The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Methodologically, this is a tricky task to perform because of the double ‘otherness’ it invokes. Here we have a scholar who, in post-colonial terms, is attempting to write about a subject not from her position of perceived ‘otherness’ in relation to the Arabo-Islamic tradition, but from that of the neglected ‘otherness’ of this tradition as defined by Western discourses on the subject. Her task is made all the more tricky by the symbolic power of the Crusades in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds as a boundless source of meanings which straddle history, politics, culture, religious beliefs and a lot more. Within the modern currents which permeate the life of the contemporary Arab world in particular, the Crusades are one of the most important and live undercurrents, not least because they involve momentous happenings which evoke the painful realities and tortured hopes of a present deeply steeped in the pastness of its past.

  A project of this nature demands many skills, in addition to the usual ones of sound methodological training and the ability to generalise in an empirically valid manner across a diverse terrain of extremely varied and, sometimes, recalcitrant data. To begin with, this project demands discerning powers in critical self-awareness, on both the intellectual and personal level, to ensure that its scholarly integrity emerges intact. By subjectivising or problematising the author, this project further demands a nuanced and deliberate use of language to convey the subtle and slippery meanings of events, practices and competing conceptualisations in a way which ensures that the narrative remains true to its original aim. A project of this kind also demands an extensive and linguistically competent reading of varied source materials in Arabic, hardly any of which is specifically dedicated to the subject per se. To make things even more difficult, the author aims her book at a wide readership consisting of general readers, students and specialists who would be approaching it with mixed agendas of wanting to find out, learn, evaluate or, even, criticise.

  Carole Hillenbrand’s book meets all these challenges. It is scholarly without being stuffy, and accessible without being patronising. It articulates issues of immense importance to the historian who is less interested in chronology – although there is more than enough of that between its two covers – than the societal institutions which animate the progress of history. It covers themes of interest to the student of theology, and to those who wish to delve into the nature of warfare or to examine how the past so clearly and decisively informs the present. It deals with stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. And it does so in a lively style, permeated by the authoritative voice of the author as a self-aware interpreter who, intentionally, paints with a broad brush to define the main parameters of her subject. The fact that this author is a very close friend and a highly respected colleague makes the task of recommending this book to the reader a great pleasure and a privilege.

  Yasir Suleiman

  Edinburgh, I January 1999

  Acknowledgements

  I HAVE RECEIVED much help in the writing of this book from various institutions and friends. In particular, I am extremely grateful to the British Academy for granting me a Readership during which I was able to conduct some of the research for this book. I should also like to give my wholehearted thanks to the University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Arts, for their additional financial support during my research leave and for contributing to the costs of producing this book. I am also indebted to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for enabling me to visit Crusader sites in Syria.

  Many friends and colleagues have given advice, help and encouragement – Nasra Affara, Dionysius Agius, James Allan, Michael Angold, Julia Ashtiany-Bray, Sylvia Auld, Edmund Bosworth, Michael Broome, Eileen Broughton, Alistair Duncan, Anne-Marie Eddé, Teresa Fitzherbert, Barry Flood, Tariq al-Janabi, David Kerr, Remke Kruk, Paul Lalor, Nancy Lambton, David McDowall, Bernadette Martel-Thoumian, John Mattock, Julie Meisami, Françoise Micheau, May Mi‘marbashi, Ibrahim Muhawi, Ian Netton, David Nicolle, Andrew Petersen, Jonathan Phillips, Louis Pouzet, Denys Pringle, John Richardson, Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Joe Rock, Michael Rogers, Abdallah al-Sayed, Lesley Scobie, Avinoam Shalem, Jacqueline Sublet, and Urbain Vermeulen. I am very grateful to them all.

  I should like to make special mention of ‘Adil Jader who managed, seemingly against all odds, to obtain for me a photocopy of al-Sulami’s manuscript, just before the completion of this book. I also wish to thank Donald Richards for his enthusiastic and erudite teaching on the Crusades many years ago, which first aroused my interest in this subject.

  I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my good friend and esteemed colleague Yasir Suleiman, Professor of Arabic at the University of Edinburgh, for writing the preface to this book. His encouragement and support have been absolutely invaluable in recent years.

  Special thanks go to Campbell Purton for providing the index, Jane Gough for typing the various drafts of this book, always with skill, cheerfulness, enthusiasm and interest, and Rita Winter for her meticulous work and for her exemplary tact and patience in the long task of copy-editing. I wish also to express my gratitude to all the staff of Edinburgh University Press who have shown such interest in this work – and in particular to Archie Turnbull (who persuaded me to write the book in the first place), Vivian Bone, Jane Feore (who made me finish it), Timothy Wright, Jackie Jones, Nicola Carr, Richard Allen, James Dale, and Ian Davidson who guided it towards publication. I should like to express my appreciation and admiration for the work of Lesley Parker and Janet Dunn, who brought flair and ingenuity to the challenging task of designing this book. I count myself fortunate to have worked with them.

