The seat of eastern Christendom, the shining city of Constantinople, had been threatened to its doorsteps by a new breed of men pouring out of the steppes of northwestern Asia. These Turks, who stormed across vast expanses on horseback, two centuries before the Golden Horde of Genghis Kahn, were converted to Islam as they rode. With the fierce fanaticism of new converts, still spirited by the Gnostic shamanism of the steppes, the Turks thundered into the Levantine lands. Christendom was reeling from the Turkish invasions. In a single generation, Asia Minor had fallen into their hands, and the Byzantine Empire lost the sources of its great wealth.

Emperor Alexius sought assistance from the western Pope, and the first of a series of Crusades came to Anatolia and Palestine and Egypt. This first Crusade featured a rabble of separate barbarian armies. It featured men like Prince Bohemond, a pure Norman with a Norman’s cruelty and a Norman’s belief that the whole world was ripe for conquest.

The first Crusade featured Robert, Duke of Normandy, the first-born son of William the Conqueror, who so exasperated his father by his hot temper and rebelliousness that he was denied the throne.

From Europe to the Holy Land, along the Danube to Greece, the Crusaders plundered and abused the local populations, reserving the cruelest of their atrocities for the Jews. They continued their plunder into Byzantine territory, and it was only by deft diplomacy and a great bestowment of supplies and treasure that the Emperor at Constantinople escaped from have to defend himself against them, which would have been very costly. In fact, Bohemond already had a history of fighting against Byzantine armies in Italy.

And the first Crusade featured fanatical infantries of the poor, like the Tafurs, who followed the armies to pick up scraps and held bridles for a crumb of bread. The Tafurs walked barefoot, covered with filth and sores, often naked or nearly so. They never rode on horseback and lived in ghetto camps separated from the main army. They were armed with knives and clubs and pointed sticks and scythes. In their eyes, they were the poor people of Christ, the Chosen Ones, and they were all equal with one another, but they were led by a pauper king, le roi Tafur. The King of the Tafurs was a Norman knight who had forsaken his sword and armor to wear sackcloth and wield a scythe. The Tafurs appear first in legend and recorded history at the battle for Antioch, where they became a single organized living force of incalculable power and energy, with a complete disregard for danger, where they fought like scrawny lions, and where they entered the besieged city and raped and murdered in a wild frenzy. When the Emir of Antioch complained of their excesses, he was told that, “all of us together cannot tame King Tafur”.

On the Crusaders marched toward Jerusalem, having recovered the Holy Lance and a portion of the True Cross, along with other relics. The Saracen defenders of Jerusalem were 60,000 strong, and they had cut down all the trees around the city and poisoned all the wells brought every animal inside the city walls. They were well supplied with Greek fire and catapults and boulders and bails of hay liberally sprinkled with oil and wax. The Crusaders brought 1,300 knights, 12,000 infantrymen and workmen of all kinds.

On July 6, 1099, a priest named Peter Desiderious had a vision. The ghost of Bishop Adhemar le Puy came to him with a message for all Crusaders. He said to walk in a holy procession around the city of Jerusalem, and that after a 9 day siege they would enter the city in triumph. And so, this is what they did. Every knight and soldier and priest and workman walked barefoot around the city, with their holy relics held up, chanting, drumming and trumpeting and asking forgiveness for their sins. And then they went to work, constructing their siege engines and sapping the walls, working in the heat, having to walk miles to find water, and starving. And after 9 days, the wind turned toward the city, and all the thick smoke of the battlefield billowed over the walls and blinded the defenders thereon, and the Crusaders finally succeeded in nailing a plank from one of their siege engines to the top of a wall, and two Flemish knights, Litold and Gilbert, had the honor of being the first to cross the bridge. A file of Crusaders followed them, and one of the threatened Saracen generals committed an act of treachery, and he opened the gate of David, and a great mass of Crusaders poured in via the main gate. They entered on July 15th, at noon, and the Crusaders were well aware that they were entering Jerusalem at the hour that Christ died upon the cross. And the city became a lake of blood, and all the Jews were burned alive, locked inside their synagogue, and only a few Saracens were spared, including the treacherous general who lifted the gate.

That night, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, they only found the rotunda. There was no tomb of Jesus. The hollowed-out rock had vanished, chiseled away long ago. On that night, all the Crusaders made their way in procession to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. A mass was administered by the priests, and candles glowed under the vaulted ceiling, and armored knights stood beside simple soldiers and in the half-darkness of that cavernous church, there was sense of common purpose achieved against all odds.

To those first Crusaders, the tomb was not of this world. The tomb had been destroyed, and yet the tomb remained. They were partakers of the mystery. Because it had been chiseled apart and carted away, the tomb lived all the more. Men seek shelter in the shade of a dream.

But, in Mecca, 800 miles to the south of Jerusalem, there was another tomb and another dream. There was the kaaba, the black cube, where according to Islamic tradition Ishmael and his mother Hagar are buried. The kaaba, formerly a shrine devoted to a thousand pagan gods, is a statement of religious belief, four-square, hard-edged, adorned by fragments of black meteorite, emblematic of the power residing in the Arab peoples. And it would come to pass that a great leader was born among those people. Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Damascus, vowed to rid the Holy Land of the bloody treacherous infidels, and he retook Jerusalem nearly a century after that first Crusade had sacked it. The True Cross passed into Saladin’s hands, and it is rumored that it has since been buried beneath the threshold of the great Mosque of Damascus, where true believers step on it as they enter the doorway. Before his death, Saladin pledged to take his forces deep into Western Europe to repay the barbarians for the outrages that they had brought to the Holy Lands.
But, Saladin died, and his 17 sons squabled over successorship, and the Islamic lands fell into separate pieces.

