The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Figure 9.9 Page of Qur’an made for the Mamluk sultan al-Mu’ayyad, early fifteenth century, Cairo, Egypt

  Figure 9.10 Kufic inscription forming an architectural silhouette and spelling the shahada or Muslim creed, manuscript frontispiece, fifteenth century, Egypt

  The response to the neo-Crusaders must be the Islamic solution of jihad: Muslims must fight until the last invader has been expelled, however many martyrs fall, however much time it takes. Again the model of the Crusader is used – Muslims are reminded that their predecessors fought for almost two centuries until the Crusaders were ousted and Muslim territorial integrity was restored.47 The destruction of Israel and the restoration of Palestine must be achieved through jihad, just as the Muslims had regained Palestine through jihad at the time of the Crusades. Victory will come, if not today, then in the future: ‘An umma that fought against the Crusaders and the Tartars [Mongols] for more than two hundred years … until it did away with them and expelled them, is capable of fighting and defeating its enemy… if not today, then tomorrow.’48

  Parallels between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Modern State of Israel

  It is a deep-rooted characteristic of Muslim historiography to draw moral lessons from the study of the past. The didactic value of the Crusade experience has been fully recognised in the Arab world since the Second World War and the establishment of the state of Israel. In October 1948 ‘Abd al-Latif Hamza wrote: ‘The struggle against Zionists has reawakened in our hearts the memory of the Crusades.’49

  Parallels are frequently drawn in the Arabic media, works of literature and academic books between the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the current situation in the state of Israel.50 Some Arabs speak of the need for patience. Is it not true, they say, that the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted 88 years (1099–1187) whilst the state of Israel has been in existence only since 1948? The fact that the Palestinian nationalist struggle focuses so closely on the status of Jerusalem and that modern Islamic movements also stress the sanctity of the city as the third holiest in Islam, after Mecca and Medina, only enhances the potency of such parallels.

  A very powerful medium for expression of Arab and Muslim longing for Jerusalem is poetry. As the Palestinian critic Jabra I. Jabra writes:

  Poetry might be condemned as too weak a toy against guns, but in actual fact it was often as good as dynamite. It gave point to a whole nation’s suffering and wrath. It crystallised political positions in telling lines which, memorised by old and young, stiffened popular resistance and provided rallying slogans.51

  An interesting example is the work of the Iraqi woman poet and essayist Nazik al-Malaika. Writing in the 1970s, she gives the Arab nationalist struggle a distinctively religious interpretation and focuses on Palestine, and especially Jerusalem. Once again, familiar symbols from the Arabic poetry and prose of the Crusading period re-emerge and are given new significance and poignancy in the contemporary political situation. The Dome of the Rock (cf. plate 9.6) occupies a central place as a powerful spiritual and political image:

  [You are] a mosque thirsty for their Qur’an and their prayers …

  When man achieves victory, the call to prayer will rise,

  Announcing the prayer, the call to Holy War and the Revolution.52

  In another poem, emotively entitled ‘Migration to God’ (al-hijra ila Allah), she speaks of her grief for Jerusalem and for the degradation suffered by the Aqsa mosque when it lacked defenders of the calibre of the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Mu’tasim, and Saladin.53 Thus, once again, as in the Crusading period, the two sacred Islamic monuments in occupied Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque, are personified, thirsting for the Qur’an and the prayers of the faithful, and suffering under the yoke of alien oppression.

  The Dome of the Rock in particular, with its compact, immediately recognisable exterior, has become a potent symbol, almost a logo, in much of the Arab world (plate 9.7). Images of it decorate the exterior walls of ordinary houses to celebrate the fact that the occupants have made a visitation there. It is employed in all kinds of contexts from letterheads to tea-trays, and is a centre-piece of revolutionary and poster art in such overtly Islamic states as Iran, always with the message of resurgent Islam and Palestinian identity. Hence the immediate and violent reaction to any action, political or otherwise, that might conceivably threaten the monuments of al-Haram al-Sharif, such as the opening of the tunnel in late 1996 in the vicinity of the Aqsa mosque. The incendiary bomb detonated by an Australian zealot in the Aqsa mosque in 1969 – which reduced to ashes the celebrated twelfth-century wooden minbar of Nur al-Din, made in anticipation of his planned capture of Jerusalem – shows that such fears are not without foundation.

