At the South African premiere of Ridley Scott’s new film, Kingdom of Heaven, about one episode in the long history of the Crusades, we were treated to a preliminary — and pre-emptive — address from Barry Ronge. He had been charged by distributors Nu Metro, he said, to convey to us the thoughts of director Scott on the movie, in the light of the controversy that has erupted around it.
Audience members looked at each other in puzzlement. What controversy? This was the first we’d heard of it. Perhaps, it was ungenerously suggested, Nu Metro was in fact hoping for a bit of controversy to get this two-and-a-half-hour epic out of the starting blocks. After all, it worked for The Passion of the Christ.
Be that as it may, Ronge spoke for Scott, saying this was a film he had been planning for 25 years. It was not simply a response to 9/11 or the subsequent ”clash of civilisations”, let alone George W Bush’s announced ”crusade” against terror — a word he had to withdraw when it became clear it had holocaust-like connotations for Muslims. Scott wanted us to know that the movie’s message was one of religious tolerance, and that he had gone out of his way not to offend Muslims.
That much, at least, was clear from the movie itself. Given its narrow focus on a mere couple of years in the history of the Crusades, and its need to create a romantic/heroic plot, Kingdom of Heaven is true to the facts of history in a broad-strokes way. Not many people deny nowadays that during the Crusades the Muslims were more sinned against than sinning. Perhaps its least historically accurate element is its vague rhetoric about tolerance, and a more pertinent complaint may be that there is too much message and too little action. But that’s not what has been bothering its critics in Britain and the United States.
For there has been, indeed, a mini-controversy. In Britain, Cambridge Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith condemned the script as ”Osama bin Laden’s version of history” — and it seems Scott responded by changing elements of the film by the final cut. Riley-Smith and others appeared to be annoyed because Kingdom of Heaven shows the Christian knights and priests as warmongers, while portraying Saladin, the great Muslim leader, as wise and merciful.
On the other hand, in the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations gave the film its approval, saying it showed Islam to be ”based on ethics and morality”. The council’s view, however, was seen as biased, given that several of its members have been convicted in the US of terrorism-supporting activities such as money-laundering, and some of its leaders have praised Hamas. But this is all beginning to look a bit like the Crusades themselves, during which there was a lot of politicking based on ”the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Saladin is, indeed, portrayed in the movie as a good guy, and the Christian knights and priests as baddies. It is not hard to extract this view from the historical record. Christian historians were as impressed by Saladin’s military and diplomatic brilliance as were Muslim writers. Scott and his scriptwriter William Monahan do omit a couple of things that would have placed Saladin in a less flattering light. But they leave out a lot of other facts too — such as that their hero, Balian of Ibelin, was married to the widow of the late King of Jerusalem and was thus by no means an outsider to local politics, or for that matter available for a romance with the late king’s daughter. So what? Go read a book about the Crusades.
Scott and Monahan’s view of Saladin is not an innovation. Saladin was highly thought of in the West after the Crusades; he was so noble an antagonist that many believed he must in fact have been a secret Christian! Which says something about how belief systems distort the ability to deal with a simple truth, and has a broader relevance for the alleged controversy around Kingdom of Heaven.
It’s hard not to see this verbal battle as an opportunity for various people to mouth their usual ideological positions. Unlike the controversy around The Passion of the Christ, this one doesn’t really raise important issues in a new way. While Mel Gibson’s pious gorefest forced the viewer to examine his or her approach to orthodox religious belief, Kingdom of Heaven is pretty meek when it comes to issues. It takes the wishy-washy-liberal view of matters: there were good guys and bad guys on both sides. And surely it is generally accepted that religious tolerance is a good thing?
Well, perhaps not. While even Bush is at pains to say he’s anti-terror, not anti-Muslim, others have taken on the basic issue of religious belief. For one, American philosopher Sam Harris’s brilliant and challenging book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (Free Press), takes the view that tolerance is wrong in the face of fundamentalism. No one suggests we tolerate Nazism, fascism, racism.
The lesson of the Crusades is apposite here, and not just because they, like Bush’s wars, led to an unintended revival of Muslim solidarity and animosity toward the West. Holy wars lead to more holy wars. The Crusades show how religious ideology, entangled with the usual levers of history (greed, desperation, self-preservation, lust for power), can cause untold suffering as well as sad consequences long into the future. Bush’s ”reborn” Christianity is as relevant to the case as is Bin Laden’s militant Islam. They are enabling ideologies; they cloak evil in righteousness.
Perhaps rather than arguing about whether Kingdom of Heaven is too nice to Saladin, we should be addressing the fundamental issues of religious belief, and whether tolerance is the correct response. Even the less fundamentalist or fanatic varieties may be harmful. As Harris writes, ”How can any person presume to know that this is how the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.”