Muslim responses to the Crusades - includes bibliography -
Confronting the Crusades
Robert Irwin
In August 1099, al-Harawi, the chief Qadi of Damascus, preached a sermon in the
Great Mosque in Baghdad: `Your brothers in Syria have no home other than the
saddles of their camels or the entrails of vultures'. Al-Harawi was surrounded
by a throng of Syrian and Palestinian refugees who wept as he spoke, and their
weeping made others in turn weep. Al-Harawi was preaching about the arrival of
the armies of the First Crusade in Syria in 1097 and their successive occupation
of Antioch, Edessa, and finally, in 1099, Jerusalem. Muslims from there and
other places had fled to the larger Muslim cities of the hinterland, in
particular to Damascus and Aleppo.
At the end of the eleventh century, Syria and Palestine were, theoretically at
least, part of the Seljuk empire and as such subject to the spiritual authority
of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and the Seljuk sultan in Isfahan. Al-Harawi's
mission in Baghdad was to put pressure on the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustazhir Billah
to send an army to help the Muslims against the crusaders. However, Baghdad was
a long way from Jerusalem and, moreover, al-Mustazhir had no troops to speak of.
Real political and military power within the territories claimed by the caliph
was exercised by the Seljuk Turkish sultan. According to Muslim political
theorists, the sultan was the executive servant and defender of the caliph. In
practice he ran the caliphate. But if Baghdad was far from the theatre of war
with the crusaders, the Seljuk capital of Isfahan (in western Iran) was further
yet. The Sultan Barkiyaruq, who was precariously in control of Isfahan in 1099,
had succeeded his father, the mighty Malik Shah in 1094. His enemies accused
Barkiyaruq of being drunk and dissolute; he was certainly young and
inexperienced. (He also suffered from piles.) In order to retain control of the
core Seljuk lands of Iraq and western Iran, Barkiyaruq had to fight off rival
kinsmen and Turkish officers. Syria was on the edges of the Seljuk empire and it
had always been a war zone. It seems most unlikely that, from Barkiyaruq's
perspective, the arrival of a Christian band of barbarians on the western edges
of his empire was perceived as constituting a major problem. Rather the sultan's
main goal there was to bring under his effective control cities such as Mosul,
Aleppo and Damascus, which were governed in his name (but in name only) by
Seljuk princes and officers.
As late as the tenth century, the jihad, or Holy War, against the Christians of
the Byzantine empire was still being preached and practiced. A galaxy of
soldiers, propagandists and poets celebrated the (partial and inflated)
successes of the Arab Hamdanid Emir Sayf al-Dawla of Aleppo against the
Byzantines in the 950s. However, by the late eleventh-century, an anti-Christian
jihad was no longer high on the agenda of either the sultan or the caliph.
Rather, the main military and ideological threat to the Sunni Abbasid caliphate
was thought to come from Shi`i Muslims.
The rift between Sunni and Shi`i Muslims went back to the seventh century, which
was the first century of Islam. Sunnis believed that the leadership of the
Islamic community had passed after the Prophet Mohammed's death to caliphs,
drawn first from the Umayyad dynasty and later from the Abbasids. The Shi`is,
however, held that only descendants of the Prophet's son-in-law, `All, were
capable of inheriting any of the Prophet's authority. (Shi'at `Ali means Party
of `Ali). The Shi`is venerated a succession of imams of `Alid descent. Over the
centuries there were divisions among the Shi`is about the correct line of
descent and many believed that their imam had withdrawn himself from the world
and was in hiding until the end of time.
In the late eleventh century some were expecting the imam to emerge from
occultation (and in this context the arrival of the barbarian crusaders in Syria
could be seen as being like famine, plague and civil disorder, one of the bad
things which presaged the end of the world). Many Shi`is, however, believed in
the vaguely couched claims of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt to descend from Ali
and the Prophet's daughter Fatima and hence to be the predestined leaders of the
Muslim community in the last days.
The Fatimids had established a caliphate in Cairo in opposition to the Sunni
caliphate in Baghdad and in the second half of the eleventh century they had
been waging a war against the Seljuks and other Turkish soldiers of fortune for
control of Palestine and Syria. From the Seljuk perspective, the coming of the
crusaders was a distraction from the larger struggle against the Fatimids. The
Fatimids, on the other hand, at first thought that the arrival of the crusaders
presented them with allies and an opportunity to exploit Seljuk disarray.
However, the Fatimids, who in the late 1090s held Jerusalem, were slow to
realise that the conquest of the Holy City was precisely the goal of the First
Crusade.
At a humbler level the First Crusade was perceived as just another transient
affliction, and its marauding progress down the coastline of Syria and Palestine
did not distinguish its operations sharply from the looting and fighting by
Turks and Bedouin which had ravaged Syria in the 1090s. Therefore calls to jihad
at first fell upon deaf ears. Al-Harawi appears to have preached to the caliph
and the citizens of Baghdad in verse. Although it is possible that his versified
call to arms against the Franks was an invention of later chroniclers, it is in
fact likely that his preaching did take the form of poetry. In medieval Arab
culture, poetry and rhymed prose were the favoured vehicles for rhetoric and
propaganda. A century earlier, at the Aleppan court of Sayf al-Dawla, Ibn Nubata
had preached in verse against the Byzantines. In considering the Muslim response
to the Crusade, one must understand that much of that response was couched in
poetry.
