When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.
Interpretation
The quote challenges the perception of the Crusades as solely an attack on Islam, highlighting that Islam's rise was also an aggressive expansion against existing civilizations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote addresses the historical understanding of the Crusades in relation to Islam. He argues that while many view the Crusades merely as an unprovoked assault on Islam, it is essential to recognize that Islam itself emerged from a context of aggressive expansion against the existing Christian and other civilizations. Chesterton acknowledges the virtues within Islam but emphasizes that the historical narrative must consider both sides of the conflict, asserting that the context of invasion and defense plays a crucial role in understanding these events.
In practice
During a history lesson on the Crusades, a teacher might use this quote to prompt discussion on differing perspectives of historical events.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)
History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.
The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.
The source known as Deep Throat provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg.
Of all the human figurines discovered so far from 30,000-3,000BC, 92% are of the female form. This is not to say there was any kind of matriarchy or worship of a mother goddess - far from it - but women are conspicuous by their presence.
Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.