Francis of Assisi a Middle East Negotiator?

Thomas Cahill has a new book on the Middle Ages and the table of contents destroys a lot of the secular mythology concerning the obscurantism and backwardness college history survey courses often portray.

Cahill's book on How the Irish Saved Western Civilization more or less ripped off without attribution Christopher Dawson's The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity, a book I read in the early '60s which has the theme that Cahill elaborates concerning the crucial rold of Irish monks in preserving the classical European heritage and then propagating it throughout Europe.

But the main theme of this blog is Francis of Assisi and Cahill's bleating column on how different things would be if a certain Italian cardinal had listened to the Friar and practiced Christianity on its highest levels.

The story line of Cahill's article is how a Fatamid [Shi'ite]sultan named Kamil was moved by Francis in a visit to Cairo, and then in Italy yadda yadda the evil Papal Curia yadda yadda.... Of course, the apologists for Muslim terror nowadays conveniently overlook little events such as kind Kamil's predecessor Al-Hakim who may have sparked the Crusades by banning pilgrimages, killing Christians [as well as Jews], making Christians wear outlandish outfits with outsize crosses, and finally destroying the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. That would be historical, and the Cahill's of this world usually print the legend.

Actually, a book by Idries Shah on The Sufis claims that Francis as a very young merchant went to Syria and became initiated into being a Sufi adept, adopting their cowl and robe for his religious order which he founded employing the Sufi quietist mode, as opposed to the whirling dervishes.

Shah's book tends to exaggerate the exploits and the extent of the influence of Sufism, and of course, the Catholic Church would never admit to introducing a foreign "cult" into their religious orders. So the real story may never be told, and it may be largely apocryphal.

But although Cahill does raise an interesting "counterfactual" what if?, the real story of the Crusades is so absurdly complex, with alliances among Roman and Orthodox Christians with Shi'ite Fatamids against Sunni Seljuk and other pre-Ottoman Turks that it makes today's Iraq look familiar and even uncomplicated!