This Day in Catholic History (Fiery Pope Urban Sermon Launches Crusades)

Nov. 27, 1095—Having already issued decrees over the prior eight days that sought to curb simony, corruption and other deviations from church practice, Pope Urban II electrified a crowd of thousands in a French marketplace with a sermon calling for a continental military mission to deliver Jerusalem from Moslem control.

Urban’s fervent summons to his listeners, a motley group of priests, knights and peasants, spurred the Crusades, a series of expeditions that not only lasted beyond the remaining four years of his reign but into the 13^th century.

The goal of reducing the geographic reach of Islam in the Middle East was not achieved by all the subsequent massive expenditure of blood and treasure. Nevertheless, as with the great majority of wars, it produced unexpected consequences before the clash of arms faded.

A Hot Historical Debate

For centuries, the Western and Muslim worlds viewed the Crusades through sharply different lenses, a result of each sphere’s ethnocentricity. Increased contacts, rather than uniformly leading to greater tolerance and understanding, often only highlighted these profound differences.

From the Western side, the origin of “Crusade” bears witness to the religious fervor evoked by Pope Urban. The word blends the Middle French croisade and the Spanish cruzada, with both ultimately derived from the Latin cruc- or crux—i.e., “cross.” It was the symbol of a faith encircled and under siege.

With the rise of multicultural studies, the term began to take on more complicated overtones. Virtually nobody in the West blinked an eye, for instance, when Dwight D. Eisenhower titled his 1948 memoir on delivering Europe from Fascist tyranny Crusade in Europe.

But 53 years later—five days after 9/11—George W. Bush’s statement at a press conference referring to the war on terrorism as “this crusade” was assailed by many progressives as an ignorant gaffe certain to trigger the anger of an Islamic world with a long memory for ancient wrongs.

All of this has also, in the past 50 years, taken place within the context of constant Mideast tensions and terror, an era in which the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” has been accompanied by a clash of historians. This historiographical debate has “long remained a dialogue of the distinctly hard of hearing,” wrote historian Francis Robinson in an essay on “Islam and the West” in the May 1986 issue of History Today Magazine.

Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun and commentator on comparative religion, epitomized the greater sympathy for Islam among scholars with Islam: A Short History, a revisionist history which argues that “it was Christians who had instigated a series of brutal holy wars against the Muslim world.” In this and Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, she traced many ills of the 20^th century—including the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict—back to the Crusades.

Revisionists such as Armstrong have been countered by the late Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, who argued that “the original justification for crusading was Muslim aggression.” More important, Riley-Smith and the school of historians who followed in his wake reappraised the scope and longevity of the Crusades and the motives of the men who inspired and waged it.

The Council of Clermont: The Background and Fallout

The latter took their cue from Pope Urban, who delivered his sermon--perhaps the most crucial of the Middle Ages--at the Council of Clermont in central France. 

A reforming pope in the tradition of his mentor, Pope Gregory VII, he had convened this meeting in keeping with his longstanding vision of a church that would be “catholic, chaste and free: catholic in faith and the communion of saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from all secular power.”

You will notice one word missing from this sentence: “collegial.” For all his idealism, Urban was not particularly interested in hearing the views of the 200 bishops present. He expected them to listen to and obey his new strictures against clerical misconduct and amassing of power. When finished with them, he turned to the princes of Europe, pointedly using the word “anathema” to warn them against interfering with church affairs.

But then he called for the great military mission in the Holy Land, and the conference took a different turn altogether.

Urban spoke against a backdrop of spreading Islamic military conquests and fractured Christian unity. The Byzantine Empire, sundered politically and even religiously from the West, increasingly shrank in the face of Muslim armies. Altogether, Islam held sway from the coast of modern Portugal to the Hindu Kush. Even in Italy, Rome had been attacked twice and the Emirate of Sicily had been established.

Then, early in 1095, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I made a special appeal to Urban for help, citing Muslim atrocities and the reduction of Christians to slavery and dhimmi (i.e., legal protection in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of taxes).

