The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives

"For an amazingly long time, it was normal to view the Crusades, almost entirely, from a Western perspective. Thankfully, that viewpoint is now completely exploded. In fact, we need to examine the crusades to the Holy Land from both a Greek and an Islamic angle too. If I’d had space, I would have chosen a book on the Byzantine perspective—but if I’ve only got the opportunity to have one, then I’d go for the Muslim angle. “when you get to places like Iraq and Iran, the Crusades were really not that important” There has been quite a rash of books trying to examine what the Crusades looked like to the Islamic world. The reason that I picked Hillenbrand is, quite simply, because it’s a classic. It covers the whole period of the struggle. It shows how the Muslims saw ‘the Franks’, and all the religious and ethnic stereotypes that were being bandied about during this long period of cultural interaction. It assesses what daily life was actually like in the Crusader States —where, on the one hand, you could be enemies on the battlefield, but you could also meet in the souk or in the bathhouse. Hillenbrand also examines how Muslim armies fought, what armour and weapons they used, their fortifications, and so on and so forth. And, of course, she looks at the biggest question of all: what all this meant for how the West viewed the Islamic world, and vice versa. Hillenbrand tries hard not to give simplistic answers. To some extent, the West and the Muslim world are represented as two self-confident cultures—who look at each other, don’t much like what they see, and therefore connect rather less than we might think. But on the other hand, though, an increasingly ‘globalised’ Crusades scholarship is saying that we should view these two spheres as actually rather similar. The warrior aristocracy, on either side, operated under quite closely related assumptions about how one should live, rule and fight, and how religion should affect what you do. But I would also bring out a point that, in my view, Hillenbrand minimises rather too much. This is the simple fact that the Westerners never actually got all that far into the Islamic world. (The Mongols are the ones who actually overrun the Middle East, doing enormous damage in the process.) On the one hand, then, the Crusades seem to be crucial in poisoning relations between the West and Islam. On the other hand, though, you could certainly argue that at the time, at least, the crusaders were little more than an irritant to the Muslim sphere. The Westerners could preoccupy warlords in Syria, and affect rulers in Egypt and what is now Turkey—but when you get to places like Iraq and Iran, the Crusades were really not that important. In a way. The Seljuq Turks had recently conquered most of the Middle East, but their united empire had already begun to break into fragments. One of the most interesting consequences of this is the simple fact that government by an alien minority was really quite normal in eleventh- and twelfth-century Syria. (At this particular juncture, most of the ruling class were Turks, but there were also Kurds, Armenians and so on and so forth—and some of them, at least, were quite suspect in religious terms.) So there is scope to argue that the Franks were not quite as shocking as one might think: that they were simply another foreign ruling class to go alongside the others. This is a particularly significant point because, with the benefit of hindsight, we assume that the Crusader States were always doomed to fail. But when you actually look at the history of the Islamic world, there were very long periods when a Turkish ruling class, for example, stayed in control over vast subject populations. Exactly."