The West's 1000-Year War on the Holy Land | Prof. Adnan Husain

The conversation with Professor Adnan Husain reframes the Crusades not as isolated medieval excursions but as a formative social and political machine that reordered Western Christendom and left a persistent imprint on modern imperial ambitions. What emerges is a thesis with uncomfortable clarity: crusading was less a series of episodic wars than a mode of organizing societies, legitimizing violence, and creating an identity that transmuted over centuries into colonial practices, settler projects, and contemporary narratives of holy entitlement. Reading the Crusades as a social formation reveals how a particular way of thinking about holiness, sovereignty, and violence was institutionalized in Western Europe—and how its echoes are audible in today’s politics of the Holy Land. ## Crusading society and Western order The central analytic shift Adnan Husain urges is to move from thinking of “the Crusades” as discrete campaigns toward seeing a crusading society: a Latin Christendom in which endless mobilizations for holy war structured political life, cultural norms, and state-building processes for two centuries and beyond. Rather than an episodic military oddity, crusading becomes a sustained organizational logic—preaching, fundraising, provisioning, administrating and legislating—woven into the fabric of social order. When a polity repeatedly organizes massive overseas mobilizations, the exigencies of such warfare reshape internal governance. Emergencies justify extraordinary powers, silence dissent, and accelerate mechanisms that a ruling elite uses to police orthodoxy and consolidate authority. Husain emphasizes that crusading was not external to European politics; it helped constitute Latin Christendom itself. The papal apparatus that called and blessed Crusades simultaneously claimed universal spiritual authority and a political role in legitimating rulers. The repeated demand for manpower, money, and moral sanction created incentives to root out internal enemies—heresies, Jews, and religious minorities—seen as threats to a purified communal body poised to wage holy war. Thus the Crusades fed a cycle: external mobilization produced internal purification, which in turn furnished the social unity alleged necessary for further campaigns. This loop institutionalized a politics of exception where violence could be normalised under the rubric of sacred necessity. ## Great Schism and the First Crusade The split between Eastern and Western Christianity—the Great Schism—set the stage for the First Crusade in ways often underplayed. Husain points out that the appeal for military aid that precipitated the 1095 call for a crusade came from the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperor, desperate after losses to Turkic forces. The Western response, however, was not a modest mercenary aid mission but a mass movement animated by new forms of religious rhetoric and mobilization. The ideological gap widened: Rome’s claims of universal primacy, the papacy’s capacity to marshal moral and material resources, and the Latin Church’s conception of Christendom as a bounded, purifiable community collided with eastern ecclesial autonomy. This moment did more than produce a military expedition: it exposed and exacerbated the emerging divergence of ecclesial politics. Husain explains how theological differences—filioque debates, liturgical calendars, and competing claims of apostolic succession—were enmeshed with political strategy. Byzantine appeals for help inadvertently unleashed a Latin movement intent on reordering Christian space by papal prerogative. In the aftermath, relations between East and West were irrevocably altered. The Fourth Crusade’s diversion to sack Constantinople decades later symbolically cemented a rupture that made reconciliation politically fraught and doctrinally awkward—an enduring fracture that shaped how Christianity imagined political authority and religious homogeneity. ## Jerusalem and the rise of holy war Why Jerusalem? Husain stresses that the city’s significance cannot be reduced to antiquarian piety. Jerusalem sat at the intersection of memory, ritual, and political symbolism—a contested urban center that embodied claims to universal sovereignty. Medieval Europe’s sudden urgency to control the city stemmed from more than spiritual nostalgia; it represented a claim to govern not merely space but the metric of sacred history itself. Capturing Jerusalem became an act of political theology: to possess the place was to claim custodianship over Christian memory and to assert an order of sacred governance. Yet the practicalities of holding Jerusalem produced a logic of expansion and permanent domination. Crusader states did not remain simple pilgrimage sanctuaries; they became settler polities requiring ongoing military presence, administrative infrastructures, tribute systems, and violent suppression of local populations. Husain draws attention to how attempts to secure Jerusalem fueled processes that made conquest durable—fortifications, feudal tenures, and alliances that entwined religious aims with fiscal and territorial imperatives. The holy site turned into a territorial objective that justified continuous intervention, and that territoriality would later resonate with modern projects that invoke religious-historical claims to legitimate dispossession. ## Judeo Christian identity and Israel 00: 45:45 Crusades colonialism and genocide A central and contentious thread in the discussion is the line connecting medieval crusading to modern colonial formations and, in the speaker’s formulation, to genocidal practices. Husain resists simplistic equivalence—crusades are not identical to settler colonialism—but insists the crusading mentality supplies a persistent grammar for violence: a readily mobilizable narrative that sacralizes dispossession, legitimizes extermination of perceived internal enemies, and normalizes external conquest. Where settler-colonial analysis explains structures of land appropriation and replacement, the crusading lens explains the sacramental vocabulary and religious legitimation that can make such replacement appear morally sanctioned. This framework helps explain why European imperial powers and settler movements could adopt biblical and crusading metaphors to justify modern projects in the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. Husain points to how historical memories and rhetorical practices around holy war were repurposed in the service of colonial enterprises. When religiously sanctioned violence and