There was neither audiovisual equipment nor a stenographer on hand to record Urban's exact words. But five eyewitness accounts passed down through the years mention the kind of abuses cited by Alexius, including the following from Balderic, archbishop of Dol:

“Our Christian brothers, members in Christ, are scourged, oppressed, and injured in Jerusalem, in Antioch, and the other cities of the East. Your own blood brothers, your companions, your associates (for you are sons of the same Christ and the same Church) are either subjected in their inherited homes to other masters, or are driven from them, or they come as beggars among us; or, which is far worse, they are flogged and exiled as slaves for sale in their own land. Christian blood, redeemed by the blood of Christ, has been shed, and Christian flesh, akin to the flesh of Christ, has been subjected to unspeakable degradation and servitude. Everywhere in those cities there is sorrow, everywhere misery, everywhere groaning (I say it with a sigh). The churches in which divine mysteries were celebrated in olden times are now, to our sorrow, used as stables for the animals of these people!”

The varying accounts agree that at the conclusion of Urban’s address, the multitude of listeners took up the cry, “God wills it!”

Those who heeded Urban's call took the movement in directions he could not halt. He had anticipated that knights would provide the military force needed for the reconquest, but had not foreseen the extent to which the entire populace would be called on to sustain it through provisioning or, more actively, through taking up arms. (Eventually, an army of between 60,000 and 100,000 was raised.)

Moreover, Urban regarded this mission as so all-consuming that he extended a plenary indulgence (the remission of all penance for sin) to those who aided Christians in the East. He never foresaw how these indulgences would undermine his objective of ridding the Church of abuses, furnishing a major cause for the Protestant Reformation.

The army Urban called into being was big enough to eventually take Jerusalem on the first crusade, but with so many undisciplined recruits, it seized lands and wantonly killed on the way to the Holy Land. Urban died in 1099, before the news of the military success and abuse of power could make its way back to him.

The Crusades, however, survived him, because those initial gains were lost. It took centuries before weariness and disillusion finally wore down the will to sustain the struggle, prompting bitter laments like this from Renaissance scholar-philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam in his Consultatio (1530):

“Every time that this farce has been acted out by the popes, the result has been ridiculous. Either nothing came of it, or the cause actually deteriorated. The money, people say, stays stuck to the hands of the popes, cardinals, monks, dukes, and princes. Instead of the wages, the ordinary soldier is given license to pillage. So many times we have heard the announcement of a crusade, of the recovery of the Holy Land; so many times we have seen the red cross surmounted on the papal tiara, and the red chest; so many times we have attended solemn gatherings and heard lavish promises, splendid deeds, the most sweeping expectations. And yet the only winner has been money. We are informed by the proverb that it is shameful to hit yourself on the same stone twice; so how can we trust such  promises, however splendid, when we have been tricked more than thirty times, misled so often and so openly?”

Many Far-Ranging Consequences

Nevertheless, no different than other movements of such widespread and long-lasting influence, the Crusades produced multiple, diverse consequences, including:

*A redrawn map of Europe. Riley-Smith and the historians he influenced encouraged seeing the Crusades as more than the merely eight (or, by some counts, nine) that had been traditionally counted. A chronology in a work he edited, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, also used the word “crusade” in places like Spain, Germany, Estonia, Finland, and Poland—where Muslim armies threatened. The Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492 may have been the most important, as it allowed King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to use money formerly allocated for military purposes to Christopher Columbus’ transformative first voyage to the New World later that year.

*The formation of a broader European identity. The creation of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne in the year 800 attempted to provide a unity on the continent that had been missing since the fall of the Roman Empire. But the threat of a common enemy fostered cooperation, however inconsistent and faltering, among quarreling princes.

*Stronger papal leadership. Gregory VII’s conflict with Emperor Henry IV represented a watershed moment in church-state relations on the continent. Urban’s assumption of moral leadership expanded on the perilous foothold his predecessor had maintained. Subsequent popes continued to leverage their moral authority and expanded their diplomatic and even military influence.

*Absentee leadership at the national level. Campaigns involving leading armies across vast areas, laying siege to Muslim strongholds, and negotiating peace terms meant that European monarchs were out of their country for long stretches of time. In the meantime, they had to deputize others to act in their stead, sometimes with deleterious results. Prince John, for instance, schemed against Chancellor William Longchamp while John’s older brother Richard the Lionheart was fighting the Third Crusade.

