Anti-War Stance in Contemporary Fiction: Kamran Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords and the War on Terror

Abstract

The chapter considers literary depictions of the “War on Terror” in a contemporary novel written by a Muslim author. It examines Islam’s relationship with the West in Kamran Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords (2010). The chapter argues that the author articulates his understanding of the relationship between Islam and the West by means of revisiting the Third Crusade following the 9/11 attacks. The novel refutes the assumption that the Crusades were fought mainly for religious purposes; in consequence, it modifies Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the “Clash of Civilizations” by suggesting that the economic and political interests and the desires for expansion were dominant factors driving the Crusades. By presenting the Third Crusade and, by means of historical analogy, the ongoing “War on Terror” as an Imperialist project, Pasha supports Edward Said’s views in his book Orientalism (1978). By presenting the vicious and destructive outcomes of the Crusades on people, the land, cultural heritage and human relations, the novel denounces the consequences of using military force and calls for resorting to diplomacy. Ultimately, Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords reflects a solid anti-war stance and optimistic views on future Islam-West relationships.

1. Introduction

Pasha is a Muslim Pakistani American writer and producer. He is currently a Hollywood screenwriter. Pasha is the author of Mother of the Believers (2009) and Shadow of the Swords (2010). He is also the writer of the 2005 ShowTime network series Sleeper Cell (2005), a Showtime’s television series which is about a Muslim FBI agent defying a group of terrorists, as well as the remake of the NBC’s series The Bionic Woman (2007). In addition, he wrote and produced the television series Kings (2009). Pasha wrote a film entitled Taj Mahal (2003) and currently is writing The Voyage of Ibn Battuta, which is about the adventures of the fourteenth-century Arab traveler to China. He worked in New York City as a journalist for three years. While he was working as a reporter, Pasha interviewed political figures including Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto [1]. His short film Miriam (2007), won the Gaia Award at the Moondance Film Festival in 2008 [2].

2. Summary of Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords

Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords focuses mainly on Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem as well as the Third Crusade and is set in Cairo, Europe and the Holy Land. The novel begins with the omniscient third-person narrator recalling the story of Miriam, a Jewish little girl who, together with her mother, has been abused cruelly by the Crusaders. After her mother is raped and murdered, Miriam escapes to the desert and is later picked up by a Bedouin who takes her to Maimonides, her uncle and Saladin’s own physician and political consultant. Despite his father’s disapproval and with the Pope’s support, Richard decides to launch his Crusade to the Holy Land, claiming that this is the only means to defend the Christian cause against Muslims. A love story between Saladin and Miriam develops and Miriam becomes Saladin’s concubine. During his stay in the Holy Land, Richard is afflicted by a fever and Saladin agrees to send his personal physician, Maimonides to cure him. Miriam accompanies him to Richard’s camp where she meets with Richard for the first time and decides to spy on Richard, exposing his military plans to Saladin. Following his treatment of Richard, Maimonides decides to take Rebecca, his wife and Miriam and to leave for Cairo. On their way, Miriam is captured by the Crusaders and taken to the Crusaders’ camp where Richard falls in love with her. Mistaken for Richard, Sir William is captured by Saladin’s men. Saladin establishes a solid friendship with Sir William, who spends more than a year in the Muslims’ camp. During his stay, Sir William gets exposed to Islamic cultures and develops admiration and respect for them. Although Sir William exerts much effort to establish peace between Christians and Muslims, Richard insists on holding the city by force. In spite of their solid friendship, Saladin and Sir William meet on the battlefield and find themselves obliged to fight fiercely against each other. Saladin eventually kills Sir William and sheds tears over the death of his friend. However, the novel ends on an optimistic note, where Richard and Saladin manage to end the conflict in the Holy Land by agreeing to a peace truce [3].

3. A historical analogy between 9/11 and the third crusade

Pasha states that the 9/11 attacks provoked him to revisit the Third Crusade. In a conversation, Pasha asserts that the 9/11 attacks triggered him to write his novel. For Pasha these assaults were also a reminder of the medieval clash between Islam and the West. As Pasha states, the Third Crusade was the most similar historical analogy to present the relationship between Islam and the West. Shadow of the Swords is narrated from a third-person perspective; Pasha uses an omniscient third-person narrator. As Pasha indicates, his choice of the third-person narrator is essential to show the inner thoughts of the characters and to demonstrate how one incident can be interpreted differently by people from different background [4]. To expand on the author’s view, this narrative technique is pivotal as the novel, on several occasions, deploys dreams as means of introducing the reader to the characters’ inner struggle. In addition, it is essential as the novel’s premise is to expose the paradox between the inner thoughts and the outward actions of several characters, with special regard to their misuse of religion.