Osman had a dream. He dreamed of a great tree which sheltered an inevitable Islamic empire. The tree cast its shadowy shade over the four holy mountains and the four ancient rivers of paradise. He saw that there would be a day when the wind would blow, and the sickle shaped leaves of this great tree would shake and point their tips toward all the peoples of the world. In Osman’s dream, the world appeared like a bejeweled ring beneath this great tree, and the centerpiece of this ring was the sparkling city of Constantinople, and Osman awoke from his dream just as he was slipping this ring upon his finger.

Osman became the first Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1300 AD. Mehmet the Conqueror took the city of Constantinople in 1453, renamed it Istanbul, and the Ottoman Empire would eventually ring the eastern Mediterranean Sea, with Istanbul as its capitol center, and with regional centers in Tripoli, Benghazi, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Ankara, Sophia, Bucharest, Budapest and Athens.

The empire survived for six centuries, but eventually outlived its grandeur, and never did a great world power sink so low as did the Ottoman Empire after the Crimean War of 1856. Thereafter, Tsar Alexander called them “the sick man of the world”, and Victorians referred to them impersonally as ‘the Eastern Question”. Osman’s tree had been felled. The Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off what would become WWI and WWII. And throughout the 20th century, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and Iran, were carved up by European surveyors on paper maps.

The Republic of Turkey would become ‘westernized’, under the strong arm of a secular military government during the 20th century. Today, Turkey is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. They build cars and electronics and appliances. They build 25% of Europe’s televisions. They send cars to Egypt. They send dishwashers and refrigerators to Iran and Iraq. They have secured their water supply by building dams on the Euphrates and Tigris, and the lower countries are now dependent upon Turkey’s generosity. After the fall of Syria, Russia will depend upon Turkey to access trade upon the Mediterranean Sea.

Turkey’s military government has been sacked, with most of the high ranking officers being sentenced to long jail terms. Turkey stands poised again to be the centerpiece of an Islamic Empire, bridging both the trade markets and the Islamist visions of east and west. And, with the downfall of the Euro zone, perhaps Turkey dodged a bullet by not being granted full membership in the EU.

At the great Islamic conference this last Sunday, held in Ankara, Osman’s tree was replanted in the dreams of Islamic prophecy. No mention was made of the European Union. The EU is faltering, and a new Islamic ‘Eurabia’ is rapidly taking hold there in Western Europe. Turkey has re-established its old connections to Egypt and Iraq and Persia and North Africa, and representatives from Palestine’s Hamas party received the loudest ovations at the conference.

Today, in Turkey, we see a practical, stable, prosperous, multi-ethnic country. And now, in 2012, they have risked all of this, throwing off their secular military government. They have cleared a path for the possible establishment of a uniquely vital and charismatic Islamic government. They have either become the economic and cultural capitol of the Middle East, or the exemplary template upon which Iran and Iraq and Egypt and Syria and Libya can rebuild. Or, rather, they will overplay their hand.

Osman’s tree grows again, and the wind shakes its sickle-shaped leaves toward the West. At the advent of a westerly Islamic Crusades, would we remember as Americans that we also had a dream once, though not of a paternalistic shade tree, but a dream of a shining city upon a hill? Perhaps there is something that we could learn from our Islamic brothers, though not something of legalisms, but a bearing of pious purposeful vision. What is our pious purposeful vision as Americans? If it is not of liberty, then we may as well all become Muslims and live in a worldwide pax shariah.

Western Man could do worse than to submit to Islamic regulation. Western Man marches steadily in the direction of becoming more wretched than any slave of Nebuchadnezzar. For, the latter served at least a human master, but digital bio-technical cyborg man would become a slave of a relentless machine, and ultimately the prisoner of that most callous of all machines, the totalitarian Panopticon.

Our democracy is a sham. Our economic viziers are more tricksterous than those of the waning days of the pharaohs of Egypt. Drones and cameras and plastic cards govern us increasingly. We bow to our knees not 5 times, but 500 times a day and suck the carpet fibers in reverence to Google and Apple and Microsoft and synthetic medicine.

We have no counterpart to look toward, as the Islamic world looks toward modern Turkey and the kaaba in Mecca. The rest of the world is either socialist or Islamic or both. We have only to look ourselves in the mirror, and realize that we are the descendents of pilgrim rebels and ne’er-do-wells and pirates and good freedom-thirsting men and women. By what great vision will liberty be restored to America? It must emerge from the pagan wilderness, and move again toward that dream of a shining city upon a hill, where men breathe the free air, and where heroism is not the stuff of fables, and where true human progress sires ever less government and more anarchic brotherhood.

Oh, we Americans have a religion. Each of your ancestors who came to this land were their own sort of individuated pilgrims. We have a belief rooted in the inalienable liberty of all men. And our cause is the product of a glorious dream, perhaps an American dream which is yet to be realized. Dreams never die, and gods never die, and some ghosts never sleep. Certainly, in the year 2006, I visited American gravestones in France and the Netherlands, and I was overtaken and floored and left bawling with the tears of a child. I had insomnia over there and I smoked a lot of Dutch weed in Europe, and perhaps that was the cause of my breakdown before the tombstones of fallen American soldiers. But, I prefer to think that the immortal gods envy us mortals who would live free or die happily in the cause of the pursuit of that shining city upon a hill, and of all the ghosts that I have ever encountered in my intoxicated stupors, the American ones were the noblest. And as I camped alone on a high strategic ground, near the western border of Germany, where Vikings and Normans and Spaniards and Germans and Brits and Dutchmen and elite shock troops of Napolean’s Grande Armie had shed their blood into the sand, I witnessed all of those apparitions approaching the ghosts of fallen American soldiers, circling around them, and asking them with great interest what life was like in Vermont and Florida and Texas and Ohio and California, etc..