*A heavier taxation burden to finance expeditions. Then as now, long wars were exorbitant. The Crusades not only involved the normal provisioning of a mass army but dealing with the unexpected fortunes of war. (The capture of Louis IX of France while on his first crusade in 1250 brings new meaning to the term “king’s ransom.” In the end, historian Simon Lloyd estimates, expenses for Louis’s crusades amounted to roughly 12 times the monarch’s budgetable annual income.) Although exploitation of material rights and possessions may have helped, greater secular and ecclesial taxes were required to fill the gap—engendering natural resentment.

*The mass involvement of all segments of society in the war effort. It wasn’t simply the soldiers who sustained the war, but financiers, preachers, cooks, and wives.

*Poisoned Christian-Jewish relations. The first pogrom in Western European history occurred from December 1095 to July 1096, with Crusaders attacking Jewish communities in Germany and France. Over time, such outbreaks became more frequent and worrisome.

*Heavy casualties. Andrew Holt, a historian out of Florida State College, is certainly correct in using the word “futility” to describe any attempt to pinpoint the number of casualties in the Crusades when the estimates range wildly, from one to nine million. But there is a larger point that can be fairly made: the loss in life (and, for the wounded, diminished subsequent lives) was enormous for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.

*Improved medical practices. Western medics brought back with them what they learned about trauma during the Crusades. In addition, subsequent hospital practices were heavily influenced by what was learned in dealing with the wounded.

*Greater trade. Merchants passed often between Damascus and the Christian port of acre. Mamluk sultans eventually traded with Venice and Genoa.

*First-hand knowledge of lands beyond one’s community. One of the interesting aspects of American history is the way in which service personnel who had never been outside their towns or cities were exposed through the Civil War and World Wars I and II into areas thousands of miles away. They never forgot what they saw there. Documentation is far sparser for the Crusades than these latter conflicts. But it is hard to believe that the soldiers in the Crusades, who were considerably more isolated than later soldiers, were not similarly transformed by their experiences.

Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on a ‘Distorted Image of Islam’)

“It has never been more important for Western people to acquire a just appreciation and understanding of Islam. The world changed on September 11. We now realize that we in the privileged Western countries can no longer assume that events in the rest of the world do not concern us. What happens in Gaza, Iraq, or Afghanistan today is likely to have repercussions in New York, Washington, or London tomorrow, and small groups will soon have the capacity to commit acts of mass destruction that were previously only possible for powerful nation states. In the campaign against terror on which the United States has now embarked, accurate intelligence and information are vital. To cultivate a distorted image of Islam, to view it as inherently the enemy of democracy and decent values, and to revert to the bigoted views of the medieval Crusaders would be a catastrophe. Not only will such an approach antagonize the 1.2 billion Muslims with whom we share the world, but it will also violate the disinterested love of truth and the respect for the sacred rights of others that characterize both Islam and Western society at their best.”— Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (2002)

Too bad that today’s Republican candidates for President don’t realize this…

This Day in Literary History (Fatwa Placed on Rushdie)

February 14, 1989—Salman Rushdie received the astonishing news that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa (sentence of death) on him in a phone call from a BBC journalist, just as he was heading out to attend the funeral of friend Bruce Chatwin. The coming years in hiding, moving from one safe house to another, must surely have made the novelist wonder whether, at a not-so-distant future, people would be memorializing him, too. That is, if they dared: for Khomeini had not only laid down his edict against the author of The Satanic Verses for blaspheming "Islam, the Prophet and the Quran," but also on “all those involved in the publication who were aware of its contents."

The fatwa was more than Khomeini’s antithesis of a Valentine’s Day message: an incitement to mass hatred rather than individual love. It also represented a marker in militant Islam’s encounter with modernity. No longer would a terrorist group not officially affiliated with a formal government simply strike out against innocents, as happened in the Munich Olympics in summer 1972. Nor would a regime hewing strictly to fundamentalist Islamic tenets confine itself to hostage-taking within its own borders, as Khomeini-inspired “students” had done in Iran in seizing American diplomats during the Carter Administration.

No, now a regime had ordered every follower of Islam, anywhere on the globe, to strike out against a blasphemer—one not even an Iranian--and all those connected to the publication of his book. They would be rewarded for an act of murder--financially, if they succeeded, sexually (in the form of virgins in paradise) if they didn't. The edict became a wedge for those practicing a fringe element of a religion of peace to ward off all criticism of their policies—and an open invitation for those easily gulled by fanatics to take violent offense against easily manufactured outrages.