  Plate 9.6 Dome of the Rock, interior, 72/691–2 onwards, Jerusalem

  (Creswell Photographic Archive, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, neg. C. 180)

  Despite the pull of the modern political agenda and the emotions aroused by the Holy City of Jerusalem, however, it is unwise to draw simplistic parallels between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the modern state of Israel. It is true enough that modern Muslim heads of state see this danger all too clearly. Nevertheless, as long as Israel, a state with a Western orientation and a militarised society, continues to occupy the same geographical space as the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem did in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it is all too easy for such parallels to be made.

  Plate 9.7 Dome of the Rock, exterior, 72/691–2 onwards, Jerusalem

  (Creswell Photographic Archive, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, neg. C. 1272)

  Of course, it is also possible to draw rather different parallels from the historical evidence. One might, for example, compare the Ayyubid ruler al-Kamil, who bowed to political exigencies and ceded Jerusalem to the Crusaders again, with those modern Arab leaders who have concluded treaties with Israel. The Crusader states, as has been shown in this book and in many others, owed their longevity (almost two centuries) to their military expertise in defence, to their regular reinforcements from the West, and to their ability to make alliances with neighbouring Muslim states. In short, as has been discussed elsewhere in this book, for a while – at least in the thirteenth century – the Crusaders became almost an integral part of the Middle Eastern political landscape, before the Mamluks unified Egypt and Syria and raised the banner of jihad and Muslims once again felt the overpowering urge to remove the Crusaders from Islamic territory. It remains to be seen which scenario will prevail in the present-day context. But it should not be forgotten that there is always a yawning gap between rhetoric and reality, between public posturings and private negotiations.

  Libyan anti-Western Propaganda

  In addition to making military and political parallels between the medieval Crusades and the current situation in the Middle East, contemporary Muslim leaders and thinkers draw on deeply held views about Crusader/Western pollution and their defiling of Muslim sacred space.

  Colonel Qaddafi’s regime in Libya was officially inaugurated on 1 September 1969. During a period of maximum hostility on the part of the West towards his government in the early 1980s a spate of defensive pamphlets were produced in Libya. Their tone is virulently anti-imperialist, anti-Christian, anti-Western; the imagery and rhetoric are strongly reminiscent of the Muslim response at the time of the Crusades. The strength of feeling is apparent in the title of one such green-coloured booklet entitled Nationalist Documents to Confront the Crusader Attack on the Arab Homeland.54 The enemy is different from the twelfth-and thirteenth-century Crusaders who originated from western Europe: the United States of America have now assumed the mantle of the Crusaders (the writer speaks of the ‘filth of the American Christians’),55 and it is the Jews who have occupied Jerusalem. But, otherwise, the tone and content are very familiar:

  Yesterday we were summoning Muslims to conduct a mass Muslim holy march to liberate Jerusalem, the first of the two qiblas, but today we are surprised that, after the Jews have occupied Jerusal
em, the Christians have occupied the sky [airspace] of Mecca, Medina and the mountain of Arafat.56

  Figure 9.11 Marble intarsia work, sabil (fountain), fifteenth century, Cairo, Egypt

  The task of the writers of Qaddafi’s leaflets is made easier by the fact that they can fan the flames of already deeply felt prejudices on the part of Muslims: Christians are ‘dirty’ and they pollute the Muslim environment.

