The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Figure 5.1 Foot soldiers, Abu Mash’ar al-Balkhi, al-Madkhal al-kabir (‘The Great Introduction’ (to astrology)), 638/1240, Egypt

  Sources

  The usual medieval Muslim chronicles and ‘Universal Histories’ are, of course, an obvious source for details about Muslim views of the Franks; but they are often, although not always, disappointing or tantalisingly brief in their comments. They catalogue battles and the capture of citadels and towns. They record the deaths of prominent Crusader leaders and speak of the Crusaders in general in stereotyped terms of abuse. These traditional sources can, however, be supplemented by writings in other genres which, if used judiciously, can truly enhance our knowledge of what the Muslims thought of the Franks.

  There are very few extant Islamic writings which focus specifically on the social interaction between Muslims and Crusaders. It is a great pity that the work of Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim (died after 554/1159) called The Way [sira] of the Franks who Went out to Syria in Those Years (Sirat al-Afranj al-kharijin ila bilad al-Sham fi had-hihi sini) has not survived, not even, apparently, in extracts quoted in the chronicles of later Muslim historians.4 It was, it seems, a very rare kind of work – a history of the Franks written in Arabic from within a state governed by the Franks.

  The book’s very title is an indication of the author’s intellectually wide horizons and his interest in the European newcomers. Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim had a successful career in the service of the Crusaders. He was successful in healing Alan, the first Crusader lord of Atharib in the Principality of Antioch, and was rewarded with the gift of the village of Mar Buniya from Alan. Thus Hamdan became one of the few Muslim landlords of the Crusader Levant. He was later put in charge of the administration of Ma’arrat al-Nu⅛an on behalf of the Franks before ending up in the service of Zengi at Aleppo in 1128.5 It is interesting to speculate on what motivated Hamdan at such an early stage of the Frankish occupation to devote a historical work to the intruders and to wonder what stance the author adopted towards them. The fact that he was in the service of both sides suggests that the confrontational attitude which the sources so often describe as characterising Muslim and Frankish interaction is by no means the whole picture. It is likely that a series of accommodations of the kind typified by Hamdan’s life was a regular feature of life in the twelfth-century Levant.

  Usama and Ibn Jubayr – Two Contemporary Sources

  There are, however, two surviving contemporary Muslim works which shed important light on the subject of this chapter. The first is the so-called Memoirs of Usama. These have been a much-quoted and valuable source for our knowledge of the Muslim view of the Crusaders. Usama b. Munqidh, an Arab patrician with proud family connections, was born in 488/1095, the very year that Pope Urban II made his momentous speech summoning the faithful to take up the Cross and go to the Holy Land to rescue it from the infidel. Usama died in 584/1188, not long after Saladin had retaken Jerusalem for Islam.6 Usama knew the Franks from his childhood onwards in his home in the castle of Shayzar on the River Orontes in northern Syria. He began fighting them in his teens and knew them rather intimately thereafter for the rest of his eventful life, in peace and in war. Because of his elevated social standing and education he moved in times of truce in the highest echelons of Frankish society; he had friends amongst the Frankish knightly class and was sent on diplomatic missions to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, where he was acquainted with the king and his courtiers. Some details of Usama’s life can be found in the obituary of him given by Ibn Khallikan (d. 681/1282) in his famous biographical dictionary. Ibn Khallikan describes Usama as ‘one of the most powerful, learned, and intrepid members of the Munqidh family, lords of the castle of Shay zar’.7

  Figure 5.2 Castle, gateway with inscription of Sultan Qalawun (1280s), Shayzar, Syria

  Usama personally witnessed many battles and important events; indeed, he himself was embroiled at one point in some rather murky political machinations at the Fatimid court in Cairo. He later joined Saladin’s court in 570/1174 but there too he was forced to leave, after relations between Saladin and himself worsened, and he passed the remainder of his life in retirement.8 Above all, Usama had the gift of survival and was able at the end of his life to review its storms and passions and provide insights into the fascinating period in which he lived.

  Writing in his ninetieth year he muses: ‘Feebleness has bent me down to the ground, and old age has made one part of my body enter through another, so much so that I can now hardly recognize myself.’9 Yet, in spite of these protestations, old age allows Usama to ponder on the lessons to be learned from a life such as his:

  I have always been the firebrand of battle: every time it abated

  I lit it again with the spark struck by applying the sword to the heads of the enemy …

  But now I have become like an idle maid who lies

  On stuffed cushions behind screens and curtains.

  I have become also rotten from lying still so long.10

  This ‘autobiography’ of Usama b. Munqidh, The Book of Learning by Example (Kitab al-i’tibar), has fascinated scholars for many years.11 The work, as its title indicates, seeks to teach by example – its main message is that God controls the destinies of men by His absolute will and that nobody can go against it. God has allotted each man his appointed span in life and nothing can alter His decree. Usama illustrates this eternal truth by means of numerous examples, many of which stem from his own long and turbulent life. His view is not a personalised one but is intended as a model from which the whole community may learn.