  I should also like to thank all those who executed the drawings for this book: Hamish Auld, Nicola Burns, Jenny Capon, Anne Cunningham, Victoria Lamb and Jessica Wallwork.

  Lastly, I would like to thank my daughters Margaret and Ruth for their loving interest and support. My debt to my husband, Robert, cannot be adequately expressed in words. More photographs in this book come from him than from any other source except the Creswell archive. He has read all the drafts of this book, giving many helpful criticisms and suggestions. He has also taught me the value of looking closely at art-historical material and from his own scholarly knowledge of Islamic art and architecture he has laboriously chosen or guided me in choosing all the illustrations for this book. Above all, he has never failed to give me much-needed support and encouragement.

  Note on Transliteration and Translations

  In view of the length and costs of this book, a decision was made to dispense with any system of transliteration for the Arabic, Persian and Turkish names and terms used in the main body of the text. However, the properly transliterated forms of such words will be found in the index. Throughout the book the words Ibn and b. are used interchangeably.

  The Arabic translations in this book are mine, except when otherwise indicated in the notes. When good translations already exist in other languages, I have retranslated them into English.

  Note on the Illustrations

  The decision to illustrate this book lavishly was taken for several reasons. First, and most important, was the desire to set the text within a visual context that would invoke the medieval Levant. Hence the many illustrations that depict everyday objects in common use in Muslim society, from coins to clothing, or show Muslims enjoying themselves in a variety of leisure pursuits, or reflect the many faces of war. Special care has been taken to evoke the world of the court, its ceremonies and hierarchies, and conversely the many ways in which the religion of Islam found visual expression: mosques, madrasas, the tombs of saints and warriors for the faith, embellished with their resounding titles, and even the very pulpits from which jihad was preached. Where possible the photographic plates depict the Levant as it was before the full onset of the modern age – for example, the mosques of Hims and Hama are shown as they were before their respective rebuilding and destruction.

  Second, the illustrations are intended to fill the multiple gaps left by the medieval Islamic sources. The authors of thos
e sources were not writing for a modern audience and they saw no reason to comment on what to them was obvious or everyday. Very few of them had a visual sense and they rarely mention the visual arts. The illustrations, then, function as a kind of subtext so as to make good this deficiency and to tell a somewhat different story. Very occasionally material from before or after the eleventh to fourteenth centuries is used, for example in Chapter 9, which in any case deals with the aftermath of the Crusades.

  Third, these visual arts are, by and large, devoid of the bias which almost inevitably afflicts those who write about the past from the viewpoint of the present. Chronicles are often later and thus flawed interpretations of what happened – and sometimes happened long ago. The works of art of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries which are depicted here, however, are for the most part unselfconsciously contemporary. They rarely have an axe to grind. Accordingly they can shed unexpected sidelights on historical events, whether they tell us how a castle was built, what weapons a warrior carried or how a ruler sat in state and enjoyed himself. Occasionally, too, as in the statue of Saladin erected in 1992, they tell us something about modern Muslim attitudes to this particular past.

  These illustrations, then, are intended to flesh out the sometimes over-terse or rhetorical accounts by the Muslim historians of the Wars of the Cross, and to show in detail how the other half lived. True to the focus of this book, a deliberate decision was taken to exclude all Crusader illustrative material, apart from a few Crusader artefacts that have been Islamised – such as coins, or elements of architecture reused in an Islamic context. Now and again, too, artefacts made by Oriental Christians feature among the illustrations; these Christians, after all, were not an intrusive presence like the Franks but had been a permanent feature of local society since the Muslim invasions. Perhaps the most notable feature of these illustrations is the absence of Muslim depictions of the Franks (with the possible exception of colour plate 13), whereas Frankish representations of Muslims are frequently encountered. Perhaps the dearth of twelfth-century book painting has something to do with this; but the fact remains that the Crusaders made no visual impact on any Islamic figural art that survives from the medieval period. This is indeed food for thought.

  Some account of the raison d’être of the placing of the illustrative material in this book may be helpful. Some illustrations are intended to complement a specific passage in the text. These are identified by cross-references within the text itself. Others are more generally relevant to the material in a given sub-section. These are listed immediately after the relevant sub-heading, but there will be no further reference to them in the text. Yet others are intended to function in a still more general fashion, as an evocation of medieval Islamic society in the Middle East. These are scattered throughout the book. All illustrations can be tracked down by the list of captions on pages xv–xxxv.