Khomeini may well have had another motive for issuing the murderous decree: as a distraction from his (and his nation’s) humiliation in signing a peace treaty with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, after vowing that he would never make such a deal to end a war that may have cost over a million lives. That motive might also account for why the fatwa wasn’t lifted when the murderous mullah died four months after the edict…why the regime didn’t lift it for another nine years…and  why, a year and a half ago, another Iranian ayatollah, Hassan Sanei, had re-issued the fatwa, using as a pretext the film Innocence of Muslims, which, he claimed, would not have been made if Satanic Verses hadn’t been published.

Longtime readers of this blog know my low opinion of Margaret Thatcher. (See, for instance, my post, “A Thatcher Depreciation” from nearly a year ago.) Yet, in this instance, let’s give credit where credit is due: Even though the very book that provoked the fatwa also included a far-from-subtle jab against “Mrs. Torture,” the Iron Lady made sure that Rushdie had round-the-clock protection against those intent on ending his life.

For all his brilliance as a master of literary wordplay (see, for instance, this eloquent account in Vanity Fair from his friend, the late Christopher Hitchens), not to mention his frequent prior brushes with controversy over provocative statements and incidents in his books, Rushdie was stunned that Muslims could be offended by a feverish dream sequence in his novel in which prostitutes bear the same names as Mohammad’s wives. 

Rushdie’s years of hiding, in fact, did not bring much in the way of wisdom—his libidinous, preening streak only seemed to stand out all the more every time he dared to break out of his safe houses and attempt to lead a normal social life. (Zoe Heller’s analysis of Rushdie’s recent memoir, Joseph Anton, in The New York Review of Books wryly notes that the years in hiding “had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre.”)

Yet freedom of expression—even very much including freedom to offend—needs to be defended, even when the person one mounts the barricades for is pompous. Until the incident that changed his life, Rushdie’s fiction (including the prize-winning Midnight’s Children) had been taken up with cultural displacement. Now, his own life had added a decided twist on this theme. The frequent critic of the capitalist West now found himself beholden to it for saving his life.

The same ironic reversal held for the novelist’s prior critics. Writing in a blog post for the conservative National Review—a journal unlikely to have much sympathy with Rushdie’s longtime leftist politics—Daniel Pipes refers now to “the Rushdie Rules”: i..e., constraint  on “the ability of Westerners freely to discuss Islam and topics related to it.”

(Photo of Salman Rushdie taken in Warsaw, Poland, October 2006, by Mariusz Kubik)

Quote of the Day (Abdullah Saeed, on Islam and Religious Freedom)

“Despite current challenges, the degree of freedom available to many Muslims, particularly those who are based in intellectually free societies (many of which are in the West), can be used to challenge those who threaten religious liberty. Muslims, who now make up roughly 20 percent of the world’s population, have a political and religious duty to take into account the important values and norms that have extensive grounding in Islam’s most sacred texts and its own tradition. In doing so, Muslim thinkers will be returning to their most important sources of authority, the Qur’an and the Prophet, in support of tolerance and religious liberty.”-- Abdullah Saeed, “The Islamic Case for Religious Liberty,” First Things, November 2011

Quote of the Day (Christopher Clausen, on Islam and Secularization)

“One reason Muslim immigrants may have an easier time integrating into American society is that piety of almost any sort is so much more common and accepted here than in Europe. The complete secularization many intellectuals have been yearning for since the Enlightenment, now nearly achieved in Europe, turns out to bring its own set of unexpected problems. Although George Washington would no doubt be disappointed, an American future of emotional, never-quite-settled conflicts over the place of faith in public life looks like an acceptable price to pay for avoiding the far greater evils that afflict both the devout and godless regions of the earth.”— Christopher Clausen, “America's Design for Tolerance,” The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2007

Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on a Turning Point in Moslem-Christian Relations)

“Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath  
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)  
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, 
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,  
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....  
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)”--G.K. Chesterton, “Lepanto” (1915)

Even in the snippet quoted here from the considerably longer work by G.K. Chesterton, you can sense that this is the kind of old-fashioned poetry that, as the cliché goes, they don’t write anymore. There’s the rhyme, for instance (increasingly, 20^th and 21^st century major poets don’t go in for this the way they used to). There’s the wider perspective, not exclusively on the poet and his troubles (whatever they might be) but on world players and the weight of history. And then there’s the completely unapologetic, politically incorrect designation of good and evil, including the acclamation of a hero.