  It is clear from Usama’s unusual book that, side by side with his stereotyped phrases of contempt for the Franks, whom he viewed as an alien and infidel presence in the Muslim world, he was also intrigued by their idiosyncrasies, their mores and their attitudes. It would, however, be dangerously misleading to take the evidence of his book at its face value. It is by no means an autobiography in the Western sense; nor is it always an account of authentic episodes which happened either to Usama or to his friends and acquaintances. It belongs to a genre of Arabic literature termed adab which aimed to please, divert and titillate its readers as well as to instruct them. Such works of literature were not bound by conventions to tell the ‘truth’, but sought rather to narrate a good story, even if in so doing the truth might be stretched a little, or more than a little. So it would perhaps be fair to regard many of Usama’s stories about the Franks as reflections of stereotypes, revealing the exaggerated and often comic behaviour of the newcomers with whom the Muslims were forced into unwanted and unexpected proximity, and about whom they would tell tall stories and saucy jokes. It is, after all, a common enough response to unwanted military occupation in any age to debunk the intruders by snide suggestions as to their uncouth behaviour and lack of culture and breeding. This was the case with the Persians after the Arab conquest of their ancient land in the seventh century.

  Figure 5.3 Composite Mamluk blazons, thirteenth-fifteenth cen turies, Egypt and Syria

  But in spite of all these warnings, Usama’s work, if interpreted with caution, is a rich source on the socio-cultural life of the twelfth century in Syria and the Holy Land. It has, however, been overexploited, often rather too simplistically, by scholars, as if it is always appropriate to take it at its face value and as if no other evidence were available in the Islamic sources.

  The other contemporary Muslim source, the travelogue of Ibn Jubayr, contains valuable insights into life in the Levant at the time of the Crusades, although it should be emphasised that its author was only one individual speaking of his personal impressions in certain areas of the Levant at one specific time. Ibn Jubayr was a Spaniard, used to close contact with Christians in Muslim al-Andalus and perhaps able to see the Frankish occupation of Syria and Palestine with greater objectivity than those who were experiencing it at firsthand; at any rate, he brought to the situation the perspective of one single Muslim from a different area of the Islamic world, an area which was nevert
heless experiencing on its northern frontiers similar aggression from Christian Europe. Like Usama, Ibn Jubayr aimed to divert and inform his audience, and his evidence too should be approached cautiously. Perhaps his view might have been regarded by some of his more cosmopolitan contemporaries as positively provincial. As was common practice, the performance of the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) allowed those who made the journey from distant parts of the Muslim world to take the opportunity of seeing different lands and recording their experiences. Ibn Jubayr kept a diary and his first-hand evidence, dating to the 1180s, is of great interest. However, a word of warning should be sounded here. Travel literature is vulnerable to error. It can be based on the inaccurate or biased testimony of local guides, and it draws on notes made on journeys and often written up later, subject to faults of human memory, once the traveller has returned home. There was, of course, no photographic evidence from which to check retrospectively the veracity of information. Ibn Jubayr’s account is susceptible to these very faults.

  Usama’s evidence, too, in so far as it is autobiographical, belongs to a category of medieval Islamic literature which is certainly vulnerable to similar criticisms of unreliability and inaccuracy. Autobiography as a literary genre was frowned upon in the Islamic world because it was outside the bounds of the verification process which was the hallmark of works written in the various fields of the religious sciences. In the classical period of Islam, in the heyday of the ‘Abbasid empire (the eighth to the tenth centuries), books on law, hadith and even history had long been subjected to a complex system of determining the authenticity of the information they contained, and every snippet was scrupulously examined before inclusion. The memoirs of a single person would be viewed as an anarchical and individualistic type of literature and thus it occurred only very rarely. And how could the veracity of such information be checked? Despite all these reservations, however, the works of Usama and Ibn Jubayr should be used by scholars of the Crusades since they provide two authentic Muslim voices from the very period of Crusader occupation. As such, they cannot be ignored.

  Figure 5.4 (above and opposite) Wooden door and metal table from the complex of Sultan Qalawun, 683–4/1284–5, Cairo, Egypt

  The Value of Popular Folk Literature

  At the end of his important work on jihad published in 1968, Sivan wisely pointed to the importance of conducting future research on what he described as the Islamic epic literature which seems to have been popular at the time of the Crusades (figure 5.5).12 As in other areas of medieval history, a major gap in our knowledge of the social aspects of the Crusades is the perspective of the ordinary people. Of course, their lives rarely come under the scrutiny of the chroniclers, who are almost exclusively concerned with the narrowly defined ruling echelons of society – the court, the military and the religious classes. It is true that from time to time the writers of annalistic chronicles mention at the end of each year unusual events – famines, earthquakes, bizarre births, Nile floodings – but such details are rarely elaborated and the background to them is sadly lost to us. It is therefore necessary to investigate other spheres of Islamic culture in order to try to find more information about how the ordinary people felt about the Crusades. Such a task of ‘literary archaeology’ is difficult and still experimental, but it has already yielded some interesting results.

