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There are questions which stay with you for a lifetime, when the quest seems to overshadow everything else. The answer fades from memory yet you still recall the whys and the wherefores which propelled you along a certain course.

‘Who are the infidels and who are the true believers, Daddy?’ I was ten years old, we were studying Richard the Lionheart in class and I was a confused little girl. I sensed that there was something wrong with our textbook account of the Crusades which depicted Richard the Lionheart, ‘scourge of the Muslims’ as a winner and my man, Salah ad-Din, as a loser—but the answer eluded me.

The Muslim warriors seemed a bloodthirsty lot and the Crusaders were blonde and blue-eyed, like most of my schoolmates at the inner city primary school I attended in Perth. I badly wanted to identify with Prince Salah ad-Din who shared our surname and looked like my father and my Uncle Mahmoud, but I didn’t want to be labelled an infidel—not so much for religious reasons, mind you. In my heart of hearts, at ten years of age, I wasn’t really concerned about who was cock of the walk in a theological sense, but I did want to be on a winning side, and I badly needed a classroom hero.

And so my father raised his eyes—yet again—to the ceiling (or was it the heavens), and offered up a different interpretation of history to this daughter of his who never stopped asking questions. It was my first lesson in ambiguity—but it was comforting.

Years later I enrolled in a medieval history unit at university and after reading Steven Runciman’s three volume The History of the Crusades, learnt that economics, as much as religion, guided the emperors and popes who called on younger noble sons and common folk to join together in a holy war against ‘the infidel’. Centuries passed and religious ecstasy faded, but greed and the desire for control of rich provinces, ports and trade routes continued to energise this long series of wars that lasted from the late eleventh century until their decline in the fourteenth.

One day, while toiling over an essay on the early crusades, I remembered the words of my father who, long ago, had talked about Salah ad-Din’s chivalry and sense of honour; how the Kurdish prince tried to negotiate with the Crusaders but had found himself thwarted by their fanaticism. My father had never heard of Runciman, but in matters to do with Salah ad-Din he would have found himself in good company. The English historian sided with my father and fixed in my mind, once and for all, who were the aggressors and ultimately the losers in the sorry tale of the crusades. But after the Salah ad-Din generation passed away, in the decades that followed, Muslim rulers became more intolerant. My father’s version would have it that Muslims learnt intolerance from their enemies, perhaps he was right, but I wasn’t convinced. The slide into zealousness was bound to happen. God might want peace on earth, but temporal rulers; statesmen; politicians; corporations and followers from every religious tribe on earth would find ways of subverting this vision.

Centuries pass and the Game continues although the rules and combatants have changed. A tribe of secularists attempts, often unsuccessfully, to ‘hold the ring’ and keep the religious tribes from warring against each other. In some societies the rule of law is invoked to stifle religious hate speech. But in the 21^st century fanaticism wears different guises, sometimes cloaking itself in nationalism, naïve patriotism, piety or religious fundamentalism. Rhetoric on one side invokes democracy at any price, locking horns with rival ideologues promising the young and the despairing a short cut to Paradise .

* * * *

I never quite put the crusades behind me, but they took on a comic turn after I became a fan of the Monty Python movies in the seventies. I conjured up scenes where visored knights and turbaned warriors on wooden horses, waving wooden swords and scimitars, clumped around bumping into each other snarling: ‘Listen mate, you’re not the true believer! I’m the true believer! You're the infidel—get it into your head stupid! My father, God bless him, never got my joke and took to grinding his teeth and muttering phrases like, ‘This is what happens when you bring them up in this country.’ He was right.

(This was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 August 2008)