The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Usama then takes his story further into the realm of farce by having the knight’s wife brought to the bathhouse where she too is shaved publicly, whilst her husband stands by with total equanimity. This part of the story touches on the essential difference perceived by Muslims between their own society and that of the Franks. In a society where women were protected by their menfolk, not allowed to reveal their unveiled faces except to a prescribed number of close male relations, the conduct of the Frankish knight and his wife, as portrayed in this edifying anecdote, both castigates Frankish immorality and lack of ‘proper’marital jealousy and also reinforces the values of Muslim society.

  Figure 5.16 Hammam al-Sami, plan, thirteenth century, Damascus, Syria

  Figure 5.17 Hammam al-Sami, decorative marble patterning of the floor, thirteenth century, Damascus, Syria

  A further disreputable element of this story is the very presence of a woman in the bathhouse on a day when it was obviously being used by men rather than women. It was standard Islamic custom to set aside certain times or days when the bathhouse was reserved for one sex only. Here too, then, the Crusader knight blunders dismally, flouting Muslim custom, and his behaviour is both ludicrous and shocking. Usama’s readers must have smiled with condescension at the absurdities of the Frankish knight’s behaviour, which are heightened by his attempts to ape Muslim ways. The anti-hero of this story belongs to the higher echelons of Crusader society to whom Usama does attribute at the end of the story some chivalric values; but even he cannot behave properly in the bathhouse.

  Figure 5.18 Hammam al-Sami, domes inlaid with crown glass, thirteenth century, Damascus, Syria

  Figure 5.19 Hammam al-Sami, transverse section, thirteenth century, Damascus, Syria

  Whereas Muslims, following Roman practice, went to the bathhouse for relaxation as well as for purposes of hygiene, there is no suggestion that this was the motive of the Crusader knight. Usama does not comment on the interesting fact that the Franks have taken to the practice of frequenting the bathhouse since their arrival in the Levant – this improvement in the hygienic habits of the filthy Franks from the sixth clime of the earth may well have been due to their settling in a more favoured clime where civilised habits prevail naturally. As Usama comments on another occasion:

  Figure 5.20 Hammam al-Sami, section of tepidarium, thirteenth century, Damascus, Syria

  Figure 5.21 Blazons, inlaid brass basin known as the ‘Baptistère de St Louis’, c. 1300 or earlier, Syria

  Among the Franks are those who have become acclimatized and have associated long with the Moslems. These are much better than the recent comers from the Frankish lands. But they constitute the exception and cannot be treated as a rule.46

  Underlying this statement, perhaps, is the assumption that even though the temperament (mizaj: blend of ‘humours’) of the people of one clime is fixed by their geographical position in the world, the balance of characteristics within them may be affected if they move to another clime. Hence it is not so surprising that the Orientalised Franks are ‘better’ than the Franks who dwell in northern Europe, since the former have lived for some time in Muslim lands which are situated in a more favourable clime. But disparaging and dismissive comments about the Franks outweigh favourable ones in Usama’s work, and the message of the story of the bathhouse is that even when the Franks try to imitate Levantine ways they behave like parvenus, and are incapable of adapting properly to living as the Muslims do. They are irrevocably unclean.

  Muslim Attitudes to the Franks: The Religious Dimension

  So far, the discussion has concentrated on the secular tradition of Muslim ethnographic literature which, following the Ptolemaic tradition, produces a deterministic division of mankind, based on geographical climes. Such a tradition gave rise, as we have seen, to deeply entrenched clichés about the Franks of northern Europe. Yet the role of the religion of Islam in defining the ‘otherness’ of the Franks is also very significant, and reinforces the gulf between the Muslims and the Christian newcomers. Christian and Muslim communities were kept apart by something quite different from geography. It was partly each community’s sense of identity and partly its sense of purpose. Both of these were expressed in terms of religion.

  Considerable emphasis has already been placed in this book on the significance of jihad in the period of the Crusades. There are, however, other important religious dimensions to the Muslim-Frankish encounter; an analysis of these casts a most interesting light on the way in which the Muslims viewed the Christianity of the Franks and defined and sharpened perceptions of their own faith in relation to it.

