Umej Bhatia has done an important service by presenting this careful reconstruction of the way in which the image of the crusades underwent enormous changes in the 20th century as the encounters between the Western and Islamic worlds began to heat up. Judicious, impassionate and drawing on a wide range of popular and academic sources, it takes us through the history of a subject which is usually written about in almost complete ignorance of its historical complexity. Not the least of its merits is the way it traces the link between the real Saladin of the crusading period and his...
It was the year of the first moon landing. Emmanuel Sivan, an Israeli historian, stepped into a Paris cinema in the Bohemian Latin Quarter. Entering the theatre, the Israeli found himself in the company of boisterous young Arabs who had come to see “Al-Nasir Salah al-Din” (“Saladin”)¹. The movie celebrated the legendary Muslim hero of the Crusades, the Ayyubid Sultan Salah al-Din Abu’l Muzaffar Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known as Saladin. Directed by the Egyptian film-maker Youssef Chahine, “Saladin”² was first released in 1963 when Egypt’s charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser dominated pan-Arab and Third World politics. Nasser roused the...
Like all traumatic historical episodes, the Crusades potentially provide a crystallizing focus for the convergence of memory and the bolstering of cultural (Arab) and religious (Muslim) identity. A key issue to be considered is how images, symbols and stories of the Crusades have circulated within the ummah. This is the worldwide community of Muslims, formed by attachment to the holiest places of Islam, notwithstanding regional variations in ritual and religious practice. I assume that Islamic remembering of the Crusades, which encompasses Arab and Muslim collective memory, as amorphous as it sounds, has a certain sociological validity and substance as much...
The Crusades were not always considered a watershed event in medieval Muslim history and consciousness. Francesco Gabrieli, the noted Italian historian of the Crusades, has argued that “the Arab histories of the Crusades are usually only a section of a general historical panorama”.55 Although the medieval Muslim chroniclers distinguished the Western Christian (“Frankish”) invasions from the attacks of the Eastern Christian Byzantine empire (“Rumi”), Gabrieli maintains that these invasions were nonetheless “never … a single subject to be treated in isolation”.56 For example, the period’s most wide-ranging Arab chronicler, the Mosul historian ibn Al-Athir (1160–1233), treated the “Frankish jihad”...
Inspired by the Qur’an, basic Muslim history sees the past as a constant struggle between belief and unbelief. However, Ibn al-Qalanisi (1070–1160), the earliest chronicler of the Crusading period, did not immediately propagate the black-and-white view of a Crusading Christianity versus a pious Islam. His chronicle recorded the impact of the First Crusade on Damascus in 1097 and ends a year before his death. Despite the wholesale slaughter visited on the Muslims (and others) after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, al-Qalanisi’s own account remained remarkably matter-of-fact and detached. He abstained from characterizing it as a collision between a...
Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem (al-Quds) are considered Islam’s three holiest cities. But, as I have described in the preceding chapter, the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 did not immediately arouse the Muslim counter-Crusade. At the time, the Muslim world found itself deeply divided with factional disputes in Syria, Egypt and the Hijaz. Those warning of the conquest’s wider dangers were voices in the wilderness, such as the Shafi’i preacher from Damascus, Ali b. Tahir as-Sulami an-Nahwi (d. 1106). In as-Sulami’s view, Jerusalem’s conquest heralded a permanent occupation of the region. But, his jeremiad went unheeded.135
Ironically, Crusader fixation on Jerusalem...
Muslim collective memory of the Crusades era retains an enduring fondness and respect for the storied Saladin. The counter-Crusader is almost universally remembered as the archetypal hero in Muslim consciousness. Indeed, to many Arab biographers, as Philip Hitti points out, this single, iconic personality is known as al-batal al-khalid (immortal hero).157 Apart, of course, from the Prophet Muhammad and other Qur’anic figures, Saladin’s heroic stature is unparalleled in the Muslim world.158 A man for all seasons, the memory of Saladin attracts all shades of politics. In Islamist circles, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian radical ideologue and right-hand man of Osama bin...
In theory, our constantly shrinking world gives us greater opportunities to form sophisticated perceptions and understanding of other cultures. Paradoxically, our enduring stereotypes are still passed down from oral history and through collective memory. What were the Muslim stereotypes of the Franks during the Crusades? The chronicler Baha’ ad-Din encapsulated the stereotypical medieval Muslim view of the Franks in describing a disguise adopted by Muslim sailors. The sailors had been despatched from Beirut to re-supply a besieged Acre, and needed a ruse to get past the Frankish blockade. Baha’ ad-Din writes: “[a] number of Muslims boarded the buss in Beirut...
As I have tried to show in earlier chapters, some of the medieval Muslim chroniclers, historians and men of letters had a remarkably nuanced view of their adversary. More so than we would expect or even see reflected today in modern memories of the Crusades. Much of the deliberate contemporary simplification of the history and meaning of the Crusades has distorted the historical richness and reality of the period and its outlook. The most extreme statements locate the conflict even further back than the Crusades. For example, in a reading of history inspired possibly by the historicism of the Qur’an...
The notion of the West’s offensive against the Islamic world, seen as a physical and ideological assault (al-ghazwa al-fikri), finds powerful expression in the notion of a recurring Crusade against Islam. In this view, the clash of civilizations is an ineluctable geopolitical reality. As the U.S.-occupation of Iraq developed into a grim quagmire, the global public perceived a replayed historical conflict between Islam, on the one hand, and the Christian West and non-Muslim rest. For Al Qaida propagandists, the situation serves as a God-given rallying call for a worldwide Muslim uprising. The Iraq invasion has given Islamists fuel for their...
