The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (original) (raw)
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NMC277H1S - The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
Course Description: The Crusades, and its legacy, had, and continue to have, a resounding impact throughout Islamic history and the modern day Middle East. During the medieval period, this epoch-forming movement, whether directly or indirectly, imprinted a lasting influence on the central Islamic lands ideologically, geopolitically, and culturally. This course will provide a historical and thematic survey of the Crusades from the Islamic perspective. It will examine the Muslim responses to the Crusades from the beginning of the movement in 1095 to the end of the Crusader presence in the region in 1291. The course will first begin with an overview of Islamic history from the Age of the Prophet down to the state of the Islamic world at the eve of the First Crusade in 1092. The course will then trace the Muslims’ political and military reactions to the Crusader expeditions and the development of the Muslim religious jihad policies during the 12th and 13th centuries under different Muslim rulers, such as Zengi, Nur al-Din, Saladin, and Baybars. It will then explore major themes such as the medieval Arabic sources on the Crusades and Arabo-Islamic historiography. Attention will be paid also to the systematic efforts of major Muslim polities, such as the Seljuqs, Zengids, Ayyubids and Mamluks, in forming cultural unity among the Muslims through the establishment of madrasas, Sufi shrines, and advancing the Sunni revival movement. Among the themes studied is the role of Shi‘i minorities during this period, in addition to Muslim views of the Franks, and aspects of Frankish-Muslim coexistence and cooperation. The course will conclude by examining the legacy of the Crusades in the modern Middle East and its depiction in modern Arab politics, history writing, art and film.
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...
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.
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.
The Islamic View and the Christian View of the Crusades: A New Synthesis
History, 2008
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.
Rethinking the impact Of the cRusades On The MusliM-ChrisTian ThOughT and develOpment
The present paper attempts to revisit the impact of the Crusades into a broader social, economic, political, and religious context. It will first investigate the Crusades' impact on the Muslim world and, then accordingly and importantly on the Western Europe visa -vis trade, economy, religion, knowledge, scientific inventions, literature to name a few prominent areas. The Crusade imagery, ideology and symbolism are so much powerful and immense so that it has subsided and undermined the constructive/positive impact the Western Europe achieved by confronting with the Orient/Muslim world. The paper concludes that the Crusades' positive impact and interaction if broadly highlighted and explored, and if given considerable space in public and academic discourses then the possibilities of the East-West tension and hostility could be alleviated to a considerable extent.