The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  The Crusades shaped western European perceptions of the Muslim world just as decisively as they formed Muslim views of the West. These stereotypical images of the old ‘enemy’ are deeply entrenched and need to be aired and scrutinised in order to be understood and modified. It is undoubtedly time to balance the western European view with the Islamic perspective. Riley-Smith rightly identifies the problem when he writes that the history of the Latin East would be transformed if Islamic studies were given the prominence they deserve: ‘It is curious how peripheral they have so far proved to be – how many Crusade historians have bothered to learn Arabic?’3 Riley-Smith then also criticises the attitude of Islamicists themselves, ‘to most of whom the Crusades and the Latin settlements are of marginal significance’.

  So both sides need to be better informed. Indeed, there is much to be gained by modern scholars of the Islamic Middle Ages studying the period of the Crusades. Such research throws light on a range of historical issues and themes – military history, politico-religious ideologies and the evolution of border societies. Over and above all this is the moulding of socio-cultural attitudes between the Middle East and the West which have survived until the present day.

  The intention is that this book will be of interest not only to non-Muslims but also to the many Muslims who cannot read Arabic. Both groups may find some of their preconceptions about the Crusades modified by the evidence presented. Muslims may well be surprised at the way in which their medieval counterparts co-existed, indeed on occasion collaborated with the invading Franks, whilst non-Muslims will have cause to ponder on the ideological heritage which the Crusades have left in the Near East. This book does not aim to be especially radical, original or comprehensive. It attempts, instead, to present some ideas and themes for those who wish to pursue this fascinating topic in greater depth, having acquired a clearer idea of the neglected side of the question.

  In a way this book needs no justification. So many popular books have been written about the Crusades from the Western side that any new general work which highlights the Muslim viewpoint, so sadly under-represented, should be a welcome addition to our knowledge of the subject. In Britain the popularity of Terry Jones’s television series Crusades (early 1990s) and book on the Crusades (in which he stressed to a wide audience the high level of Islamic civilisation at the time of the Crusades) points to considerable interest in this subject.4

  There are many different but complementary perspectives which together cast fresh light on the phenomenon of the Crusades. At the basic level the political and military story needs to be told. The ideology and motivation of both sides need to be examined. The social and economic interaction between Crusader and Muslim also provides more nuanced insights into the reality of life in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Levant. Last but by no means least – indeed perhaps the most important theme of all – is the nature of warfare in this period, since the advent of the Crusaders in Muslim territory involved wars which they first won and then lost.

  Figure 1.3 (above and opposite) Signs of the zodiac on the Wade Cup (a: Aries, b: Gemini, c: Leo, d: Libra, e: Sagittarius, f: Aquarius), inlaid brass, c. 1230, Iran

  It is, of course, vital to avoid viewing Islamic history, or for that matter any other kind of history, exclusively from the Western perspective. Even Orientalists who know Arabic and are knowledgeable about Islam have often been rightly criticised in the past for having a colonialist agenda and for being unable to represent honestly the views of the indigenous peoples of the Middle East. Thus it might be argued that the writing of the Islamic view of the Crusades should be left on the whole to Muslim scholars themselves. This is, of course, a reasonable point of view and the fact that this book is the work of a Western scholar does not imply disagreement with such a view. But there has been no spate of books written from the Islamic side about the Crusades by internationally respected contemporary Muslim scholars themselves. It is a sad fact that the best Muslim historians have, as it happens, specialised in other areas.

  But just as it is important for the history of the Christian West to be studied and written about by scholars of non-Western origins, so too there is benefit in Western scholars writing about aspects of medieval Islamic history. What matters is the methodology used: a careful reading of a wide range of sources and an awareness of how to evaluate historiographical evidence in the light of recent researches in medieval history, both Western and Oriental.

  Recent Arab Scholarly Approaches to the Crusades

  Not surprisingly, since the Crusader attacks from Europe afflicted what is now perceived quite rightly as being part of the Arab world – Syria, Egypt and Palestine – the Crusades have been viewed in the Muslim writings of the twentieth century as an Arab phenomenon, as will be seen in greater detail in the last chapter of this book, and the lessons of the Crusades have been embraced most ardently by the Arabs. Some contemporary Arab and Muslim scholars evaluate and reinterpret the Crusading phenomenon in the light of recent experiences such as colonialism, Arab nationalism, the establishment of the state of Israel, the liberation of Palestine and the rise of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’.