  The Western infidels are seen as violating the most sacred places in Islam and the imagery used of ‘these filthy American pigs’ reminds one of the impressions of the Crusaders of Acre recorded by Ibn Jubayr in 1184.57 The leaflet pronounces: ‘While hundreds of thousands of Muslims of various colours and languages and races were standing on Mount Arafat, the American Crusader Christians threw their garbage and defilement from their planes on to Mount Arafat.’58

  The battlelines are drawn up between ‘Islam and the Christians, between East and West’, and between on the one hand ‘the Arab nation, the Islamic nation’ and the ‘foreigners’ (ifranj) on the other.59 The Americans are viewed as having launched the ‘offensive of the Cross against Islam’; they are ‘the leaders of the modern Crusader offensive’.60

  Colonel Qaddafi, the leader of the Libyan people, himself a military figure like the Muslim heroes of the Counter-Crusade, is described in the following rousing terms: ‘It is he who has uncovered the conspirators, exposed the fascist reactionary rulers and made a true summons to the holy jihad.’61 The message of this booklet is uncompromising and crystal clear, and is a powerful reminder of the spectre of the Crusades in modern Arab consciousness.

  Figure 9.12 Amirs and servants, inlaid brass basin known as the ‘Baptistère de St Louis’, c. 1300 or earlier, Syria

  Figure 9.13 Panel, Mosque of Barquq, 786–8/1384–6, Cairo, Egypt

  The analogy with Crusader times made in these pamphlets is of course striking. The propagandists here are using the same theme as the Muslim Brothers, and they link ‘Christian’ Americans on the one hand and Zionist Israelis on the other. The rhetoric is meaningful because the conflict is polarised as a political and military one between East and West, as once again the West attempts to interfere, as in Crusading times, in the affairs of the Middle East.

  Some General Reflections

  To sum up modern Muslim opinion on the Crusades is a difficult task. At first glance there would appear to be grounds for pride and triumph in modern Muslim hearts; after all, it was Islam that had the ultimate victory, both politically and culturally. The Crusaders were uprooted after two centuries of interference and proto-colonialism. Contact with the Crusaders had, moreover, shown very clearly that the Islamic world was at that time superior in cultural terms to western Europe.

  Yet this whole episode in the long relationship between Islam and Christianity is etched deeply into the modern Islamic consciousness, and the Crusades are viewed more frequently by Muslims as having exerted a negative and deleterious influence on the Islamic world. The Crusades are seen as a movement of imperialism, the first in a long series of territorial rapes of the Muslim homelands.

  It is certainly indisputable that since the Crusades the political and cultural hegemony and prestige of the Muslim world have waned, just as the power and the political and cultural imperialism of the West have increased. Speaking of the undermining of the Muslim self-image, the American scholar Hodgson writes with appropriate force:

  Not Muslims but the despised Christians of the far north-west, long since written off as too cold and fog-bound to produce anything more intelligent than the unpolished Crusaders that had already come from there, now suddenly had the mastery in the world’s affairs.62

  After the Crusaders departed, the Muslim world turned in on itself, going on the defensive, feeling excluded and viewing modern techno-logical developments as a manifestation of ‘the other’.63 Modernism was synonymous with the West, whence had come the Crusades. After the Crusades, then, the Muslim world which had defeated the western Europeans faced the undeniable and bewildering truth that these same defeated enemies were enjoying genuine economic, technological and cultural growth and had gone on to rule the world.

  Of course, the decline of the great medieval Islamic civilisation cannot be laid exclusively at the door of the Crusades. But Islam cannot and will not forget the Crusades, especially as its territorial space continues to be the focus for Western intervention and Arabs and above all Palestinians are obliged to react to the existence of the state of Israel. Muslims seek now to embrace ideologies which are true to their own self-image and not contaminated by Western imperialism and secularism. It is an unpalatable fact that, just as many deep-seated Western prejudices about Muslims can be traced back to attitudes moulded in the period of the Crusades, so too Muslim opinion about the West has been profoundly influenced by Islam’s encounter with western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the final years of the twentieth century it is common for political leaders in the Muslim world to speak of Saladin and to view Israel as a latter-day Crusader state. The fact that this is not a parallel that naturally recommends itself to the Western world, with its traditional culture based on Christianity rather than Judaism, is neither here nor there.

