their lives in defense of the faith. They did not believe that turning the other cheek was the whole message of the Gospel, nor did they believe themselves obligated to tolerate a religion that persecuted their own. Their story is especially worth recalling in an age when Christianity has largely been reduced to sentimental humanitarian ....
Raymond Ibrahim knows that a war does not end simply because one side forgets it is being fought; all that happens is that the forgetful side ensures its own defeat. The war waged for so many centuries by Christendom’s military orders continues, but who is prepared to assume the burden once borne by the Knights of the Temple and the Hospital?
