ABSTRACT
The new rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has also featured a nearly ubiquitous characterisation of its actions as ‘medieval,’ ‘barbaric’ or otherwise synonymous with the ‘stone age’, with a strong implication that this sort of violence is unknown to the Western societies they are attacking. The crusades have been reinvented down the centuries for countless purposes, imaginations and sociopolitical projects, and this continues in the post-9/11 political world. The responses to Kingdom of Heaven thus form an extremely fertile avenue of inquiry, as they stand at the intersection of a popular image of the crusades and its critical reception. Clearly, the nearly millennium-old conflict of the crusades is not a distant or irrelevant concern, but the context in which, with the use of modern technology, the message is framed and given resonance. The crusades have been reinvented down the centuries for countless purposes, imaginations and sociopolitical projects, and this continues in the post-9/11 political world.
