The Crusades: A wound that has lasted 900 years

In the opening minutes of Kingdom of Heaven, the father of the hero, Balian of Ibelin, tells his son what to expect in the Holy Land: "A kingdom of conscience; peace instead of war, love instead of hate. That is what lies at the end of Crusade."

In the opening minutes of Kingdom of Heaven, the father of the hero, Balian of Ibelin, tells his son what to expect in the Holy Land: "A kingdom of conscience; peace instead of war, love instead of hate. That is what lies at the end of Crusade."

They are noble virtues which Sir Ridley Scott, the British director of Hollywood's latest "sand-and-sandals" epic, must have been wishing were more in evidence among his critics as his £66m film about the medieval Crusades last night had its premiere in London.

Publicity for the film, starring Orlando Bloom, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson, makes a virtue of its faithfulness to the events it portrays - the abject defeat of Christian forces by the great Muslim warrior, Saladin, at the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and its aftermath.

For Sir Ridley, knighted two years ago for services to film, the desire to depict the 200-year struggle between the Christian and Islamic faiths for primacy over the spiritual treasures of Jerusalem and the Holy Land has been a 30-year dream.

Among the claims made for the production - featuring the full panoply of costume drama eye-candy from vast battle scenes and a shipwreck to dashing knights and a leprous king - are that it is "historically accurate" and designed to be "a fascinating history lesson".

But the roles of the assiduous academic, fixated with historical probity, and Tinseltown director, obsessed with entertainment at any cost, have never been easily reconciled - and Kingdom of Heaven seems no exception.

Critics, ranging from some of Britain's leading academics to Islamic terror groups, have rounded on Sir Ridley and his film for distorting the reality of complex Christian and Muslim relations in the years preceding the 12th-century Third Crusade.

Among the more temperate language used about the film have been the words "rubbish", "ridiculous", "complete fiction" and "dangerous". To add an extra twist, Sir Ridley has been accused of stealing the plot from an American researcher's work.

Indeed, the 65-year-old British director faces much adversity in his self-proclaimed mission to rectify Western perceptions of Islam and "challenge extremism of all kinds". Speaking to the BBC yesterday, he said: "[The film] is a very good discussion and balanced on those tricky subjects: politics and religion. There's no black and white in a discussion of these particular worlds. It's a minutiae of grey areas."

But in a world where the word "crusade" in relation to Western and Arab relations is every bit as politically charged as it was 800 years ago, the Christian battle to seize Jerusalem still polarises opinion dramatically.

During filming in Morocco last year, more than a dozen death threats were issued by fundamentalists, forcing King Mohammed VI to offer 1,000 soldiers to guard the set in the Sahara.

Moderate politicians in the country accused the film, financed by the Fox studio, of being part of an American propaganda campaign for "legitimacy in the crusade against the Arab world" - a reference to George Bush's spontaneous use of the word "crusade" when launching his War on Terror in the wake of the 11 September attacks in 2001.

But while some Muslim scholars have denounced the film as "anti-Islamic", debate among Western historians has focused on concern that it confuses historical events and ultimately goes too far in portraying the Crusaders as bearded brutes and romanticising the Muslim warriors, in particular Saladin, as munificent foes bent on enlightening the lobster-coloured invaders.

Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading historian of the crusades, has led the criticism, saying the film presents "Osama bin Laden's version of history".

The Cambridge academic has accused Sir Ridley of relying on the Victorian view of the crusades as portrayed in Sir Walter Scott's account of the conflict in his book, The Talisman. "It sounds absolute balls," Professor Riley Smith said. "It's rubbish. It's not historically accurate at all. They refer to The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."

It is a charge which Sir Ridley, whose previous blockbusters include Gladiator, Alien, Blade Runner and Black Hawk Down, and Fox have gone out of their way to deny, stating one of the film's key elements - the notion that Muslims, Christians and Jews formed a peaceful fraternity in Jerusalem - is backed by historical research.

But the director admitted the film was as much about changing Western attitudes as telling the story of faith-based medieval warfare. "Religious difference right now is causing a great lack of understanding, so I felt it was important to show that not all Muslims are bad and not everyone in the West is good.

"There's been a lot of criticism from historians. But they haven't seen anything. They haven't read anything."

In the screenplay for Kingdom of Heaven, the Christian hero, Balian, a French blacksmith of uncertain lineage, is rediscovered by his crusader father, Godfrey of Ibelin, played by Neeson, and persuaded to leave his recently buried wife and child in search of rebirth and forgiveness in Jerusalem, occupied since 1099 by the Christians.

