Francesco Gabrieli - Arab Historians of the Crusades

The purpose of this book is to help the European reader to see the period of the Crusades from the other side, through the eyes and the minds of the men who at that time were the enemy. Such an experience is particularly interesting and informative in the case of the mediaeval conflict between Christianity and Islam, two civilizations which then had a great deal in common. They were founded on similar attitudes of mind and religious concepts, and it was their common struggle for universality that brought them into conflict and drove them to fanaticism. Nowadays the fanaticism has died down, at least among Christians, and the battles are fought on other fields, although the issues are still the same. We no longer speak of daggers and hammers of the Faith; in fact a sympathetic and conciliatory attitude to Islam is characteristic of Christians today; an attitude that may not be shared by the other side. But the violence of the old antagonism still blazes from the pages of the mediaeval chroniclers and polemicists, and we tend still to see the enemy of the Crusades in the light of that old theological and racial hatred, which later conflicts have deepened and embittered. It is only in poetry that Clorinda is brought from the camp of Sulaiman and Argantes to die reconciled with the Faith. Those who wish to rise above this view of history and to see more than one aspect of the situation must take a closer look at the enemys attitudes and ideals, his way of life and methods of warfare, as they appear in the pages of the Arab chroniclers and historians of the time. The evidence they present is as plentiful and as valuable as that of their European contemporaries. Of course the slogans are back-to-front: Christian swine has been substituted for Saracen dog, and the vision of the Holy Rock, upon which the Prophets foot rested on the night of his miraculous ascent into heaven, for that of the Holy Sepulchre. The saintly Godfrey is replaced by the saintly Saladin. This is not the place for religious and philosophical pronouncements. All we have tried to do is to offer to the historian and the interested layman a selection of the oppositions views to set beside the picture presented by European writers.

The Crusades burst upon the Muslim empire at a crucial moment in its history. The wave of Arab conquests had passed and Arab military activity was confined to defence, while the Turks were still building up their military supremacy within the Muslim empire before their great onslaught on the Christian world. Islam had already suffered at Christian hands during the Byzantine wars, particularly during the tenth century, but this violent attack by the Latin empire, on grounds that were fundamentally and conspicuously religious, took the Muslim world completely by surprise and found it in a state of political disunity that obstructed the speed and efficiency of its preparations for war. Groussets formulainitial Muslim anarchy versus Frankish monarchyis an accurate summary of the situation in Syria during the last decade of the eleventh century and the first decade of the twelfth. The land was divided among rival Turkish amrs, Seljuqid Ata-begs and their vassals. The Fatimids of Egypt maintained a tenuous control of Palestine. In Baghdd the Abbasid Caliph reigned under the tutelage of the Turkish Sultan, the dignity of his position a mere shadow of what it had been in the days of al-Mansr and al-Mamn. The potentates of southern Syria and the Fatimid commanders in Palestine did their feeble best to put up a resistance, but the Crusaders spread like a stain through the empire, while the Anti-Crusade, vainly urged and hoped for by Baghdd, remained as ineffective as ever.