Hollywood on Crusade

Meanwhile, Khaled Abou El Fadl, the UCLA professor who attacked Scott's film, has filled his copy of the screenplay with scribbled comments about its take on Muslims. "Typical!" he writes of a scene in which an armorless Balian and an aggressive "Saracen knight" go one on one in the desert. And: "This image of tolerance is supposed to be Jerusalem under Christian rule?" And: "God!!! Typical view of every Muslim cleric!!"

This last comment refers to a fanatical mullah who particularly angers Abou El Fadl. "It's as if there cannot be a religious Muslim who is moral or representative of an ethical tradition," he says.

In the finished film, the mullah's role appears to have been reduced. ("Kingdom of Heaven" was cut from well over three hours to two and a quarter; Scott says the longer version will appear as a director's cut on DVD.) Some other things that bothered Abou El Fadl are gone entirely. Last week the Council on American-Islamic Relations announced its view that the film offers "a balanced and positive depiction of Islamic culture during the Crusades."

Still, Abou El Fadl's strong reaction points to the likelihood that some Muslims will see Scott's film through their own, radically different, historical lens.

Fair enough, you may think. But dig a little deeper and you'll turn up a paradoxical complication.

That Muslim lens is nowhere near as different as you would expect.

And here's where Crusades history -- and its relationship to 9/11 -- gets especially fascinating and strange.

'Saladin, We Have Returned'

A year after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Cambridge's Jonathan Riley-Smith -- the early Scott critic who is perhaps the best-known living historian of the Crusades -- was invited to Virginia to lecture at Old Dominion University. He also spoke to analysts at both the FBI and CIA about Osama bin Laden's rhetorical use of the Crusades.

Riley-Smith went on to publish a version of his Old Dominion talk as "Islam and the Crusades in History and Imagination, 8 November 1898 -- 11 September 2001."

"One often reads that Muslims have inherited from their medieval ancestors bitter memories of the violence of the crusaders," he wrote. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

What actually happened, according to Crusades historians -- Riley-Smith's analysis draws in part on the work of Carole Hillenbrand of the University of Edinburgh, whose book "The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives" is the preeminent work examining the Muslim point of view -- is that after Muslims expelled the Crusaders, they mostly put this unpleasant episode behind them. If they did look back, it was with what Riley-Smith describes as "indifference and complacency." After all, they'd won -- big time. From their point of view, also, they'd faced far greater challenges, among them a frightful onslaught by the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan.

In Europe, meanwhile, the Crusades stayed high-profile. They were romanticized by medieval chroniclers as the height of chivalry, derided by Enlightenment thinkers as gross religious intolerance, rehabilitated by 19th-century historians as glorious antecedents of nationalism and portrayed -- first with approval, then disapproval -- as the precursors of European colonialism. Through all this, the figure of Saladin became rooted in the European imagination as the worthiest and most chivalrous Crusader opponent, just as he is in "Kingdom of Heaven." In Damascus, by contrast, his tomb was allowed to decay.

Riley-Smith's mention of Nov. 8, 1898, refers to a remarkable manifestation of this contrast. On that day, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany "laid a satin flag and a wreath, with an inscription dedicated to 'the Hero Sultan Saladin' " on Saladin's grave, which he'd apparently had some trouble locating. He then paid to restore the tomb and included "another wreath, this time bronze gilt, and inscribed 'From one great emperor to another.' "

But the Muslim world's take on the Crusades was about to change. It began to look at these ancient wars through the European lens, and what it saw was: colonial oppression.

The head of the Ottoman Empire, which was rapidly losing territory to Europeans, responded by asserting that his foes were engaged in a new Crusade. World War I and its aftermath brought a renewed British and French presence in the old Crusader territories of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria -- "Behold, Saladin, we have returned," one French military governor proclaimed. The Crusade metaphor was picked up by Arab nationalists. Saladin was revived as an inspirational figure. Later in the century, he would be embraced by the likes of Syria's Hafez Assad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Radical Islamists adopted the metaphor and extended it. They argued, Riley-Smith notes, that "any offensive, including a drive for economic or political hegemony, against Islam anywhere by those who call themselves Christians" was a form of Crusading, along with similar actions by surrogates such as the "Crusader state" of Israel. Such notions help fuel al Qaeda -- and are widely shared by moderate Muslims who wouldn't dream of initiating violence themselves.

"Since 9/11 I've done countless interviews," says Saint Louis University's Madden, and the interviewers often ask "how the Crusades 'created' the situation in the Middle East. My answer is: They had nothing to do with the current situation. But the recasting of the Crusades that came out of 19th-century colonialism -- that's what did it."

Current Muslim views on the Crusades are a form of "recovered memory," more than one Crusades historian says, and whether that memory is true or false, it's a potent one. Is it any wonder that a Hollywood Crusades movie -- any Hollywood Crusades movie -- looks to some like a cinematic stone hurled straight at a political hornet's nest?

'Not a Documentary'

One picture. A thousand words. What, in the end, will "Kingdom of Heaven" add up to?

Whatever its intentions, Ridley Scott's knight movie cannot escape either the historical era in which it is set or the times in which it was made. It's likely to be seen as both a harmless Hollywood rendition and a dangerous provocation; as both historically evocative and historically obtuse. To a moderately neutral observer, it doesn't appear to be intentionally anti-anything, except religious fanaticism of all stripes. But as one of Fox's imported historical experts put it, the film is sure to be "interpreted by as many interpreters as there are."

Screenwriter Monahan agrees. "Movies are such high-voltage cultural events," he explains, "that they sometimes get people coming out of the woodwork to unleash programmatic rhetoric, irrespective of what the movie actually is." The film he and Scott made has nothing to do with 9/11, he maintains, and as for accuracy, well, Shakespeare modified history too: "What you use, as a dramatist, is what plays."

"This is not a documentary," another Fox expert, Columbia medievalist and film scholar Hamid Dabashi, warned the press in Pasadena. "This is a work of art."

Best, perhaps, to leave that for history to judge.

Still, if you talk long with Dabashi and others who've seen the film, one particularly striking sequence is likely to come up. It's also the only one that Scott -- the man with the Hollywood instincts and the visual DNA -- mentions when asked to name the most meaningful visuals in his film.

It begins up close and personal, in the midst of that desperate struggle to hold the breach in Jerusalem's wall. Orlando Bloom has lost his helmet -- as all stars do in such battles, lest their fans lose track of them among the grunting, bleeding masses -- and he's slashing away like a berserker, sometimes backlit, sometimes in slow motion.

But then Scott's camera gradually pulls us into the air above the shattered wall. We see the fighters shrink and the horizon expand. It's as if we've taken God's point of view, from which it is a great deal harder -- impossible, in fact -- to justify the savagery below.

"That clearly speaks for itself, right?" Scott says. "And that's where I think the visual is better than words."