  Figure 9.14 Carved stone frieze, modern, outside the Officers’ Club, Cairo, Egypt

  Mahmud Darwish: Memory for Forgetfulness

  A recent masterpiece of Arabic literature is the moving and evocative work of Mahmud Darwish on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Entitled Memory for Forgetfulness,64 it is an extended elegy on this deeply tragic event. In it the writer moves seamlessly between present and past catastrophe, between the bombed city of Beirut and the Crusader occupation of the Holy Land. In a poetic meditation on water, Darwish declares: ‘Our water has been cut off by those acting on behalf of leftover Crusaders, yet Saladin used to send ice and fruits to the enemy in the hope that “their hearts would melt”, as he used to say.’65

  Jerusalem was and is the cynosure of all eyes, the cherished object of all hearts: ‘I love Jerusalem. The Israelis love Jerusalem and sing for it. You love Jerusalem. Feiruz sings for Jerusalem. And Richard the Lion-Hearted loved Jerusalem.’66 Interspersing his own reflections on the current tragedy with direct quotations from the memoirs of Usama and the chronicle of Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), Darwish is not crudely didactic: the mere juxtaposition of the medieval passages with his own contemporary voice is telling enough. This whole work is per-meated with the memory of the Crusades. The term ‘Frank’ can be seen as an extended metaphor for the occupation of Arab lands by foreign intruders. The Islamic historical heritage continues to provide potent symbols for contemporary situations.

  Figure 9.15 Radiating inscription on candlestick of Muhammad b. Qalawun, early fourteenth century, Egypt

  Concluding Remarks

  This book has deliberately presented a one-sided view of the Crusades, a view from the Muslim side alone. Clearly, such an approach is as biased and incomplete as one which studies the Crusades from an exclusively European standpoint. Yet it has to be said that the overpowering weight of Crusading historiography and secondary literature over the past century has tended towards the latter approach, with a perfunctory nod at some Muslim sources. It seemed high time to attempt to redress the balance a little. The task for modern historians of the Crusades is, of course, to weigh up the evidence from all sides – western European, Byzantine, Jewish, Oriental Christian and Islamic – in order to gain a more holistic view of the Crusades, that brief but momentous period of conflict and co-existence between Islam and European Christianity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Brief it may have been in actual chronological terms; but its impact, against all the odds, has lasted and has resulted in battle lines of misunderstanding and hostility being drawn up between East and West. Many a lesson derived from an analysis of Islamic perspectives on the Crusades will help towards better understanding between the West and those lands where Islam is still very much a political rallying-cry and a predominant religious ideolo
gy. In 1999, the year of the 900th anniversary of the Crusader capture of Jerusalem and the approach of a new Christian millennium, efforts towards a lasting peace, focused on the Holy City, must be continued: as Walid Khalidi so eloquently puts it: ‘A viable solution for Jerusalem must steal the thunder of all irredentists – of Crusades and prox -Crusades, of jihads and counter – jihads.’67

  Whilst there are many interpretations of the phenomenon of the Crusades, reflecting both medieval Christian and modern Western attitudes, this book has attempted to show how Muslims felt about the Crusades. It seems indisputable that the Crusades brought little benefit to the Islamic world. On the contrary, in the religious sphere and all that pertains to it, they caused Muslims great offence and inflicted on them profound and lasting psychological scars. It is my view that the modern Western views of the Crusades take far too little account of this. Those who support the present ‘demonisation’ of Islam in the Western media would thus do well to bear in mind this history of psychological damage and religious affront. Many Muslims today still remember with pain – centuries later though it may be – what was done in the name of the Cross. As so often in the Islamic world, the events of the distant past have a sharp contemporary relevance.

  Notes

  1. K. Kishtainy, Arab Political Humour, London, 1985, 198.

  2. For a detailed account of the later Crusades, cf. A. S. Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1938; A History of the Crusades, vol. 3: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. H. W. Hazard, Madison, Wis., 1975.