The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Each of us is worth twenty… We shall bring about the end of the world in defence of the [Church of the] Resurrection [qiyama].174

  ‘Imad al-Din then goes further. Under a special section entitled The account of the Church of Refuse’, he launches into his views on Frankish Christianity. He is fully aware that the Franks too are ready and willing to shed their own blood in defence of their faith and this, their holy monument. Indeed, Frankish honour is bound up with the protection of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In it, he says, is the place of the Crucifixion; in it there are many pictures and sculptures:

  In it are the pictures of the Apostles talking, holy men informing, monks in their cells, priests in their congregations, the Magi with their ropes,175 priests and their delusion; the image of the Lady and the Lord, the Temple and the Birthplace, the Table and the Fishes … the Disciple and the Teacher, the Cradle and the Child speaking, the picture of the ram and the ass, Paradise and the Fire, the [church] bells and the laws. They said, in it [Jerusalem] the Messiah was crucified, the sacrificial victim was slaughtered, divinity became incarnate and humanity became deified.176

  Figure 5.35 Mamluk cr 701/1301, Aleppo, Syri

  To Christians this concatenation of details about Christianity will be viewed as a mishmash of truths, half-truths and misconceptions: but it is in fact an excellent depiction of what twelfth-century Muslims probably believed about the religion of the enemy. This passage shows Christianity and Christians through the prism of Muslim popular beliefs. This dazzling display of details about Christianity does not, as Gabrieli suggests, betray ‘the Muslim author’s lack of real information’.177 Rather, it is a view of Christianity which is based on the Qur’anic revelation (Jesus speaking from the cradle, the Magi with their ropes), overlaid with strongly held Muslim popular prejudices against Christian practices – epitomised by images in churches, monkery and church bells.

  Muslim Views on the Papacy and the Superiority of the Caliphate

  Ibn Wasil records an alleged conversation between Frederick II and a Muslim dignitary called Fakhr al-Din b. al-Shaykh. This is a perfect opportunity for Ibn Wasil to make an unfavourable comparison between the Pope and the caliph and to put it into the mouth of a Frankish ruler. Frederick asks about the caliph and Fakhr al-din replies:

  He is the son of the uncle of our Prophet [peace and blessings be upon him]. He [the Caliph] took the caliphate from his father, and his father took it from his father and the caliphate has been continuous in the house of Prophethood (i.e. the Prophet’s family), not leaving them.178

  Frederick’s response is to attack the traditions of the Papacy and to extol the virtues of the caliphal system:

  The emperor said: ‘What a good thing that [the caliphate] is! But those people of limited intelligence – meaning the Franks – take an ignorant and dull-witted man from the dunghill – there is no relationship or link between him and the Messiah – [and] they make him caliph over them, taking the position of the Messiah over them, whilst your caliph is the scion of the uncle of your Prophet and he is the person most worthy of his position.’179

  There is no need to interpret this passage as recording the exact words of Frederick II, and indeed it is very doubtful that he would have said this. Ibn al-Furat, drawing on the evidence of Ibn Wasil, is also concerned to discuss the role of the Pope:

  You must know that amongst the Franks the Pope is the caliph of the Messiah, in whose place he stands. He has the power to make things unlawful and lawful…. It is he who crowns and establishes the kings, and, according to Frankish law, it is through him alone that they can be properly appointed.180

  The value of these passages rests rather in the light which they shed on Muslim attitudes to the Papacy.

  The Propaganda Value of the Correspondence of Muslim Rulers

  We have already seen the importance of official letters composed in Saladin’s name and sent to the caliph, the kings of the Franks and other potentates. Many similar letters have survived from the Mamluk period in which great emphasis was placed on chancellery skills. Baybars made a speciality of sending taunting letters to his opponents. In 666/1268 he wrote a letter to Bohemond VI announcing his intentions towards Antioch. Part of its fiery rhetoric touches on the fabric of Christianity:

  If you had seen your churches destroyed, your crosses sawn asunder, the pages of the lying Gospels exposed, the tombs of the Patriarchs collapsed, if you had seen your enemy the Muslim trampling the sanctuary, with the monk, the priest, the deacon sacrificed on the altar… the Churches of St Paul and St Peter pulled down and destroyed, you would have said ‘Would to God that I were transformed to dust181 or would to God that I had not received the letter which tells me of this sad catastrophe.’182

