Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

breached the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, four years after Urban had dispatched them to liberate the Holy Land, Christianity was no longer the secret Jewish sect whose members, along with the rest of the Jews, had been forced out of the Holy Land by Rome a thousand years before. It was Rome: rich, mighty, thirsty for blood. The chronicles of Raymond of Agiles, who rode with the knights of God during the First Crusade, bear witness to the almost unimaginable violence unleashed upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem: the Crusaders cut off the heads of Muslims and Jews, shot them with arrows, tortured them by casting them into fires. Piles of heads, hands, and feet littered the cobblestoned streets. The Crusaders rode in blood up to their bridle reins, slashing their way through the bodies of the dead—men, women, and children—until they arrived at the Temple Mount, which they soaked in blood. “This day,” declared an exultant Raymond, “marks the justification of all