There Balian finds a city ruled by a Christian king, Baldwin IV, who as well as suffering leprosy has forged a fragile peace to keep Saladin's army at bay and allow the three major faiths - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - to worship alongside each other.

It is only after the death of Baldwin and his succession by his brother-in-law, Guy de Lusignan, that the baddies of the piece, the warrior monks of the Knights Templar arrive to disrupt the inter-faith panacea and declare war anew. The result is the Battle of Hattin on the plains 60 miles south west of Damascus in July 1187 in which the Crusader army, successfully outmanoeuvred by Saladin and deprived of water, was slaughtered by the Muslims.

Under Sir Ridley's direction, a nihilistic Balian ultimately finds himself the defender of Jerusalem against Saladin's vast army before negotiating a civilised surrender.

According to the film's critics, this compelling yarn is a strange mixture of historical figures and events with interpretations of the Crusader story that bear little relation to reality.

Historians have particularly quibbled with the notion of a peaceful confraternity in Jerusalem under Baldwin IV and the view that Guy de Lusignan and his lieutenants were untrammelled savages outwitted by the urbane Saladin.

Ironically, the only evidence for a friendship between the Crusader knights and their enemies is a contemporary chronicler who shares his first name with the West's current number one bogeyman.

Usama ibn Munqidh, who wrote before the Battle of Hattin, expressed admiration for some of the Crusader leaders. But experts point out that this was driven by the assimilation of the Western invaders.

Carole Hillenbrand, professor of Islamic history at Edinburgh University, who has written a leading text on Muslim perceptions of the Crusades, said: "I would view the notion of a confraternity with some suspicion.

"Almost every generation in the West has interpreted the Crusades according their contemporary needs, from 19th Century imperialism to the troubles of today. What Usama described was more about how the Crusaders became used to the ways of the Islamic world and accepted before a new influx arrived from Europe.

"The idea that the Crusades were about constant warfare and set-piece battles is also wrong. This was a struggle over 200 years with long periods of detente punctuated by heightened tension and conflict. There were sieges and raids but big battles were a rarity."

Experts have also expressed concern that whatever the film's didactic intentions by underlining the refinement of Saladin and the Islamic culture, it is wrong to suggest barbarity and expansionism came from one side only. The sultan of Egypt and Syria did indeed spare the lives of many of his enemies in retaking Jerusalem after 1187 - in stark contrast to the bloody Crusader conquest of the city in 1099 which inspired an Arab poet to write the lines: "How can the eye sleep between the lids at a time of disasters/ That would waken any sleeper?/ This is war, and the infidel's sword is naked in his hand, ready/ To be sheathed again in men's necks and skulls."

But while showing mercy to some, Saladin, whose other champions have included Saddam Hussein, was ruthless with others. After the Battle of Hattin, he personally undertook the execution of Reynald of Chatillon, a leader of the Crusader army who had attacked pilgrims on the Muslim Haj, and ordered the execution of the Knights Templar.

Professor Hillenbrand said: "Saladin even had his own spin-doctors, two contemporary biographers who portrayed him as a jihad or holy warrior. The truth is he was just as interested in personal power, family power and territorial ambition. He was capable of acts of great generosity but he was also responsible for what can be described as the grim acts of war. The realities of war were on both sides in the Crusades."

Beyond the minutiae of the historical debate, there can be little doubt of the enduring ability of the Crusades to stir interest and inflame passions.

After long periods where the conflict has been interpreted among Muslim academics as part of an assault by a culturally and technologically inferior Christian enemy, some experts in the Arab world are now billing the Crusades as the first attempt by the western powers at colonisation.

Others point to a resurgence in the age-old rhetoric of the Crusades among fundamentalist political groups and clerics in the wake of the war in Iraq. Websites used by Islamist extremists groan with references to "infidels" and "wars of the holy cross".

But as Kingdom of Heaven bids to out-do Gladiator as the most lucrative of the recent crop of ancient epics in box offices across the world, all agree that it will not be the final word on the collision between Islam and Christianity.

Rifaat Ebied, the Egyptian-born professor of Semitic studies at Sydney University, said: "My instinct tells me that this film will be another point of view about the Crusades. It will not be definitive. Instead, we should realise that even at the time of greatest tension between the West and the Arab worlds, there has always been dialogue between both sides."