  A typical example of recent Muslim writing on the Crusades is a work in Arabic by ‘Ashur, published in 1995, entitled The Islamic Jihad against the Crusaders and Mongols in the Mamluk Period.5 The author is concerned not to give a scholarly historical account of his subject but wishes rather to use Mamluk history as a rallying cry for jihad against present-day governments in the Middle East, especially in Egypt. This is an illustration of ‘late twentieth-century Islamist history’ which is characterised by moralising and an explicit political agenda.6

  Whilst this interpretation has obvious validity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century terms, it is by no means the whole picture. Above all, despite its intense fascination in modern political and sociological terms, it can scarcely claim to reflect medieval realities, and such works are often marred by emotional rhetoric. Others write histories of the Crusades more in the Western ‘mode’; they rely very heavily on European scholarship in the Crusades, notably Runciman, to provide what turns out disappointingly to be yet another straight chronological narrative of the Crusades, not notably enriched by the use of hitherto unexploited Arabic sources. A typical example of the latter approach is the Syrian scholar Zakkar, who published a two-part work entitled The Crusading Wars (Al-hurub al-salibiyya)7. This is a disappointing book which contains long narrative passages and little interpretation of events. The reading of a similar work by al-Matwi, with the same title, published in Tunis in 1954, yields little benefit. It has to be said that precisely those historians whose native language is Arabic have done very little indeed to provide a properly documented counterweight, based on Arabic materials, of the accounts of the Crusades produced by modern historians of the medieval West.

  Whilst anachronistic nationalist labels should be avoided in the study of medieval history, there is no doubt that recent Muslim writing has underplayed the role of the Turks in the Crusading period. The study of the Muslim response to the coming of the Crusades needs to be undertaken within the wider context of the role played by the eastern Islamic world in general, and especially taking into account the military and ideological role played by the newly Islamicised Turks and the continuing heritage of the Seljuq empire in Syria and Palestine. Although there is no doubt in the minds of Arab Muslims today that almost all the great fighters of jihad (mujahidun) who finally defeated the Crusaders – Zengi, Nur al-Din, Baybars – were Turks, this has been inadequately recognised, perhaps because of several centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule which followed the end of the Crusades. Traditionally, this period has been regarded by the Arabs of the Levant with loathing, and this is perhaps the reason for modern neglect of the Turkish achievement in the medieval context.

  It is noteworthy that non-Arab scholars from the Muslim world – Turks, Kurds, Persians, Pakistanis and others – have not worked seriously on the topic of medieval Muslim reactions to the Crusad
es. The modern Muslim interest, then, is a resolutely Arab one (cf. plates 1.1 and 1.2).

  Some of the Limitations of This Book

  The material presented in this book excludes the views and attitudes of Near Eastern Christians – Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and others8 – whose experiences are also an integral part, together with the Byzantine and Jewish perspectives, of the total truth about the phenomenon of the Crusades (plate 1.3). These facets of Crusading history deserve full treatment of their own, a task which is beyond the remit of the current book.

  Plate 1.1 Statue of Saladin, 1992, Damascus, Syria

  Plate 1.2 Statue of Saladin, foot soldier, 1992, Damascus, Syria

  This study does not set out to give a full and detailed chronological account of the Crusades in the Levant as presented in the Muslim sources – a good deal of this work has been done already. Nor will it deal in any detail with aspects of the Crusades in Spain – a growth industry in modern scholarship – and Sicily. Instead, it attempts much more to adopt a thematic approach which addresses the broader ideological and socio-cultural issues raised by the Crusader occupation of the Muslim Levant. In spite of periods of peaceful co-existence and of rather murky Realpolitik in which groups of Crusaders and Muslims allied with each other against other such factions, the Crusaders were undoubtedly a pernicious foreign body which eventually had to be removed from the ‘House of Islam’ by force; much of this book, therefore, inevitably focuses on military aspects of the Muslim-Crusader confrontation. But it also deals with religious and social themes which fit into the wider context of the medieval Islamic world. Finally, it traces the heritage of the Crusades into modern times – for the Crusades have had a remarkable afterlife spanning many centuries, and their impact is still strong at the end of the twentieth century.

  Plate 1.3 Ayyubid canteen with Christian scenes, back, inlaid brass, c. 1250, Syria

  It is, of course, impossible for Western scholars to divest themselves totally of preconceived opinions and prejudices. Nevertheless, the textual and artistic evidence presented in this book is based entirely on Muslim sources, which to some extent tell their own story. The selection and interpretation of them may be relatively subjective, but at least the technique of presenting them on their own will encourage the debate to progress and more material will thus be made accessible. An audience with interests wider than those of Crusader specialists will thereby be in a position to make an informed judgement about the Muslim response to the Crusades.

  Figure 1.4 Tent, Cappella Palatina, ceiling, c. 1140, Palermo, Sicily

  The Nature of Medieval Muslim Sources

  The Muslims themselves amply recorded the history of the two hundred years or so which witnessed western European Christian intervention in territory which had been ruled by Muslims since the seventh century. But their treatment of the subject of the Crusades is by no means easy to analyse – the concept of ‘Crusade’ is a Western one. It has no particular resonance for Islamic ears and the Muslim historians are not concerned with it. For them, these are simply wars with an enemy – in this case, the Franks, as distinct, say, from the Fatimids. Accordingly, their reflections on the events of the Crusading period have to be pieced together like a jigsaw from stray references, anecdotes and comments tucked away in universal or dynastic histories of the Islamic world and the chronicles of cities – in other words, works with quite other emphases and historiographical aims. The Crusades were not treated in any extant Islamic work as an isolated topic. Nevertheless, much varied information on Muslim responses to the Franks can be found in the Arabic annals, biographical dictionaries and other literary works of the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Major problems arise, however, when one tries to evaluate and interpret such snippets of information so many centuries later.