The Battle of Lepanto, which Chesterton is commemorating, took place on this date in 1571. It was a double watershed moment in world history: not only the last major naval engagement involving galleys in the West, but the point at which the Christian European decisively checked the advance of militant Islam into its own territory.

It shocked me—though thinking about it now, in light of the last point, it shouldn’t have—that Britain’s WWI “Tommies” could recite this poem, and take it to heart as they entered battle. Did they think of these verses on the beaches at Gallipoli, another encounter with men from the Mideast professing a different faith?

I had heard of this poem previously, but had never encountered it until I read it online. I can’t think of any poetry anthology I ever came across that contained it, and I suspect that, with the passing years, it will be even harder to find.

Part of the problem, I think, is this old-fashioned element. In his essays and Father Brown detective stories, Chesterton’s religious certainties are complemented by a genial sense of paradox not unlike his friend and frequent debate foil, George Bernard Shaw.

Not here. It all sounds terribly inconvenient to think about: Moslem ships bearing down on Mediterranean coasts, engaging in mass enslavement, putting the men to work rowing in galleys. (In fact, many of the galley rowers straining at the oars of Moslem galleys at Lepanto were Christian slaves.)

The above lines come near the end of Chesterton’s poem. Many of us feel intense sympathy for the 24-year-old soldier Miguel de Cervantes, knowing that his searing experience of being wounded (losing the use of a his left hand) would lead him down the road of disillusion to create one of the masterpieces of Western literature, Don Quixote.

But Chesterton thinks there’s an important place, too, for the likes of Don John of Austria, who, at the time of battle, was the 25-year-old illegitimate son of the late Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and half-brother of the present king of Spain, Philip II. Don John’s backing did not owe simply to his privileged position, however, as much as to his ardent backing of Pope Pius V’s call for a trans-European Holy League that would mount a last-ditch defense against the Ottoman Empire.

History depends more than a bit on contingency. In 1588, the Spanish Armada that met disaster in an encounter with the fleet of Queen Elizabeth I of England was without the services of Don John, who had died 10 years before. But in 1571, he was still around to command the fleet of the Holy League at Lepanto.

The history that got me interested in Don John was The Galleys at Lepanto, by Jack Beeching, in which the lead-ups and consequences of the battle got much more ink than the naval encounter itself. Over the last decade, however, several other histories have also considered the battle, including Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World, by Roger Crowley; Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto, by Niccolò Capponi; and a chapter in Victor David Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.

There is a reason for this, I suspect. I think it has much to do with the legacy of 9/11 and historians’ need to revisit the past to see how Western Europe once reacted to a prior wave of fear generated by Moslems who claimed to be doing Allah’s will in battling the West.

Lepanto, to be sure, did not end the Moslem threat, anymore than the overthrow of the Taliban, or even the death of Osama bin Laden, has done so now. But it is equally false to claim that the results of the 1571 encounter were negligible.

For years, Europeans were living amid the growing fear that Moslem navy might would sweep all before it. Lepanto punctured the myth of Moslem invincibility. That victory, owing heavily to the Holy League’s material advantage and training in gunpowder (the Turks’ advantage in number of men and ships was undermined by their reliance on bows rather than cannon), did not come without a price, however, just as the West’s War on Terror has not been filled with mistakes and casualties.

Though the Ottoman Empire was left with only a third of its original fleet and it lost 18,000 out of 30,000 men--as well as the battle--it still inflicted terrible losses on the West: 20 ships sunk, 7,000 dead out of 20,000. By the end of the day’s fighting, according to Crowley’s Empire of the Sea, the Holy League could barely sail away because the Ionian Sea was so filled with corpses from the battle.

There were also divisions among those who should have been allies. (The French, bitterly opposed to Spanish gains on the continent and elsewhere, not only refused to join the Holy League but helped finance the Turks.) Even at its best, the alliance could barely be held together.