  Plate 5.2 Minaret, detail, Great Mosque, c. 1170, Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man, Syria

  Frankish Defilement of Islamic Sacred Space

  It is difficult to reconstruct the feelings of ordinary Muslims towards the Frankish presence in territory which had long been Islamic. Certainly, for those of us living in the twentieth century in a postmodern secular age, concepts such as taboos, sanctity and pollution seem quaint and primitive. It is hard to relate to the belief that the breaking of taboos causes deadly contagion which inevitably calls forth the wrath of God. Such concepts can be found in many of the world’s religions. But for those who do not share these beliefs it requires a very special effort of the imagination to enter this particular thought-world. The effort is worth making.

  These attitudes to purity and pollution, then, were experienced profoundly by ancient and medieval peoples. As Mary Douglas so eloquently puts it: ‘From a religious perspective defilement is not merely a symbol of something else, or even the balance on which ideas of virtue and sin are weighed, but the basic condition of all reality.’47 The idea of defilement is ontological: impurity implies separation from God.48 Only divinely instituted purification rites will defend against it.49

  Purity lies at the very heart of Islamic worship. Indeed, without it worship is invalid. The precise and detailed acts of purification undertaken by Muslims before prayer and at the time of the Pilgrimage are not just outward exercises in cleanliness; they are an integral dimension of the faith, reflecting underlying truths which relate to man’s relationship with God. ‘Purification is half the faith’, the well-known hadith of the Prophet, sums up the central importance of the concept of purification in Islam. It is not just an essential preliminary to worship but an integral part of it. The Qur’an itself enjoins that those who would turn to God should be pure in body and clothing: ‘Thy Lord magnify, thy raiment purify (tuhr), pollution (rujz) shun.’50 Purity of body is a prerequisite for purity of mind. Whilst the Qur’an enjoins purity on the believer, the corpus of hadith lays down very precise and detailed instructions on how to achieve purity.

  Figure 5.22 Motifs used on Mamluk coins, thirteenth-fifteenth cen turies, Egypt and Syria

  Islam also speaks of najasat (things that are intrinsically impure) which include wine, pigs and excrement. Not surprisingly, these ‘impurities’ form the basis of Muslim anti-Christian feelings at a popular level and recur in many of the writings about the Franks. What such writings reveal, as we shall see, is a deep-rooted atavistic disgust towards Christian practices as well as other even more profound and barely articulated taboos.

  The dichotomy between halal and haram, between what is allowed and what is forbidden, lies at the heart of Islamic worship. Within Islam, the word haram denotes the place where anything profane or sacrilegious is prohibited, and harim, the special area reserved for women, may be entered only by a mahram, a male family member within certain clearly defined relationships. According to Nasr: ‘The Muslim lives in a space defined by the sound of the Koran.’51

  Yet, despite the universality of this statement, there are certain sanctuaries and holy places which, as Schimmel writes, ‘seem to be endowed with special blessing power and which then serve in literature as symbols of the human experience of “coming home”.’52 Such places include the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

  Abuse can be manifested in many fo
rms – the abuser may be seen as a violator of women, a predatory animal, a devil and so on. All these images are applied to the Franks by the Muslims – but it is important to stress that they viewed the Franks primarily as polluters. The leitmotiv of medieval Muslim writers about the Frankish occupation is defilement of sacred space, both public and private, although the emphasis is particularly on religious buildings, especially those in Jerusalem.

  The ‘Abbasid historians reflecting on the triumph of Islam in the conquests of the seventh century stress the impurity of the enemy. Al-Baladhuri, for example, calls the Sasanian Persians ‘uncircumcise?. Later on, medieval chroniclers, such as Ibn al-Athir, concentrate in their rhetoric against the Mongols on their omnivorous tendencies (especially carrion) – once again emphasising impurity – and on their indiscriminate massacring of the Muslim population, women and children too, even including the unborn foetuses in the womb, a long-standing cliché applied by Islamic sources to ‘barbarians’, such as nomadic Turks and Mongols.