  It will be clear from all this how important it is not to cherish unrealistic expectations of what may be found in these primary sources. They have serious limitations, as of course do Western medieval Christian sources themselves. They are couched in rigidly ideological terms where the enemy is irrevocably the enemy and where God is on the Muslim side, guiding the faithful towards the inevitable victory preordained by Him. War, even if fought against fellow-Muslims, is described as jihad. Altogether, the Muslim sources show little interest in the activities and motivations of the other side. There is disappointingly little information about social contacts between Crusaders and Muslims. The information which does exist is of interest, of course, but its importance must not be exaggerated or distorted simply because it exists in the first place.

  Figure 1.5 Seated ruler, Cappella Palatina, ceiling, c. 1140, Palermo, Sicily

  The Accessibility of Medieval Muslim Sources

  A number of medieval Arabic sources still remain only in manuscript form. It is to be hoped that Middle Eastern scholars in Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul and other centres of scholarship will continue the slow but vital task of publishing them in edited form.

  On the Western side, those who write about the Crusades and who do not read Arabic (which is the vast majority of scholars) depend for their knowledge of the Muslim sources on translations which cover the field in a patchy and unsatisfactory way. Many important works remain inaccessible to them. Their image of the Muslim perspective is therefore incomplete and is skewed by the availability of those sources which have actually been translated. It is also unfortunate to find that all too frequently Islamic specialists, for their part, rather than daring to branch out into the unknown and translate a new source, prefer the safer option of retranslating a work: thus we find two translations of the chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanisi9 and several of Usama’s memoirs in different European languages,10 whilst other key works, such as most of Ibn al-Athir’s Universal History,11 remain inaccessible to those who cannot read Arabic. If more scholars of medieval Islamic history would devote more time to translating such sources into English or other European languages, the great divide between Western and Islamic perceptions of the Crusades would be substantially narrowed to the benefit of scholarship on both sides.12

  Books in European Languages about the Muslim Side of the Crusades

  This discussion will be limited to a selection of useful books about the Muslim side of the Crusades; those who wish to delve more deeply into the subject should as a starting point consult the bibliographies provided by the authors mentioned below, as well as various works discussed in different chapters of this book and listed in the Bibliography.

  A number of general books and scholarly monographs have been written about aspects of the Muslim side of the Crusades. The interested reader will find P. M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517, London and New York, 1986, a short but very lucid historical overview of the subject. A much earlier work of scholarship, W. B. Stevenson, The Crusaders in the East, Cambridge, 1907, is still very readable and gives a detailed narrative account based on the medieval Arabic sources accessible to the author at that time. It has to be said, though, that Stevenson, for all his emphasis on the Arabic side, does not try to present events from that viewpoint alone, for he also uses Western sources; nor does he try to evoke in detail the way that the Muslims and Crusaders co-existed in the Levant. There are also some very useful chapters on Muslim aspects of the Crusades in K. M. Setton and M. W. Baldwin (eds), A History of the Crusades, 6 vols, Madison, Wis., 1969–89. Finally, two very helpful historical monographs on major dynasties may be cited here: one on the Ayyubids (S. Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus 1193–1260, Albany, 1977) and the other on the Mamluks (R. Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250–1382, London and Sydney, 1986).

  Figure 1.6 Animated inscription on cup made for Khalaf al-Julaki, inlaid metal, c. 1230, Syria(?)

  Figure 1.7 Servants, inlaid brass basin known as the ‘Baptistère de St Louis’, c. 1300 or earlier, Syria

  A. Maalouf’s book The Crusades through Arab Eyes, London, 1984, came as a breath of fresh air int
o this field; it is lively and always popular with students. Moreover, the book lives up to its title. Its drawbacks are that it is unashamedly general in its approach, is not comprehensive or academic, and furnishes little new information.

  Amongst individual Muslim leaders of the Counter-Crusade, Saladin takes pride of place in modern scholarly biographies. There is a wide spectrum of scholarly opinion on him, ranging from the eulogies of Gibb and others to the more realistic appraisal of Ehrenkreutz. A very balanced and well-documented view of Saladin is given by M. C. Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson in their book Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War, Cambridge, 1982. Regrettably the other great Muslim leaders at the time of the Crusades have not received the same thorough treatment as Saladin. Zengi, the conqueror of Edessa, for example, remains unjustifiably neglected, as do many other important Muslim figures of the Crusader period. As for Nur al-Din, N. Elisseeff wrote a three-volume monograph in French entitled Nur al-Din: un grand prince musulman de Syrie au temps des Croisades, 3 vols, Damascus, 1967. Whilst being undoubtedly scholarly, this work strangely does not provide a full assessment of this key figure of the Counter-Crusade. That task remains to be attempted. The later period is well served by P. Thorau who provides good biographical coverage of Baybars in The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century, trans. P. M. Holt, London and New York, 1992. Still worthy of particular mention is the work in French of E. Sivan, L’Islam et la Croisade: Idéologie et propagande dans les reactions musulmanes aux Croisades, Paris, 1968. This important book bases itself firmly on Islamic sources and analyses the evolution of the jihad phenomenon at the time of the Crusades.