4. The crusades: an imperialist project?

Discussing the relationship between Islam and the West, Huntington argues in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) that since religion is the chief defining feature of a civilisation, “fault line wars are almost always between peoples of different religions”. Huntington also argues that neither the medieval nor the ongoing conflict between Islam and Christianity has its origins in contemporary situation. Rather, the tension stems “from the nature of the two religions and the civilizations based on them” [5]. The theory of the “Clash of Civilizations” frames the relationships between Islam and the West both in the medieval period and in our contemporary times primarily within cultural and religious conflicts. Nevertheless, Jonathan Riley-Smith argues in his book The Crusades that the neo-imperialistic interpretations of the Crusades gained wide currency among the Crusades historians in the 1950s. The imperialistic interpretations of the Crusades became appealing to the public. He maintains that Muslim historians also supported such notions [6]. In his book Crusader Institutions, Prawer describes the Crusades as “colonization” as the territorial expansion was a main feature of them [7]. In this regard, it is essential to discuss Said’s views about the relationship between the Orient and the Occident in his book Orientalism, which preceded Huntington’s theory by almost two decades. In this book, Said argues:

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it: in short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient [8].

For Said, Western systematized knowledge of the Orient, which started towards the end of the eighteenth century, has been transformed into a discourse of power. Western attempts to create an artificial dichotomy between the East and the West and to construct them as binary oppositions served as a crucial colonial discourse to sustain modern Imperialism. According to Said, a massive number of writers accepted and further contributed towards creating an “oncological and an epistemological” division between the Orient and the Occident (2). Describing this relationship between the Orient and the Occident Said maintains: “the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of dominance, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…” (5). Thus, Said’s views on the relationship between the East and the West undermines those of Huntington:

Exploring uses of the metaphor of the “Crusade”, Brian Steed observes:

The idea of Europeans imposing their own will on the Middle East is consistently characterized as crusader like. The imagery and rhetoric used emphasized these ancient conflicts as a way of encouraging local inhabitants to recall the mythology and history of the suffering inflicted on Islam by the crusaders [9].

Osama bin Laden’s statement following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 is a case in point. In a declaration that was broadcast on Al-Jazeera satellite television channel on Saturday, November 3, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden rails against Crusaders and UN” [10], bin Laden provided his own justification of the 9/11 attacks. For him, what he describes as “a long series of Crusade wars against the Islamic world” and the Western presence in Arab and Islamic countries was what provoked the assaults.

The metaphor of the “Crusade” has also been used to refer to the West’s response to terrorism. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, American President, George W. Bush used the allegory of the “Crusade” in his remarks on September 16: “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient [11]”. As Jonathan Phillips argues, Bush’s use of the “Crusade” metaphor was used by Osama bin Laden to create parallels between the medieval Crusades and Bush’s contemporary “War on Terror”. With the rise of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, the term “Crusade” has been deployed to describe the West’s reaction to the terrorist activities conducted by the network [12]. For instance, in Andrew Sharp’s book: The Rise of ISIS: The West’s New Crusade, the metaphor of the Crusade is deployed to describe the West’s military act against ISIS [13]. Since the Crusades have been widely conceived as a historical analogy for current affairs between Islam and the West, literary use of the metaphor is worth exploring and carefully scrutinizing.

Examining the nature of the relationship between Islam and Christianity in the Middle Ages, Thomas Asbridge argues, “There is little or no evidence to suggest that these two world religions were somehow locked in an inevitable and perpetual ‘clash of civilisations’”. As suggested by views mentioned earlier, the Crusades did not present a case of a civilisational clash. In his novel, Pasha presents the Crusades as colonial projects connected with implied materialistic objectives of territorial expansion, political dominance and fame while religion is rendered a pretext for legitimizing the campaigns. Such representations complicate Huntington’s views on what he describes as a civilisational clash between Islam and the West [14].