  In the Muslim portrayal of the Franks, then, symbols of pollution and impurity abound. These reflect wellsprings of Muslim religious revulsion at a deep psychological level, and relate to the breaking of taboos and the primeval fear that they would be cut off from God.

  The Sight of Frankish Religious Buildings in a Muslim Setting

  The churches and cathedrals built during Frankish occupation must have excited comment on the part of the Muslims who were long familiar with the religious monuments of the Oriental Christians but had certainly never seen the likes of a Gothic cathedral on Muslim soil before. Over the centuries the Near Eastern city had evolved with certain well-known features which marked it out as Islamic – above all, the presence of the mosque with its minaret. There is sometimes emotional resistance nowadays to the building of mosques in western European cities, and adverse criticism of the way such buildings ‘mar the landscape’. So too but much more forcibly – since the Franks were military aggressors who had seized Islamic lands – the Near Eastern Muslims living under Frankish rule must have loathed these new religious buildings of the infidel, with their inscriptions in alien script, their crosses, walls painted with images and ornate interiors with religious sculpture. It is noteworthy too that Ibn al-Furat, quoting the lost history of Ibn Abi Tayy?, makes particular reference to another Frankish religious ‘oddity’, a portable Frankish church captured after the unsuccessful Frankish siege of Damascus in 523/1129: ‘amongst the things they [the Muslims] plundered was the satin church which the king of the Germans used to carry in the camp. It was carried on 200 mules.’53

  The Frankish Occupation of the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock

  The Dome of the Rock has always been a glorious sight and a potent symbol of the Islamic faith. Medieval Muslims were clearly overwhelmed by its beauty. As al-Muqaddasi, who travelled practically the length and breadth of the Muslim world, describes it:

  The dome, although gigantic, is covered with golden copper… Under the rising sun, the dome lights up and the drum sparkles marvellously… I have never seen in Islam anything comparable to this dome nor have I discovered that [something comparable to] it exists in the [lands of the] infidels.54

  The Frankish occupation of the Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was an act of grave desecration in Muslim eyes (figure 5.23 and colour plate 17). Building new monuments in the name of one’s own religion, once military conquest has given way to full-scale occupation, is a recurring feature of ancient and medieval history and was always an exceedingly humiliating and painful experience for the conquered. The appropriation of the sacred monuments of another faith which are still in daily use, and their transformation, with the visible signs of one’s own religion, is an even greater humiliation. It is more than mere military occupation – it is an invasion and desecration of religious sanctity, trespassing on sacred monumental symbols of a faith. No doubt the Franks, when they entered Jerusalem in 492/1099, had in their collective memory the wanton destruction of one of their holy monuments, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 400/1009–10, at the behest of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim. It was, of course, a great blessing that the Franks did not go so far as to destroy either the Dome of the Rock or the Aqsa mosque in retaliation for al-Hakim’s action. Although such an act would never have been forgiven, the infidels’ defiling and occupying of Islamic monuments, second only to those of Mecca and Medina in the veneration with which they are viewed by Muslims, must have been almost as hard to bear. For eighty-eight years, the gilded dome of the Dome of the Rock was surmounted by a cross and the monument became the Templum Domini. The Aqsa mosque was occupied by the Knights Templar (figure 5.24).

  Figure 5.23 Haram al-Sharif, showing Dome of the Rock and Aqsa Mosque, perspectival view, 72/691–2 onwards, Jerusalem

  Figure 5.24 Aqsa Mosque, perspectival view, seventh-eleventh centuries, Jerusalem

  These familiar and much-loved monuments in Jerusalem underwent structural and visual changes. In the Aqsa mosque, the Templars added large sections, mainly in the front of the building, and they refurbished the facade. In the Dome of the Rock the Christian presence was announced externally by the crowning cross, and internally by a grille (plate 5.3) and an altar which was erected on the rock itself.

