'Kingdom' stokes embers of religious tension

Ridley Scott's crusader epic, Kingdom of Heaven, gets its US release today, amid concerns that the film could stoke embers of religious tension with its portrayal of the 12th-century Christian-Muslim battle over Jerusalem.

The big-budget Hollywood take on the Crusades was always going to be a sensitive undertaking. The very word "crusade," connoting religious conquest, is troublesome, as US President George W. Bush found out when he was widely chastised for using it to characterize the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Even before shooting began on Scott's US$130 million project in January last year, some academics who saw the script accused it of containing gross historical inaccuracies.

Cambridge University professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading authority on the Crusades, slammed the movie for pandering to Islamic fundamentalists by depicting Muslims as sophisticated and civilized and the Christian crusader army as brutes and barbarians.

"It's Osama bin Laden's version of history," Riley-Smith told Britain's Daily Telegraph.

Contrary takes on the film's plot pronounced it pro-Christian, and the resulting debate began to carry echoes of last year's controversy that raged around Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, which many Jewish leaders condemned as anti-Semitic.

In an attempt to assuage any concerns ahead of the movie's US release, Scott and the studio behind the film, 20th Century Fox, arranged private screenings for American Muslim and Christian groups.

The director even employed Grace Hills Media, a Los Angeles public relations company that specializes in marketing potentially controversial films to Christian opinion-makers.

The tactic seems to have paid off.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a prominent Islamic rights group, issued a statement last week saying initial fears that the film offered stereotypical portrayals of Muslims were unfounded.

"Our overall impression is that Kingdom of Heaven is a balanced and positive depiction of Islamic culture during the Crusades," the statement said.

"Muslims are shown as dignified and proud people whose lives are based on ethics and morality," CAIR added.

Journalists with the Christian media were equally warm about the movie after attending a special screening last month.

"With the current political-socio-religious tensions between the West and the Islamic world, making a film about killing one's enemies in the name of God can be carelessly incendiary or politically correct mush," wrote Steve Beard, editor of Good News Magazine, a conservative Methodist publication.

"This movie fell into neither trap," Beard said in his review and called Kingdom of Heaven a "majestic triumph."

Holly McClure, a film reviewer for Trinity Broadcast Network, the world's largest Christian Broadcasting Network, said she saw nothing offensive in the film.

"I think it's more a history lesson than a statement about faith," McClure told AFP.

"The Catholic Church might be a little miffed at some of the characters, but you can't change history," she added.

Some, however, remained unconvinced.

Khaled Abu el-Fadl, who teaches Islamic law at the University of California, Los Angeles, insisted that the movie portrayed Muslims as irrational and the crusaders as tolerant.

"It is President Bush's version of the crusades," Fadl said. "It supports the movement in this country by conservative evangelical Christians who believe Muslims should be grateful for the crusades, just as they should also be grateful for Iraq and Afghanistan."