  Figure 5.5 Muslim folk hero, under-glass painting, twentieth century, Tunisia

  Until the 1970s the great works of popular Arabic literature – the traditional equivalent of today’s soap operas – had received inadequate scholarly attention and were looked down on by Arab intellectuals. Yet such works played an important part in traditional Arab life, and one of them, the Arabian Nights, is probably the best-known work of Arabic literature in the West.13 With their colourful reworking of familiar themes and motifs, these works reveal the taste of traditional Arab audiences. Sometimes too they may offer ‘a glimpse of the secret wishes, taboos and fears harboured by such audiences’.14

  These works do not conform to the literary and linguistic standards of the Arabic literary elite. Part of this narrative corpus consists of some long heroic cycles focusing on a central hero, usually a historical figure who has acquired legendary status and has been turned into a fictional personality. One such epic cycle concerns Sultan Baybars.15 In the skilful hands of scholars such as Lyons, Irwin, Kruk and others, this fruitful area of research is beginning to open up. Many of these popular folk epics have their foundations in Islamic history but do not, of course, lend themselves easily to historical analysis. With their stock themes, standard ingredients and their basis in a long-established but fluid oral tradition, they make good story-telling material, but they lack proper chronology and historical accuracy. Nevertheless, it is worth while to focus on such pseudo-historical material and to try to identify strands and themes which shed particular light on the Crusading period or, to use Lyons’s archaeological image, to find evidence of a ‘Crusading stratum’. The legendary exploits of Saladin and Baybars are a case in point. Historians eager to use this material to enrich the information in the chronicles will be disappointed – for the charismatic names of these warrior sultans are merely pegs on which to hang adventures of a comic-strip type. What the use of these names does prove, of course, is that these Muslim heroes had a vigorous afterlife in the popular imagination.

  Figure 5.6 L‘la Yamina seated, under-glass painting, twentieth century, Tunisia

  For the Crusades do lurk in the shadows of some of this popular literature from the Middle Ages. Chronology, as noted above, has little or no significance in the sequence of events as they unfold in folk epics – a personage may be killed at one part in the narrative only to appear alive and active in the later part of the story. Characters from the seventh to the tenth centuries are juxtaposed with figures who have obviously Frankish names such as Bohemond. One episode in the popular folk epic Sirat Dhat al-Himma concerns the Frankish king Malis, son of Bulus (Paul). Jesus appears to him in a dream and tells him to go east through Byzantium ‘to deliver the [Church of the] Garbage (al-Qumama) [i.e. the Church of the Holy Sepulchre] and Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims’.16 Whilst some glimpses of historical memory may be seen here, the tale assumes the contours of an Islamic legend, as Malis, having appealed to all the Frankish countries and assembled a great army, passes through Constantinople on his way to Syria where he is defeated and killed by the heroine of the epic, Dhat al-Himma, ‘the mother of the warriors of the faith and the defender of the religion of Muhammad’. Later Dhat al-Himma is praised for saving Jerusalem from the infidel threat. She is by no means an isolated example of legendary female warriors in the Islamic folk tradition who perform marvellous feats.17

  Figure 5.7 ‘Antar and Abla, under-glass painting, twentieth century, Tunisia

  As in a modern soap opera, persons in Islamic popular epics can be resurrected in the plot without any justification being needed. It is therefore difficult to evaluate such material in historical terms. What is clear, however, is that this literature is a vast and largely untapped source of popular attitudes, beliefs and stories which helped to create Muslim stereotypes of the Franks. Specific references to this material will be made at intervals in the rest of this chapter.

  Muslim Stereotypes of the Franks: The Formation of an Image before the Crusades

  Western Europe held few attractions to the medieval Muslims; from their perspective their own culture was so obviously more sophisticated and advanced. The medieval Muslim felt superiority and condescension towards Christians. For him it was indisputable that Christianity, an incomplete and imperfect revelation, had been superseded and perfected by Islam, the final Revelation, and that the Prophet Muhammad was the seal of the prophets. Such supreme confidence in the values that were based on this Revelation did not engender great intellectual curiosity in peoples of other faiths which were by definition wrong or incomplete. The Muslims showed little interest in Christianity, whether it was the Latin Christianity of the bar
barians of western Europe, the eastern Christianity of their great enemy and neighbour, Byzantium, or the Oriental Christian communities who had lived under Muslim rule since the Arab conquests in the seventh century. The Muslims knew little and cared less about Europe; it just did not impinge much on their world view. They knew a certain amount about Christianity from the Christian communities in the Middle East, but even to these familiar groups they gave scant attention.

  Figure 5.8 ‘Abdallah ibn Ja‘far and L’la Yamina, daughter of the Great King of Tunis, under-glass painting by Mahmud al-Feriani, c. 1890, Sfax, Tunisia

  Figure 5.9 The princess Abla, wife of ‘Antar, and the princess Zubayda, wife of Harun al-Rashid, under-glass painting, twentieth century, Tunisia

  Before the coming of the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, the Muslims had heard of the Franks and formed opinions about them. These opinions were based on travel accounts,18 oral narratives from prisoners of war,19 pilgrims, merchants and diplomats, geographical works and popular stories. These opinions were sharpened, moreover, by the natural tendency of those of one race or religion to form stereotypical images of the ‘other’.