Holding it all together was Don John, as charismatic as his half-brother Philip was ascetic. While detailing the climate of fear on the brink of this epic naval clash, Chesterton makes clear that help is on the way: “Don John of Austria is going to the war.”

Quote of the Day (John Paul II, on Islam)

“I remember an event from my youth. In the convent of the Church of Saint Mark in Florence, we were looking at the frescoes by Fra Angelico. At a certain point a man joined us who, after sharing his admiration for the work of this great religious artist, immediately added: ‘But nothing can compare to our magnificent Muslim monotheism.’ His statement did not prevent us from continuing the visit and the conversation in a friendly tone. It was on that occasion that I got a kind of first taste of the dialogue between Christianity and Islam, which we have tried to develop systematically in the post-conciliar period.”—Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), edited by Vittorio Messori

Last Sunday’s beautification of Pope John Paul II occurred on the same day that U.S. Navy Seals ended the life of Osama bin Laden, who had used terror in an attempt to revive the Moslem caliphate that held sway in the Mideast during the Middle Ages. It wasn't the first time that his life and message were obscured by media attention given a madman who used terror to propagate a fundamentalist vision of Islam.

In 1979, the first full year of his quarter century as pope, John Paul traveled the globe, an indefatigable evangelist spreading his message of peace. Millions responded to his charisma. Yet the same year, Time Magazine named the Ayatollah Khomeini as its “Man of the Year.” The designation did not imply goodness, the editors insisted, but was simply given to the man who had most affected the news over the last 12 months.

In a way, John Paul’s brief description of this youthful encounter with Islam in the above quote foreshadowed the West’s far more convulsive one in the past three decades, beginning with the 1979 seizure of American hostages in Iran at the urging of Khomeini. Between the lines in this quote, you can sense the pope coming to terms uneasily with the impact of Islam in the modern world.

In a college course on Catholic theology since Vatican II, my professor was at pains to disabuse us about the nature of ecumenism. It was not, he insisted, a watering-down of the essential differences between religions. In fact, he said, attendees at such sessions staked out positions and disagreed as vigorously as possible.

Seen in this light, John Paul’s treatment of Islam in Crossing the Threshold of Hope fulfills my professor’s criterion of ecumenism. The God of Islam, the pontiff notes, is a deity of majesty, but only majesty. Though Jesus is mentioned in the Koran, it’s only as a prophetic forerunner of Muhammad. There is no Cross or Resurrection—and, thus, no “religion of redemption,” or revelation of God within the world.

Far more troubling, one suspects, for this pontiff who sparked a massive nonviolent resistance movement in Eastern Europe that eventually destroyed the Iron Curtain, was his recognition of the limits placed on freedom in countries dominated by political Islam, where a fundamentalist strain of that religion held sway. “In countries where fundamentalist principles come to power," he wrote, "human rights and the principle of religious freedom are unfortunately interpreted in a very one-sided way—religious freedom comes to mean freedom to impose on all citizens ‘the true religion.’”

And yet, John Paul discusses Islam with considerable sympathy. Though he touches on Vatican II’s pronouncements about Islam, it is much more than a pro forma recognition of a recent Church document. Quite simply, he admires the fervor of Muslims:

“It is impossible not to admire, for example, their fidelity to prayer. The image of believers in Allah who, without caring about time or place, fall to their knees and immerse themselves in prayer remains a model for all those who invoke the true God, in particular for those Christians who, having deserted their magnificent cathedrals, pray only a little or not at all.”

In this, it’s easy to discern a passionate pilgrim who found it impossible not to respect someone whose prayerfulness matched his own.

It’s clear from the pope’s account that he was moved by his respectful, even kind reception in Muslim-dominated countries in Africa and Asia. In particular, his 1999 apology for atrocities committed by the Crusaders represented, according to a Beliefnet.com article by Professor Akbar S. Ahmed of American University, “a tectonic shift in Christian attitudes toward Islam.”

The many around the world praying for John Paul’s canonization might also want to pray that the vision offered by John Paul to Muslims and other non-Christians—profound respect for the beliefs of others, coupled with an absence of triumphalism—might now be coming into being with the Arab Spring and the death of one of history’s greatest murderers that have electrified the world this year.