5. Humanity, land, culture, women and war

The novel provides several images of the Crusades’ destructive outcomes; Pasha deploys variable techniques to show the devastating impact of war. These techniques include dreams and the narrator’s as well as the characters’ commentary. Pasha uses Richard’s dreams as effective means to reflect the enormous impact of the war not only on the people of the Holy Land but also on the Crusaders themselves. Under the influence of the severe fever Richard has caught, he starts to have nightmares. In his first nightmare, Richard explains to his father that his presence in the Holy Land is intended to protect it. Nonetheless, Henry’s remark shows the irony in Richard’s claims: “By destroying it?” (187). Henry’s response points out that the war is not a defensive but rather a destructive action as it leads to great damage and death. In the dream, Richard sees a shocking, comprehensive image of war. As the narrator says: “He glided over the bodies that lined the devastated courtyard of the Dome, passing through them as if splashing through a thin puddle…. It was blood of women and children, of innocents whose cries for mercy had been ignored by the frenzy of battle” (188). Such depictions are meant to show the fierceness and irrationality of war. Moreover, the narrator describes the cruel, destructive methods the Crusaders used to attack the Holy Land: “BOOM. The walls rattled as the battering ram struck the iron gates. BOOM, again and again… the ancient doors buckled. Crumpled like a parchment in the hands of a frustrated scribe” (126), which reflects the destructive effect of using force. Commenting on the deeds of the Crusaders, Maimonides says: “They have ransacked and pillaged their way through Europe. Entire villages have been laid to waste. They have all the markings of the uncouth barbarians that descended like a plague on the Holy Land a hundred years ago” (153). Maimonides provides us with an impartial commentary on the cruel deeds of the Crusaders and the vast destruction they have inflicted on other humans and the land. Thus, with clear emphasis on the Crusaders’ methods of attacking the Holy Land, Pasha presents the Crusades as a vicious military project.

By presenting the Crusaders’ invasion of the Holy Land as primarily an act of destructive colonial pillage, I argue that Shadow of the Swords promotes connections between the medieval Crusades and contemporary Euro-American intervention in the Middle East. Both novels suggest that the contemporary acts of invasion for which the novels provide parallels in the historical past, only helped destroy the cultural heritage of some countries such as Iraq and led to terrible loss of human life on both sides. According to news report entitled “Iraq Wars in Figures”, the US-led invasion of Iraq with the coalition of the United Kingdom and other nations was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Eventually, the operation proved to be very costly in both human loss and economic expenses. The number of US soldiers sent to Iraq was around 100–150,000, but later, Bush ordered sending 30,000 additional troops to bolster security in the country, especially in Baghdad. Between March 2003 and July 2010, 4421 US soldiers had been killed and the United Kingdom lost 179 service men and women. On the Iraqi part, there have been between 97,461 and 106,348 deaths of Iraqi civilians [15].

As Patrick Martin states, “The looting of Iraq’s museums and National Library, with the destruction of much of Iraq’s cultural heritage, is a historic crime for which the Bush administration is responsible”. Martin argues a large number of the antiquities in the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad were stolen or damaged after the military invasion of Baghdad. He maintains such actions aim at “destroying their national identity”. For him, the ultimate goal of this invasion was to take control of the oil sources in the country and to fulfill materialistic goals [16]. Similarly, in his book Bush in Babylon (2003), Tariq Ali argues that the occupation of Iraq has led to destructive ends. He maintains that the war broke up the Iraqi army, caused the destruction of law and order and inflicted torture on the people [17]. He provides a number of pictures to show how Western media was selective about the war images. He includes a photo of an Iraqi boy kissing Tony Blair (15). Nonetheless, Ali offers several other pictures that reflect a more comprehensive reality about military actions. For instance, he includes a picture of an Iraqi woman mourning the death of her child (209). In addition, he provides a photo displaying a heap of dead Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison (223), which reflects the catastrophic outcomes of war on human beings.

Pasha highlights the horrible consequences of the Crusades on women. He establishes the notion as a crucial matter that provides the opening episode of the novel. The narrative begins with the story of Miriam. The third-person narrator informs us that Miriam and her mother have both been raped by the Crusaders and that her mother has also been killed (3–5). Moreover, Miriam is later captured by Richard’s army on her way to Cairo (278). Historically speaking, Hansen and Curtis argue that the Crusaders did rape thousands of women (376). Fictional though the story is, Pasha tries to show the devastating effect of war on women both in the past and in our present time.

