The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1984) is a popular history by Amin Maalouf of the Crusades, a series of Western Christian-led holy wars from the High to Late Middle Ages. His history filled a void in Crusade scholarship at the time of its publication by telling the story of the Crusades from the perspective of the Islamic world that experienced it. Maalouf draws on primary sources authored by Arab chroniclers rather than relying primarily on Crusader accounts. Nevertheless, some scholars have criticized Maalouf for failing to engage in meaningful historical analysis, embellishing the thoughts and feelings of his subjects, and the exclusion of Muslim women’s perspectives. Maalouf’s journalistic experiences shape his storytelling, engaging in a critique of medieval Islamic political discord and presenting the Crusades as a multi-ethnic and religious conflict. His journalistic roots also lead Maalouf to center how past events influence contemporary global politics.

Content Warning: This book contains references to war, violence, and cultural conflict.

This guide uses the 1984 edition published by Al Saqi Books and translated by Jon Rothschild.

Summary

Maalouf recounts the history of the Crusades to the Middle East from the First through the Eighth Crusades. The text opens with the strange arrival of a ragtag band of Crusaders nearing the Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm in the late 1000s. This group of early “Franj” (as Arab chroniclers called them) was the “People’s Crusade,” headed by the wandering preacher, commissioned by the Papacy, named Peter the Hermit. This wave of the First Crusade soon dissolved but portended the disaster to come for the Muslim world.

Soon the final, successful wave of the First Crusade arrived. French barons led this well-armed group that managed to defeat the quickly assembled Muslim forces they met along the way, forcing the Seljuk ruler, Kilij Arslan, to abandon his capital at Nicaea. These Crusaders soon besieged major urban centers like Antioch and Damascus, and finally conquered Jerusalem, their goal in this Christian holy war. They established four Crusader states.

It took approximately two decades for the Muslim world to respond. This reaction took time because the Islamic world was politically fractured, with petty rulers spending more effort attacking each other than dealing with the Franj threat. Even the Abbasid caliph provided a non-response to Syrian pleas for help. It took several generations before Muslim leaders like Zangī, Nūr al-Dīn, and Saladin managed to re-take lands lost to the Crusaders, with the latter two building on the successes of their predecessors. These men stand in contrast to the brutality of their Frankish contemporaries. Saladin, for example, spared the lives of Frankish captives while his European counterpart, Richard I the Lionhearted, massacred Muslims, according to the Arab chroniclers.

Muslim authors view the Crusades as a series of Western wars of aggression, while the Crusaders saw them in religious terms. Some of the Arab historians Maalouf cites, for example, express shock at how religiously zealous the First Crusaders were. Likewise, they note that their brutality was directed not only at Muslims but also at the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem and eastern Christians at times. Maalouf’s account thus acknowledges the Crusades’ religious dimensions while highlighting the multi-ethnic nature of the conflicts. Alix of Antioch, for instance, appears as an easterner in Maalouf’s account because she was born in the Crusader east and her mother was Armenian. Moreover, Muslim leaders sometimes allied with the Franks as they fought with each other or engaged in dynastic quarrels. The Crusaders were thus not merely a conflict between Muslim and Western Christians, though they began as such.

Though the Crusades concluded and the Mamluks finally pushed the Franj out of the Holy Land, with even their fortresses destroyed under the Sultan Khalīl’s direction, Maalouf encourages his audience to question if the Crusades truly ended. He argues that these series of wars cast a long shadow and influenced contemporary politics at the time of his book’s publication. These contemporary issues include the Arab view of the modern nation-state of Israel as a new Crusader kingdom, given its backing by Western countries, and some extremists’ persecution complex and justification of violent acts against Western targets. The Crusades, Maalouf argues, shifted the center of intellectual and cultural prosperity to the West, which in turn became modernity’s center. The Crusades’ specter led the Arab world to reject this modernity because of its association with the oppressor. Maalouf therefore suggests that the Crusades launched a permanent “schism” (265) between the Arab and Western worlds.