  The Dome of the Rock, which had been built in 72/691 as a triumphant statement of the superiority of Islam over other faiths, especially Christianity, displays a careful selection of Qur’anic inscriptions which tilt at the Trinity and the Incarnation. Islam’s uncompromising monotheism is emphasised in a long band of inscriptions measuring around 240 metres in length: the message is unambiguous: ‘There is no god but the One God and He has no partner.’55

  The irony of this very monument in the heart of Jerusalem being topped with a cross could not have been lost on the Muslims. Indeed, the removal of that cross was the first aim of the companions of Saladin in 583/1187:

  Plate 5.3 Dome of the Rock, interior showing the Crusader grille around the Rock, 72/691–2 onwards, Jerusalem

  (Creswell Photographic Archive, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, neg. C. 60)

  There was on the top of the Dome of the Rock a large golden cross. When the Muslims entered the city on the Friday a group of them scaled up to the top of the dome to remove the cross. When they reached the top all the people cried out with one voice.56

  ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani describes the changes wrought on the Dome of the Rock by the Franks in some detail:

  As for the Dome of the Rock, the Franks had built on it a church and an altar… They had adorned it with pictures and statues and they had appointed in it places for monks and a place for the Gospel… They put in it over the place of the [Prophet’s] foot a small gilded dome with raised marble pillars and they said it was the place of the Messiah’s foot… In it were pictures of grazing animals fixed in marble and I saw amongst those depictions the likenesses of pigs.57

  It is in the highest degree unlikely that ‘Imad al-Din saw any pigs in the Christian decoration of the Dome of the Rock. Perhaps his biased eye was too ready to interpret sheep – a common feature in Christian paradisal iconography – as pigs. He is of course unlikely to have been challenged by his readers. As with Usama, one suspects him of playing to the gallery. The excessively artificial literary devices, such as alliteration, internal rhyme, parallelism, antithesis and repetition, of which he is so fond, point in the same direction.

  The Dome of the Rock is portrayed as being ‘wounded’ by the Franks:

  The Franks had cut pieces from the Rock and carried some of them to Constantinople and some of them to Sicily. It was said that they had sold them for their weight in gold … When it [the Rock] was brought to light, its places [where it had been cut] became visible and hearts were cut because of its cuts which became manifest.58

  The eyewitness account of the ‘vagabond ascetic’‘Ali b. Abi Bakr al-Harawi (d. 611/1215),59 who visited Jerusalem under Frankish rule in 569/1173, is especially valuable. He entered the Dome of the Rock an
d saw ‘on an iron door a representation of the Messiah in gold encrusted with precious stones’.60

  An anecdote given in Usama’s memoirs suggests that the Franks had hung a painting of the Madonna and Child in the Dome of the Rock:

  I saw one of the Franks come to al-Amir Mu⅛ al-Din when he was in the Dome of the Rock,61 and say to him, ‘Dost thou want to see God as a child?’ Mu’in al-Din said, ‘Yes’. The Frank walked ahead of us until he showed us the picture of Mary with Christ (may peace be upon him!) as an infant in her lap. He then said, ‘This is God as a child’. But Allah is exalted far above what the infidels say about him!62

  Usama’s comment reveals the traditional and deep-seated Muslim horror of Christian anthropomorphism.

  During the Franks’ reoccupation of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century the Muslims felt the same deep outrage at what they saw as a public display of infidelity (kufr).63 The Ayyubid chronicler Ibn Wasil describes the situation first-hand: ‘I entered Jerusalem and I saw monks and priests in charge of the Sacred Rock… I saw on it bottles of wine for the ceremony of the mass. I entered the Aqsa mosque and in it a bell was suspended.’64 He then bemoans the way in which the call to prayer in the holy sanctuary (al-haram al-sharif) has been rendered invalid.

  Figure 5.25 Dome of the Rock, manuscript painting, fifteenth century, Egypt

  The Frankish Threat to the Pilgrimage and to the Holy Cities of Arabia, Mecca and Medina