Review of Franks and Saracens: Reality and Fantasy in the Crusades (original) (raw)
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No cryptographer or symbologist is needed to unravel the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades. It is embedded in no secret code. The sources from which this interpretation can be reconstructed are widely known and readily accessible to scholars. A good number of the relevant Arabic texts have been translated into Western languages and have been available to researchers and to the general public for decades. Scholars – both in the West and in the Islamic world – have examined these texts repeatedly, yet they have brushed aside the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades as irrelevant – of no significance for understanding the actual phenomenon of crusading. Conceptual blinders have successfully prevented scholars from recognizing the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades for what it is: a coherent and historically verifiable explanation of the Crusades that can be validated by reference to eleventh-century Latin sources for the Crusades, although not by reference to the popular, and still entrenched scholarly, notion that the Crusades began in 1095.
Al-Ghazālī and the Ismailis : a debate on reason and authority in medieval Islam
Al-Ghazālī and the Ismailis, 2001
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE) is arguably one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Islam and his writings have received greater scholarly attention in the West than those of any other Muslim scholar. This study explores and important dimension of his thought that has not yet been fully examined, namely, his polemical engagement with the Ismailis of the Fatimid and early Alamut periods. Al-Ghazali's debate with the Ismailis constitutes an important chapter in the history of Muslim thought and this book also explores the wider intellectual and political significance of this encounter, and especially the light it sheds on the central tensions and questions of the age in which al-Ghazali lived.
Conventional wisdom maintains that the Islamic world and western Christendom held two very different views of the crusades. The image of warfare between Islam and Christendom has promoted the idea that the combative instincts aroused by this conflict somehow produced discordant views of the crusades. Yet the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources indicates otherwise. The self-view of the crusades presented by contemporary Muslim authors and the self-view of the crusades presented by crusading popes are not in opposition to each other but are in agreement with each other. Both interpretations place the onset of the crusades ahead of their accepted historical debut in 1095. Both interpretations point to the Norman conquest of Islamic Sicily (1060–91) as the start of the crusades. And both interpretations contend that by the end of the eleventh century the crusading enterprise was Mediterranean-wide in its scope. The Islamic view of the crusades is in fact the enantiomorph (mirror-image) of the Christian view of the crusades. This article makes a radical departure from contemporary scholarship on the early crusading enterprise because it is based on the direct evidence from Islamic and Christian sources. The direct evidence offers a way out of the impasse into which crusade history has fallen, and any attempt at determining the origin and nature of crusading without the support of the direct evidence is doomed to failure.
Muslim responses to the Crusades have been a focus of modern scholarship in both Crusades studies and medieval Islamic history over the last decade or so. This important aspect of the Crusades had been largely, if not entirely, ignored by Western scholars owing to their particular Western academic environment. One of the common misconceptions about the Muslim understanding of and response to the Crusaders is the view that the Muslims knew little, if anything, about them and were confused about the difference between the Byzantines and the Franks (Crusaders). Consequently, it took the Muslims approximately a half century to organize a unified Muslim front to fight against the Crusaders. Despite this view, Muslim sources reveal that Muslim intellectuals and religious figures closely observed the Crusaders’ actions and motives, and they did, in various ways, respond to this hitherto unimagined flood of people from the West. This paper attempts to highlight and explore the Muslim ideolo...