A discourse of saving women was used by some to legitimize the “War on Terror”. As Sadia Abbas argues, the emancipation of Muslim women in Islamic cultures has been used as a pretext for the ongoing “War on Terror” [18]. Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin observe that wives of prominent politicians in the West including Laura Bush and Cherie Blair used the discourse of protecting Muslim women in Afghanistan to justify the moral objectives of the “War on Terror” [19]. In a radio address, Laura Bush, for instance, argued that women and children in Afghanistan had been treated inhumanely by al-Qaeda. She maintained that women had been denied education and had not been allowed to work or leave home on their own. For her, all the countries in the world, regardless of their faith or culture, had an ethical obligation towards women and children in Afghanistan. Mrs. Bush argued that the military action that had been carried out helped Afghani women regain some of their rights such as education [20]. Kristen McNutt’s paper “Sexualized Violence Against Iraqi Women By US Occupying Forces”, which was presented to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights 2005 Session in Geneva, reported incidents of rape and sexual violence by US military personnel. In a letter smuggled from inside the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq by an Iraqi woman in December 2003, it was reported that women detainees were raped by American guards in the prison. She further noted that President Bush had insisted that these actions cannot be said to be the outcome of military action and were carried out only by a few of the recruits [21]. Accordingly, I argue that Pasha deploys historical analogy to reinforce notions that the “War on Terror” has left a negative impact on women in Muslim-majority countries, although the objective of protecting Arab and Muslim women was among the supposed objectives of the mission. Thus, it can be argued that Pasha calls for a rejection of war and warns against its destructive effects.

Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords on the other hand, ends on an optimistic note where Saladin and Richard are able to end the conflict. As the narrator concludes: “Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub and Richard the Lionheart signed the treaty, bringing the Crusade to an end” (379).¹ Following Sir William’s stay in Saladin’s camps, Richard asks him about Muslims: “Are they like us?” (357). Sir William replies: “They are us” (357). Richard’s question implies that Islam and the West need far more mutual and comprehensive understanding as their knowledge about each other is still insufficient. Sir William’s response, I argue, reflects Pasha’s views on the necessity of more tolerant and harmonious relationships between Muslims and the West and the need for stressing the common ground between the two sides. Following Sir William’s death, Richard and Saladin decide to avoid repeating the same catastrophe again. They switch from a discourse of war and conflict to a discourse of brotherhood (374). After witnessing the atrocities of the war, Richard regrets his decision to launch the Crusade (365). Richard’s ultimate remorseful stance on war, I maintain, is meant to urge the West to learn lessons from history and to reject war as a means of settling conflicts. Furthermore, al-Adil and Joanna appear at the end of the novel, standing beside each other in the ceremony held to celebrate the signing of the peace treaty (378). Rumors about their marriage have spread, but we are unsure whether they are married.² While historians are confident that Joanna refused al-Adil’s marriage proposal, Pasha implicitly manipulates the historical chronicles to manifest his hopes for a better relationship between Islam and the West.

6. Conclusion

As I have demonstrated in this chapter, by revisiting the Third Crusade in a retrospective manner, Shadow of the Swords creates a historical analogy between Saladin’s taking of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade and contemporary relations between Islam and the West. I argue that Pasha’s representations of the Third Crusade suggest that it is inaccurate to describe the Third Crusade, and by extension the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “War on Terror”, as a clash of civilisation. The novel contests Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the “Clash of Civilizations”; the Crusades in the novel are shown to have been largely launched to fulfill European desires for expansion, dominance and military reputation under the guise of religion. Through such depictions, Pasha at least in part support Said’s argument in his book Orientalism. For Said, the relationship between the East/Islam and the West/ Christianity is a relationship of dominance.

Besides depicting the Crusades as an imperialist activity, Shadow of the Swords presents the campaigns as destructive actions that have inflicted severe harm on people, land, cultural heritage and human relationships. I contend that by means of historical analogy, the novel condemns the ongoing “War on Terror” and calls for the rejection of violence and urge for resorting to diplomacy instead.

Pasha’s Shadow of the Swords constructs the impact of the military action on women it as a central matter. Pasha creates the fictional protagonist Miriam, making her endure the cruelty of the Crusaders against her and her mother throughout the novel in order to underline the harmful consequences of war on women. Pasha, through his literary depictions, suggests that war hinders efforts of alliance and cooperation between Islam and the West, implying that contemporary military action has a negative impact on human and intercultural relationships. Ultimately, he shows a strong anti-war stance.

Additional information

Parts of this chapter were previously published in the doctoral thesis by the same author: Yousef NTI. Contemporary Representations of the Third Crusade in British and American Texts [Internet]. University of Leicester; 2017 [cited 2023Jul21]. Available from: https://hdl.handle.net/2381/40133.