  Glossary of Islamic Terms

  Abu:

  father (of), used in many Muslim names in combination with the name of the first-born son.

  amir:

  commander, prince.

  atabeg:

  guardian of a prince; often a governor.

  b.:

  son of (Arabic ibn, bin).

  caliph:

  the name given to leaders of the Muslim community (from Arabic khalifa, ‘successor’ – to Muhammad).

  caravansarai:

  lodging place for travellers, merchants and their goods; often fortified and situated on a trade route.

  dhimma:

  a covenant made between the Islamic state and the adherents of other revealed religions living under Islamic rule. The dhimma gives them protection on condition that they pay the jizya.

  dhimmi:

  a member of a protected religious community.

  dinar:

  gold coin.

  dirham:

  silver coin (later copper).

  diwan:

  government office or ministry; royal reception chamber; collection of poems.

  fals:

  copper coin.

  fatwa:

  a ruling or opinion based on Islamic law delivered by a qualified legal scholar.

  ghazi:

  warrior for the faith.

  hadith:

  collective body of traditions relating to Muhammad and his Companions; they constitute one of the sources of guidance for Muslims.

  hajj:

  the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  hammam:

  steam baths; bathing establishment for the public.

  haram:

  that which is forbidden or sacrosanct. This term applies especially in this book to the area of the Islamic sanctuaries in Jerusalem.

  hijra (hegira):

  Muhammad’s emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622, the date which marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.

  ibn:

  see b.

  imam:

  a prayer leader; the sovereign head of the Islamic community; the spiritual leader of the Shi‘ites.

  Islam:

  submitting oneself to the will of Allah.

  Isma‘ilis or:

  Seveners members of the Shi‘ite group who believe that the legitimate succession

  Seveners:

  of imams includes the seventh imam Isma’il, son of the imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq.

  jami‘:

  the great mosque in which the communal Friday prayer takes place and the Friday sermon is preached.

  jihad:

  holy war against unbelievers.

  jizya:

  the poll-tax paid by the protected religious groups within the Islamic state, cf. dhimma.

  khan:

  lodging place for travellers and merchants; lord, prince.

  khassakiyya:

  personal military entourage of a sultan.

  khutba:

  bidding prayer or sermon delivered in the mosque at midday prayers on Fridays.

  madhhab:

  school of law.

  madrasa:

  an institution for the study of law and other Islamic sciences.

  Maghrib:

  the Muslim world in North Africa west of and including Tunisia.

  maqsura:

  a special section of the mosque reserved for the ruler.

  maristan:

  hospital.

  maslaha:

  the principle of what is beneficial to the common good.

  maydan:

  open public square or plaza, central ceremonial space.

  mamluk:

  slave (often also used of manumitted slave).

  mihrab:

  arched niche, usually concave but sometimes flat, indicating the direction of Mecca (the qibla) and thus of prayer.

  mina’i:

  pottery in which colours are applied both under and over the glaze.

  minaret:

  the tower of a mosque from which the faithful are called to prayer.

  minbar:

  stepped pulpit in a mosque, used for the pronouncement of the khutba.

  mi‘raj:

  the ascent of the Prophet Muhammad into heaven.

  mosque:

  a place where Muslims worship.

  mujahid:

  one who strives in the path of God; one who fights jihad,

  muqarnas:

  honeycomb or stalactite vaulting made up of individual cells or small arches.

  Muslim:

  a person who follows the religion of Islam.

  nafs:

  soul.

  qadi:

  a judge, usually in matters of civil law.

  qasr:

  castle or palace; fort.

  qibla:

  direction of prayer, that is to the Ka‘ba in Mecca.

  qubba:

  dome.

  Qur’an:

  God’s Word revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.

  ratl:

  a unit of weight corresponding in Syria to c. 3.202 kilos.

  ribat:
<
br />   a fortified Muslim monastery or frontier post.

  sahn:

  interior court, usually of a mosque.

  Seveners:

  see Isma’ilis.

  shahid:

  a martyr in the path of God.

  Shari‘a:

  Islamic law.

  Shi‘a:

  (hence Shi‘ite) generic term for a series of ‘sects’ not regarded as part of orthodox Islam; they all recognise ‘Ali (cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet) as the first legitimate caliph.

  Sufi:

  Islamic mystic.

  sultan:

  ruler, king.

  Sunni:

  orthodox Muslim.