the doctrine of purifying and reconstituting a sacred order are available in a cultural repertoire, they can be reactivated in new geopolitical contexts to authorize extraordinary brutality. The implication is stark: atrocities in contemporary conflicts over the Holy Land cannot be fully grasped without acknowledging a long genealogy of theological-political imaginaries that made such violence thinkable. Husain also invites caution regarding terminology and causality. He does not reduce all instances of modern state violence to medieval antecedents, nor does he argue medieval actors foresaw modern genocides. Instead he traces continuity in a set of legitimating practices and institutional dispositions—forms of mobilizing sanctified violence, mechanisms for disciplining populations, and sacralized narratives of entitlement—that were refined in the crusading era and periodically resurface in modern political projects. ## Islamophobia and closing thoughts The conversation closes with an urgent observation about contemporary Islamophobia and the need to recognize how historical legacies shape present perceptions. Husain notes that myths of civilizational superiority cultivated during and after the crusading centuries helped produce a durable sense of Europe’s right to intervene in, govern, or reorder non-European societies. These myths did not disappear with the end of direct colonial rule; they mutated into discourses th

Professor EXPOSES West's 1000-Year War on the Holy Land | Adnan Husain Settler colonialism goes not far enough to explain the insane level of cruelty we see with the Gaza Genocide and the rampage of Israel in Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of the Holy Land. It doesn't explain why the entire West, Europe and North America are on board with the project. The crusading spirit that is baked into the colonial system, does. Looking at the original crusades, we see that they sparked the relentless drive for Europeans to go out, destroy and dominate—something they never stopped and that they are currently still doing, especially the neocon faction of the barbarian empire. Today I speak with Queen’s University historian Dr. Adnan Husain about crusading society, the Crusades as a force in Western state and social order, the split between Latin and Eastern Christianity, Jerusalem’s place in medieval politics, and the claimed links between crusading, colonialism, modern Israel, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and genocide. Links: Adnan A Husain on X: https://x.com/adnanahusain The Adnan Husain Show: https://youtube.com/@adnanhusainshow Guerrilla History Podcast: https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Donation: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction and guest background 00:03:47 Crusading society and Western order 00:12:22 Great Schism and the First Crusade 00:20:30 Jerusalem and the rise of holy war 00:30:52 Judeo Christian identity and Israel 00: 45:45 Crusades colonialism and genocide 00:56:06 Islamophobia and closing thoughts #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutrality Studies. This is Pascal, and I am joined today by Associate Professor and Director of the History Department of the School of Religion at Queen's University, Dr. Adnan Hussain. Hussain, welcome. It's great to be with you, Pascal. And I'm sorry, I should have said Adnan, of course. Hussain is your last name, but either way, I'm very grateful that you're coming online. You've been researching West Asia for most of your academic career, and you've actually developed quite a bit of a framework to understand what is currently going on with Israel. That's what I would like to talk to you about. Can you maybe give us a little bit about your background, your research, and then tell us how this shapes your outlook on West Asia at the moment? #Adnan Husain Yeah, thanks so much. And again, it's a pleasure to be on with you. I'm what I would describe as a medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate world historian who has specialized in the religious cultures -- 1 of 17 -- of the Mediterranean and the interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews over the medieval period, basically. And so that covers everything from looking at the interrelationships between these religious traditions and their spiritual, mystical, or theological dimensions, but also, in historical terms, everything from the mixed societies where there was some semblance of coexistence, of tolerance, of living together in places like medieval Spain or Al-Andalus or parts of the Balkans, or frankly, you could say all across the Islamicate lands or lands where Muslims ruled, which were, of course, populated by longstanding groups of people who adhered to monotheistic religions in the Near East, around the Mediterranean, whether Christians or Jews. And those societies under Muslim rule continued to be very diverse ones where those populations existed for millennia up until today. Although I would say that the modern Middle East in the post-colonial period has been particularly devastating for that tradition of heterogeneity, diversity, and cosmopolitanism. I'm also, however, interested in some of the unhappy cases in the premodern period that helped pattern what I think of as some of the abiding and recurring structures that transmit themselves after they're formed during the medieval period into forms of war, holy war, crusades. In fact, what I'm at work doing right now is trying to detail and articulate an understanding of the transformation that takes place in Europe in the 11th to the 13th centuries, where it becomes what I would call the crusading society. So I would characterize the work as a project to study the formation of the crusading society, what that is, and how it has reverberating consequences for subsequent Western history, particularly in its relation to the Islamic world. #Pascal I find this so important because, you know, some of these concepts of history are something that especially Europe and North America today look at as closed chapters, right? So most Europeans would say, colonialism—no, no, closed chapter, learned our lessons, not doing that anymore; feudalism—closed chapter, you know; and certainly crusades—closed chapter. We know it's part of history, we know it was violent, but we're not doing that anymore. Right. I'm pretty certain you have kind of a different perspective on that one. But before we go there, can you explain a little bit the concept of a crusading society? Because, like, the crusades in the plural are usually what we talk about to