  Figure 5.36 Marble panel, Mosque of al-Mu’ayyad, 818–23/1415–20, Cairo, Egypt

  The Level of the Muslim Debate about Frankish Christianity

  Sivan is very negative about the level of polemic in the ‘CounterCrusade’. He criticises Muslim thinkers of the time for failing to rise above simplistic slogans and to address the real basis of the antagonism between the two faiths. In his view, no new arguments were devised and no genuine discussions capable of advancing the debate seem to have taken place.183 One work written for Saladin by Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Katib appears from its title (The Valuable Pearl on [the Subject of] the Merits of the Muslims and the Defects of the Polytheists)184 to have been a polemical treatise, but it is no longer extant.185

  Sivan concludes that this lack of true intellectual debate is because Islam at that time was ‘in full stagnation’.186 This judgement is too harsh and rather unrealistic. There is no guarantee that the missing work whose loss Sivan regrets would have risen above the usual level of anti-Christian polemic shown in the Islamic sources. These were concerned with the vigorous propaganda campaigns of the time and, like their Christian counterparts, Muslim thinkers such as al-Sulami, the Qadi al-Fadiį ‘Imad al-Din and Ibn Taymiyya did not have the time or inclination to indulge in investigating the niceties of the theological differences between Islam and Christianity. As mentioned earlier, Islam was for them the final revelation, encompassing and perfecting all previous monotheistic messages.

  Initially the Muslims had certainly been confused by the fact that the Franks had arrived along routes previously used by Byzantine invaders of northern Syria and certainly there seems to have been a time-lapse before the Muslims realised that they were dealing with a different kind of Christian adversary. But even when their knowledge of the Franks had deepened, the Muslims still clung to their old polemical stances towards Christianity. Few opportunities are taken by Muslim writers to draw comparisons between the two faiths. Certain practices and ideals are taken for granted; they are not used either to score propaganda points or even just in a spirit of curiosity about the religion of ‘the other side’. Usama speaks, for example, in passing about Franks who have come on pilgrimage to the Levant and he uses the word hajj,187 but he does not then compare and contrast the rites of Christian and Muslim pilgrimage. Moreover, although there is an awareness that the Franks are fighting under the Cross, no parallel seems to have been drawn by Muslim writers with the concept of jihad.

  Islam defined Muslim society, a community, which, as Hodgson so aptly puts it, ‘succeeded perhaps most strongly in building for itself a total society, demarcated sharply from all culture before and beyond its limits’.188

  This chapter has demonstrated that the coming of the Franks to the Muslim world and their living close did not change the ancient and deeply entrenched ethnic stereotypes the Muslims had formed of them. Nor did first-hand witnessing of how the Franks practised their faith modify Muslim views of Christianity. On the contrary, the old anti-Christian dogmatic arguments acquired additional intensity.

  Figure 5.37 Marble epigraphic panel, Mosque of al-Mu’ayyad, 818–23/1415–20, Cairo, Egypt

  We have already seen that it is difficult to identify what the earliest Muslim perceptions of Franki
sh Christianity may have been. It is, however, unlikely that even later Muslim writers were concerned to draw comparisons or fine distinctions of dogma or attitude between the Christianity of the Franks, the religion of the ‘Oriental Christians’ – with whom they had lived cheek by jowl for centuries – or the faith of the familiar Christian enemy, Byzantium.

  Notes

  1. This is a well-known hadith from the scholar Muslim’s canonical collection.

  2. The use by Muslim historians of non-Muslim sources’, in Historians of the Middle East, ed. B. Lewis and P. M. Holt, London, 1962, 181.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Cf. Ibn Muyassar, 70; as Bernard Lewis points out, it is symptomatic of the general lack of interest on the part of the Muslims that this work has not survived even in quotation (The use by Muslim historians’, 182, n. 5; cf. also B. Lewis, The Muslim discovery of Europe’, BSOAS, 20 (1957), 409–16).

  5. B. Z. Kedar, The subjected Muslims of the Levant’, in Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100–1300, ed. J. M. Powell, Princeton, 1990, 137; C. Cahen, La Syrie de Nord, Paris, 1940, 41–2, 343–4; F. Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, Leiden, 1968, 62, 466; according to al-Sakhawi (d. 902/1497) (I‘lan, trans, in Rosenthal, A History, 466), Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Halabi wrote a historical work called Al-Qut, from the year 490/1096–7, which ‘comprises the history, times and Syrian expedition of the Franks’. This may well be the same work as the one mentioned by Ibn Muyassar.

  6. Ibn Khallikan, de Slane, I, 179; Ibn Taghribirdi, Nujum, VI, 107.

  7. Ibn Khallikan, de Slane, I, 177; for some events in the life of Usama, cf. Ibn Zafir, 102–4. Cf. also Ibn Muyassar, 94.

