War on error

TO SAY HOLLYWOOD PLAYS FAST AND loose with history is about as revelatory as a "dog bites man" headline: no news at all. The point is not that movies falsify history but how and to what end they work their cinemagic. So forget about the historic accuracy of Ridley Scott’s Crusades epic, Kingdom of Heaven. It is a film with no historic context because it is all about today. As usual, Scott attempts to import a confused liberal’s wish fulfilment into history. But along the way what Hollywood actually gets is what it always sells: a vindication of the American Dream, which, in this instance, provides a fig leaf for pre-emptive democracy building.

The plot line of the film is a very particular kind of fairy tale. Balian (Orlando Bloom) is a not so simple blacksmith in a scruffy village in France. At a moment of crisis in his life he discovers he has a father (more like a fairy godfather), a Crusader knight. Balian is offered the prospect of adventure: setting off for Jerusalem where he can erase his sins, and gain his inheritance.

It is this long lost father, Godfrey (Liam Neeson), appropriately the only totally invented character in the film, who presents the vision of what awaits Balian. He goes to make a new world, a better world than there has ever been, where a man is not what he is born but what he has it in himself to be. A society where Christian and Muslim live side by side. A kingdom of conscience; of peace instead of war, love instead of hate. Well, I did say it was a fairy story.

More importantly, to attain this vision Balian must be schooled in the use of arms, converted to the use of military force. The moral code of a knight Crusader is a theme running throughout the film. It comes down to the proposition that "holiness is right action and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves". With all this in place, Balian will not just go to the Holy Land but build a New Jerusalem.

These are not medieval historic ideals, but the key to American self-image, where the purpose of settling a new land is to transcend the failures of old Europe. The potent connection is that the Crusades were the first European colonial experiment, America the second. America, the city on a hill, the newer new Jerusalem, then becomes the only nation that can fulfil the real meaning of crusade.

Today, America is the indispensable nation whose ethos requires it to intervene militarily, to act rightly to protect those who cannot defend themselves. After all, this is the rationale of the Bush doctrine for regime change in Iraq. And it was Bush who initially sought to name his war on terror a crusade. Like innumerable Hollywood movies before it, Kingdom of Heaven reads the familiar litany of ideas of America back into history to address contemporary issues.

The parallels between Kingdom of Heaven and innumerable westerns and war films are hard to miss. The hero must contend with the corruption of his own society, in the form of the villains - all with very French names: Gui de Lusignan and Reynald de Chastillon - and the Church, which merely wants war for the sake of war. The hero is an enlightened common man with the knowledge to make the desert bloom, digging a well that instantly produces green, flourishing crops. He is also master of technology, using it to devise the final defence of Jerusalem. To defend not the buildings but the people within the walls, the hero outrages the Church by overturning the given order of things. True to his principles that making men knights will make them better fighters, he inducts all the common men of Jerusalem into knighthood. And he is sought after by the female love interest, the "exotic and forbidden queen" who abandons her kingdom to ride off into the sunset with him in the final scene.

Into this tale Scott attempts to introduce inconsequential chatter about religion. It amounts to nothing but confused utterings in a film dominated by battle scenes and therefore short on dialogue, and which must use a lot of lines introducing a large cast of characters. In short, as far as one can intimate, Scott seems to think crusades without organised religion would be a good thing. It’s a novel proposition, at least.

Any war epic needs an implacable enemy. Enter Salah ed Din al Ayyubi, leader of the Muslim forces, more commonly known as Saladin. You will hear much being made of the sympathetic representation of this towering historic figure. Do not be misled. Innumerable westerns have had their noble savage enemy, a principled adversary. As nuanced ideas go, the most that can be said is everyone pronounces his name correctly.

The only point of perspective this film has is that of the Crusaders. Like all Hollywood films it is about "us". Muslim civilisation, beyond the questionable set dressing, is entirely absent. The enemy bursts on Jerusalem, in scenes reminiscent of the shock and awe footage we watched on our televisions as Baghdad was attacked. It is an army and nothing else.

Kingdom of Heaven does what Hollywood historic epics always do: redeem history with the central themes of the American self-image. Pursued with the ideals of the American Dream, it seems, the Crusades would be no bad idea. And that’s a dangerous moral to set before audiences with little grasp of history.

So consider for a moment the context Scott ignores. Jerusalem was surrendered to Muslim rule in 638. The citizens demanded to meet the Caliph Umar, second successor to the Prophet Muhammad, before giving over the keys of their city. Umar rode from Medina without an entourage, sharing his camel with the one servant who accompanied him. His edict assured the safety of Jewish and Christian places of worship. For 500 years the Holy Land continued to be the heterodox society the Crusaders found. Salah ed Din was living up to his history.

The Crusades began as a vituperative and inaccurate polemic against Islam, a genuine ideology of Holy War with the promise of paradise for all who took part. And they began in Europe with pogroms against the Jews, slaughtered by the mobilised masses of common people. The first attack in the Holy Land was on Antioch, a Christian city, whose population the Crusaders slaughtered, much to the amazed incomprehension of Muslim chroniclers. When they arrived at Jerusalem even the Christian chroniclers describe in detail the three days of extermination when knights waded through streets of blood. Under Crusader rule no Jew or Muslim was ever permitted to live in Jerusalem.

But there is an even more important historic context that European history has eradicated. Muslim civilisation at the time of the Crusades was a literate, learned plural society. Salah ed Din’s court physician was Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest of Jewish philosophers and scholars. It had universities, public libraries, scientific institutes, free hospitals that conducted medical research, all of which produced advanced technology and agronomy. Under the auspices of Islamophobic rhetoric and ideology, Europe appropriated as much of this learning as it could while denying the Muslim contribution. Crusading polemic came to define the worldview of the West. And it is with us yet.

The liberal humanism that modernised Europe, and to which Ridley Scott is perhaps making diffuse reference, was learned and acquired from Muslim philosophy. It is what we do not know or acknowledge of historic context that so bedevils relations between Muslims and the West today, denying an informed common basis for debate and dialogue. The few noble savage lines ceded to Salah ed Din in this epic are nothing to be grateful for. The injection of the familiar coded messages of the American self-image into such living history is positively dangerous.

As an epic, Kingdom of Heaven is lush and ravishing on the eye, but surprisingly pedestrian and boring in execution, even the set piece battle scenes. Orlando Bloom is also pretty on the eye, but lacklustre and unconvincing.. The rest of the actors have little to work with and do their best in making what they have sound portentous. We can all be thankful Scott apparently had to cut an hour from the final version. There is no prospect that a more mature film lies on the cutting room floor awaiting the director’s cut.

The movie applies the greatest of improbability factors to history. A whole edition of Trivial Pursuit could be devoted to the real stories of the characters and incidents it assembles. But its historic fidelity to the absence of Muslim civilisation as a fully drawn character is in no way trivial. And its dedication to redeeming the Crusades as the historic mission of American ideals provides yet another opportunity for us all to be afraid of the political import of Hollywood cinemagic.

• Merryl Wyn Davies is co-author of American Dream, Global Nightmare and Why Do People Hate America? both published by Icon Books. Kingdom of Heaven (15) is out on general release.