describe these different periods when different groups of Europeans, one after another and in concert, then went down to the Holy Land and, well, on the way, pillaged and plundered and murdered and conquered, and then went back. Can you maybe explain a bit why you look at this as a society? #Adnan Husain Yeah, that's an excellent question, because very often when people have studied the Crusades in the past, the long tradition of scholarship on it, it was something that was fascinating to historians, medieval historians. But it appealed to a particular kind of historian who was interested maybe in military history or thought that the romance of this kind of history, the folly of, like, idealistic, you know, ideas about going to Jerusalem, you know, were somehow kind of oblique to or extraneous to -- 2 of 17 -- the fundamental paradigm of European history and its development. It's just something, you know, kind of that happened. But the trajectory of European history was based on a whole lot of other developments, you know, internal, political, social, cultural, intellectual, and so on, in its transformation. Right. So very often the Crusades is not really integrated into the story of how Europe becomes Europe in the way that it does. And my thesis is that you can't really understand the effect or importance of the Crusades only by studying them as a military phenomenon that had a beginning and an end, but rather we have to look at it as a process by which Europe—well, I would say more accurately at this time, before Europe is really the category that we would think of—this society is really Christendom, and particularly Latin Christendom. And in fact, actually, the very idea of Christendom, particularly Latin Christendom, as something like the lands that recognized the suzerainty of the Pope, who guaranteed the legitimacy of political order in the kingdoms and so on of these various polities—that was sort of Latin Christendom. It's almost coterminous as a concept with crusading and with the start of the Crusades. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this can happen anytime again. So please consider subscribing not only here, but to my mailing list on Substack. That's pascallottaz.substack.com. The link's going to be in the description below. And now, back to the video. #Adnan Husain And so my point here would be that we need to understand that these were wars and mobilizations for wars. They're organizing, they're preaching, they're financing, they're administering, they're provisioning. That happened from 1095 to 1291 in a very transformative way. If you think of a society that organized nine massive military mobilizations over the course of almost 200 years, 1095 to 1291, and ceaselessly in the periods before was talking about, you know, the need to recover the Holy Land, regarded the loss of, say, the County of Edessa, one of the four principalities that were established—the so-called Crusader States of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem—as a consequence of the first very successful crusade, the loss of Edessa in the 1140s became its own emergency around which there was a mobilization that had to take place for the Second Crusade. And the loss of Jerusalem to Salah ad-Din in 1189 then called forth the Third Crusade. And the desire to kind of expand the territories led to the Fourth Crusade, which went off the rails but sacked Constantinople and then led to a Latin Byzantine Empire controlled by these former crusaders. And that itself imposed all kinds of new obligations that led then to the Fifth Crusade, the Louis IX, you know, the Seventh Crusade in the 1250s. You know, it's very hard to talk about European history or Latin Christendom's history during this period without thinking about the consequences of this constant mobilization for war—a sense of emergency that put pressure on how -- 3 of 17 -- you should organize Christian society, right? In order to have proper order, to make sure that you didn't have the dissent of heretics—that had to be suppressed. We need to purify. One of the explanations for why the subsequent Crusades went so badly and why there were constant losses to Muslim resistance against the Crusader states was, of course, to turn inwards and say, we must have been sinful. We can't tolerate these dissenters. We have to purge the sin, and so we need to purify society. And so there was an ordering paradigm that is yoked to the Crusades and the consequence of the Crusades that leads to persecution of heretics, persecution of Jews, persecution of the Muslims who are conquered in places like Spain or in Sicily. Or, you know, there's even a small—Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor in the early 13th century, put down a major revolt in the eastern part of Sicily that had been, you know, populated by Arabs. It was a very diverse society. There were, you know, Arab Muslim peasants, but there were Greeks, Jews. And then, of course, there were Latin Christians under the Normans in particular. And there was a rebellion, and he put down this rebellion in the southeastern part of Sicily and decided the best way to make sure that there wouldn't be future rebellions from this population was to remove them and put them on the Italian peninsula and create a city just for them. And they ended up turning, you know, this very important place called Lucera that nobody has really heard of. I visited the ruins of his city there. There's one small plaque that talks about, you know, what happened here. But there was, like, for 60, 70 years, a predominantly Muslim city on the Italian peninsula that was loyal to Frederick II and his heirs, the Hohenstaufens, and was part of his wars against the popes during the 13th century, before they were ultimately liquidated when the Angevin monarchs of Sicily and southern Italy—a kind of allied branch of Louis IX's family, in fact, actually first his brother, Charles of Anjou. So, you know, what I'm saying is that there's a certain ordering of this Latin Christendom. Yeah. #Adnan Husain Internally, that is a response in some ways to these unceasing external overseas wars that are very expensive, largely unsuccessful, and constantly beset by resistance. And that experience of two centuries has a very formative kind of role in shaping Western identity and the shape of politics, society, and culture for the future. #Pascal Yeah, this is a very, very good and, I think, important observation about what this does to not just this or that country, but actually to the way that the society itself was organized before that. And I think it's very perti