  8. For a detailed account of Usama and his family, cf. E2:Munkidh.

  9. Usama, Hitti, 190–1.

  10. Hitti, 191. Cf. also Usama, Kitab al-manazil, I, 25.

  11. The work has been translated by Derenbourg, Hitti, Miquel, Rotter and others.

  12. Sivan, L’Islam, 195–200.

  13. R. Kruk, The bold and the beautiful. Women and fitna in the Sirat Dhat al-Himma: the story of Nura’, in Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, Piety, ed. G. Hambly, New York, 1998, 2.

  14. Ibid.

  15. R. Kruk, ‘Back to the boudoir: Arabic versions of the Sirat al-amir Hamza, warrior princesses, and the Sira’s literary unity’, unpublished paper, 97.

  16. Sivan, L’Islam, 196, quoting Paris ms. 4976, fol. iioa and M. Canard, ‘Delhemma, épopée arabe des guerres arabo-byzantines’, Byzantion, 9 (1935), 36.

  17. Lyons, The Arabian Epic, I, 109–18.

  18. In the period before the Crusades, the most important traveller from the Muslim world to visit western Europe was the Spanish Jew Ibrahim b. Ya’qub al-Turtushi. The account of his travels (c. 354/965) has not survived but it is quoted by later writers, such as al-Bakri and al-Qazwini. Cf. A. Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman, Paris and The Hague, 1967, 146–8.

  19. E.g. Harun b. Yahya whose ninth-century account has survived in the work of Ibn Rusta. He was a prisoner in Constantinople and then travelled to Venice and Rome.

  20. Quoted by Lewis in The use by Muslim historians’, 183.

  21. EI2: Ifrandj.

  22. Lewis, Islam, II, 122.

  23. B. Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, London, 1982, 68–9.

  24. EI2: Ifrandj.

  25. I am extremely grateful to Professor Kruk for giving me access to her as yet unpublished findings.

  26. Remke Kruk also draws a very interesting and apt comparison between the ideas of this author and those of the great Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406).

  27. Ms. Bodleian I, 456, 6 (Hunt. 534), fol. 358b.

  28. Ms. Bodleian I, 456, 6 (Hunt. 534), fol. 375b.

  29. Ms. Bodleian I, 456, 6 (Hunt. 534), fol. 378b; incidentally, Ibn Khaldun’s ideas on the northern zones do not reveal much advancement in knowledge from his predecessors.

  30. Al-Idrisi, Géographie d’Edrisi, trans. P. A. Jaubert, Paris, 1836–40, 355.

  31. Ibid., 425.

  32. Al-Qazwini also wrote a work on cosmography entitled The Wonders of Created Things and the Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things (Aja’ib al-makhluqat wa-ghara’ib al-mawjudat).This is the first systematic cosmography in the Islamic world; in it he describes the world as being divided into seven climes.

  33. Al-Qazwini, Athar al-bilad, trans. B. Lewis, Islam, II, 123.

  34. Ed. A. F. Mehren, St Petersburg, 1866.

  35. Ibid., 275.

  36. M. C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Storytelling, Cambridge, 1995, I, 27.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Usama, Hitti, 161.

  39. For an excellent discussion of this topic, cf. A. al-Azmeh, ‘Barbarians in Arab eyes’, Past and Present, 134 (Feb. 1992), 3–18.

  40. Ibid., 3.

  41. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 322.

  42. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 318.

  43. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 325.

  44. Kedar, The subjected Muslims’, 155.

  45. Usama, Hitti, 165–6.

  46. Usama, Hitti, 169.

  47. M. Douglas, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers, Sheffield, 1993, 21.

  48. Ibid., 21–2.

  49. Ibid., 23.

  50. Sura 74: 3–5.

  51. S. H. Nasr, Islamic Spirituality, London, 1987, I, 4.

  52. A.-M. Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God, Edinburgh, 1994, 48.

  53. Ibn al-Furat, Shayyal, 21.

  54. Al-Muqaddasi, Ahsan al-taqasim, partial trans. A. Miquel as La meilleure répartition pour la connasissance des provinces, Damascus, 1963, 195.

  55. RCEA, I, 8, inscription no. 9.

  56. Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, XI, 364.

  57. ‘Imad al-Din, Fath, 65.

