Sorry, I don't remember who originally wrote this so I can't give them credit. It came off of Myspace and I liked it enough that I saved it.

Pope Urban called the first Crusade in 1095

In 635, 3 years after Muhammad’s death, Damascus fell to invading Muslim armies

In 636 the Caliph Umar invaded and took over the city of al-Basrah in Iraq

In 637, the Christian city of Antioch fell to Muslim invaders

In 639 Jerusalem (at the time a Christian city) fell to invading Muslims

Also in 639, the Muslim General 'Amr started the invasion of Egypt and in 642, Alexandria fell.

In 668, Muslim armies laid siege to Constantinople for several years, and again in 717.

Muslim armies swept rapidly through North Africa and by 711, they were in position to invade Spain. By 715, nearly all of Spain had been conquered and subdued by Muslims

In 732, French General Charles Martel stopped invading Muslims at the city of Tours.

In 792, Hisham, the Muslims ruler of Spain declared another jihad, and Muslim armies again invaded France and were again, stopped cold.

In 827 jihad was declared and Muslims invaded Sicily and Italy, by 846 they had reached Rome but their presence there was tenuous at best. However they remained until 1091 when Normans drove them out.

In 848 yet another Muslim army invaded France and did considerable damage, however over time they ran out of steam and many warriors converted to Christianity.

In 1009, Abu 'Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim, the 6th Fatimid Caliph, ordered that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed along with the Church of the Resurrection.

In 1071, the Seljuk Turks defeated a Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert and by 1076 had conquered Syria, by 1077 Jerusalem had fallen to the Seljuk Turks

So what I’m getting at is, if Pope Urban declared the First Crusade in 1095, why would Christians be considered the aggressors when responding to 450 years of violent Muslim expansion?



So tell me, what do you think?

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"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." Alexander Hamilton

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato

Because it is politcally expidient.

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Liberal-a person who has his cake, eats his cake, and complains that other people don't have cake, and believes that you should donate your cake to them

Because the world of Islam was only retaking the land of their ancestors, that the Romans had conquered and the Christian world inherited. It was not an aggression toward Chistianity, except in the sense that the Christian world took it for granted that what was once Roman territory should now belong to the new central rule in Europe.

The France issue you will find was different to the rest. Spain always had in the past direct links and decendants from Northern Africa and the Islamic leader you speak of joined a force of muslims in Spain and united they expanded until the new leader was able to rule complete.

It is nice to imagine that we as the Western worl were justified in retaliaing however, it should be seen in the light of historical relevence, that includes an expansion by the Roman Legions, through lands that belonged to others. Whether or not those people freely chose the religion of Christianity would have been an irrelavence to those who later decided that the world was a puppet of the Roman Empire, even if under a Christian guise.

What ever happened to the good ole day when you conquered a country and it became yours

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People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp92vkXcC0w

Baggage, it is all about the baggage now. Hey AYFR, I read another of your posts and I need you to know that it is no longer a 'rat's ass', it is a 'fat rats clacker'. Don't know why I told you this, it seemed important to share at the time, now I just don't know what I was thinking.

They were not retaking anything. Islam developed solely in the Arabian desert and the Arabs ancestors did not live in any of the places that were conquered. The only place that the Arabians ancestors lived was in the Arabian peninsula.

I may be misinterpreting here, are you saying that the Romans converted people to Christianity by conquering them? If so, by the time that Rome had actually become Christian, they were in decline. They were no longer taking any more land, it was actually being taken from them.

The lands that Politicon mention were extentions of the Roman Empire, that did become extentions of the Holy Roman Church(the New Rome). These lands were once under one ruler and that includes the Arabian Peninsula. That was the Persian Empire. My point is that there was no reason for a crusade based on the re-aquesition of land by Islam(the new Persian Empire), simply because it was held under Christian dominion. And no I did not imply that the Roman Empire was Christianising the world.