  58. Ibid., 66.

  59. Al-Harawi, trans. Sourdel-Thomine, Guide, xii.

  60. Al-Harawi, trans. Sourdel-Thomine, Guide, 63.

  61. Wrongly described by Hitti as a ‘mosque’, Usama, Hitti, n. 7, 164.

  62. Usama, Hitti, 164.

  63. Ibn Wasil, V, 333.

  64. Ibn Wasil, V, 333.

  65. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 301.

  66. Abu Shama, RHC, IV, 259.

  67. Abu Shama, RHC, IV, 231–5.

  68. Stevenson points out that Reynald has been blamed personally by many for these actions but that it is conceivable that other Frankish leaders may have shared his views. Reynald advanced into the heart of Arabia because he was the Frankish leader in the best geographical position to do so. Cf. Stevenson, The Crusaders, 240–1.

  69. Anon., The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, trans. J. C. Mardrus and P Mathers, Norwich, 1980, vol. I, 442.

  70. Ibid., 443.

  71. ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, Al-barq al-shami, unpublished edn by L. Richter-Bernburg, 23.

  72. Ibid., 196.

  73. Ibid., 167.

  74. Ibn al-Furat, Shayyal, 206.

  75. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 316.

  76. Usama, Hitti, 116.

  77. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 322; Broadhurst has ‘in Muslim lands’ which makes no sense.

  78. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 322.

  79. Ibn Taghribirdi, Nujum, V, 151–2.

  80. Ibn al-Khayyat, Diwan, ed. H. Mardam Bek, Damascus, 1958, 184–6.

  81. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 36.

  82. Abu’l-Fida, RHC, I, 165.

  83. Sibt, VII/2, 656.

  84. Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, XI, 365; cf. also Sibt, VIII/i, 397.

  85. Cf. A. L. F. A. Beelaert, ‘Mani ba ‘arus-i hagla-basta/dar hagla yi car-su nisasta. The Ka‘ba as a woman: a topos in classical Persian literature’, Persica, 13 (1988–9), 107–23.

  86. The verb ahdatha means both ‘to establish’ and ‘to drop excrement’. The phrase could mean ‘replete with the construction work they had put up’, and indeed, the Franks had added extra sections to the Aqsa mosque. This is the interpretation given in the Recueil. However, in the context of this highly charged discussion of
Frankish filth, the other meaning of the verb has been preferred. ‘Imad al-Din was an inveterate punster and he is possibly making this play on words deliberately.

  87. According to Abu Shama, RHC, IV, 333.

  88. ‘Imad al-Din, Fath, 47.

  89. ‘Imad al-Din, Fath, 47.

  90. Ibn Khallikan, de Slane, II, 635.

  91. Ibid.

  92. Sibt, VIII/1, 397. In his turn, Baybars attached great importance to the Dome of the Rock, refurbishing it and engraving his name in lapis lazuli blue and gold on the dome; cf. al-Maqrizi, Suluk, I, 445; Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir, Rawd, 89.

  93. Ibn Jubayr, Rihlat Ibn Jubayr, ed. W. Wright and M. J. de Goeje, Leiden and London, 1907, 29.

  94. Qur’an 2: 222.

  95. RHC, III, 416; the translator misses this point completely. Cf. also Ibn Khallikan’s biography of Saladin.

  96. Syphilis is called the ‘Frankish chancre’.

  97. Ibn al-Furat, Shayyal, 18.

  98. Ibn al-Furat, Shayyal, 18–19. Leaders such as Guillaume de Bures and Baldwin ‘Lord of Jerusalem’ were given such titles.

  99. Ibn al-Qalanisi, Gibb, 344.

  100. Ibn al-Dawadari, cited by Atrache, Die Politik, 198.

  101. ‘Imad al-Din, Fath, 103.

  102. Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir, Tashrif, 80.

  103. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 23.

  104. Lyons, Arabian Epic, III, 419.

  105. Ibn al-Qalanisi, Gibb, 47.

  106. Ibn al-Qalanisi, Gibb, 135–6.

  107. Mouton, Damas, 90.

  108. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 29.

  109. Quoted by Ibn Shaddad, Eddé, 254.

  110. Cited by Ibn Khallikan, de Slane, IV, 529.

  111. Al-Maqrizi, trans. Broadhurst, 89–90.

  112. Presumably this refers to one of the early Qur’ans sent to the provinces of the Islamic empire after ‘Uthman’s recension, which is generally dated to 656.

  113. Sibt, VIII/1, 198.

  114. Ibn al-Jawzi, X, 131.

  115. Ibn al-Nabih, Diwan, 202.

  116. Sibt, VIII/2, 746–7.