The conquest by the army of the First Crusade of such towns as Jerusalem,
Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, and Tripoli created a generation of wandering scholars,
learned and cultured Muslims who sought patronage in the larger Muslim cities of
the hinterland, where they sold their pens and their poetry to generals and
politicians. Among them in the early twelfth century, Ibn Munir and his rival,
Ibn al-Qaysrani were looked on as the leading poets of the Arab Near East.
Abu'l-Hasan Ahmad ibn Munir al-Tarabulusi was born in Tripoli in 1081, but the
crusader conquest of that city in 1109 made him an exile. He began by making a
career of sorts for himself as a satirical poet in Damascus, but his youthful
satires aroused the wrath of Taj al-Muluk Buri, the Turkish overlord of Damascus
from 1128-32. Al-Buri threatened to cut out Ibn Munir's tongue, so he fled north
to Aleppo, which from 1128 onwards was ruled by a rival Turkish warlord Zenki.
Zenki presented himself as both the protector of Sunni Islam and the prosecutor
of the jihad against the crusader principalities. Inspired by Zenki, Ibn Munir
gave up writing satirical verse and became a serious partisan for the Muslim
counter-crusade and, although like many of the former citizens of Tripoli, he
was a Shi`i Muslim, he went so far as to hail Zenki as Amir al-Muminin,
(`Commander of the Faithful'), a term which was normally only used by Sunni
Muslims to refer to their caliph. Ibn Munir wrote poems of madih, or panegyric,
celebrating the jihad, especially Zenki's conquest of Edessa from the crusaders.
Ibn Munir's contemporary and literary rival, Ibn al-Qaysrani, had a more
ambiguous attitude to the crusader presence. Ibn al-Qaysrani was born in the
Palestinian coastal town of Acre and was educated initially in Caesarea, but,
after the crusader invasion, he continued his studies in Damascus, where he was
instructed in religious traditions, poetry, belles-lettres, astronomy,
engineering and mathematics. His study of the last two subjects equipped him to
pursue a career as a horologist and he seems to have been in charge of the
maintenance of clocks in various Palestinian and Syrian towns. Like Ibn Munir he
also pursued a risky career as a satirical poet and he was eventually obliged to
flee Damascus having offended al-Buri. Again, like Ibn Munir, he ended up as a
pensionary of Zenki and he wrote panegyric poetry in praise of the capture of
Edessa.
However, Ibn al-Qaysrani did not just write panegyrics aimed at securing him a
salary, nor were the Franks for him merely the stereo-typically cowardly and
villainous opponents of Zenki and his son and successor, Nur al-Din (1146-74).
In 1145 or 1146, after Ibn al-Qaysrani had visited the great crusader city of
Antioch on business, he fell in love with the place and started writing poetry
celebrating its churches, especially the Church of the Virgin, a `watchtower of
the Franks'. He also wrote a poem in praise of the beauty of Melkite (that is
Greek Orthodox) church liturgy.
Ibn al-Qaysrani was even more struck by the beauty of Frankish women. He
recommended that his fellow Muslims attend churches on days of Christian
festival, for on such days the beauty and finery of the Christian women could
best be contemplated. Several of Ibn al-Qaysrani's poems commemorated the
wonder, longing and regret inspired by this sort of cross-cultural voyeurism.
One of his favourite women was a high-spirited and graceful servant girl called
Maria, who sang, accompanying herself on the tambourine. Ibn al-Qaysrani noted
that she sang in such a style as was calculated to alienate the Christians in
her audience and please the Muslims.
Ibn al-Qaysrani's interest in crusader manners and customs was unusual, though
it was echoed in the writing of the well-known twelfth-century poet and warrior,
Usamah ibn Munqidh (1095-1188). Usamah wrote a memoir, The Book of Examples, in
which he reminisced about, among other things, his visits to the Kingdom of
Jerusalem and his dealings with the Franks there. While he regularly cursed
them, his cursing seems to have a rather perfunctory character and it is clear
from his book that he had friends among the infidel Franks.
Other Muslim writers, however, wilfully or inadvertently ignored the crusader
presence. The great Sufi thinker, al-Ghazali (d. 1111), resigned a professorship
in Baghdad to travel and pray in various holy places. Although he spent some
time meditating at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in 1096, he never mentioned
the Franks anywhere in his prolific writings, preferring to concentrate on the
alleged heresies and evils of the Shi`is. Some time before 1122, al-Hariri wrote
the Maqamat, a picaresque series of narratives about a plausible and eloquent
rogue. It is one of the major classics of Arabic literature. Although, two of
its chapters are set in crusader-occupied Ramleh, the Franks are not mentioned
anywhere in the book.
Contemporary historians of the region were of course obliged to take note of the
crusader presence. Ibn al-Qalanisi's Dhayl Tar'ikh Dimashq (literally,
Continuation of the History of Damascus), which the author was still working on
when he died in 1160, is one of the earliest chronicles to take note of the
crusades. Though Sir Hamilton Gibb in 1932 selectively translated and published
it as The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, such a title is misleading. The
real focus of Ibn al-Qalanisi's book was the struggle between local factions for
the mayoralty of the city and infighting between Sunni's and Shi`is there.
Only slowly did the Muslim counter-crusade gather ideological and military
momentum, fuelled both by the ambitions of the Turkish military aristocracy and
the demands of the refugees from the occupied lands. From the 1140s onwards
under the leadership first of Zenki and later Nur al-Din and Saladin (1169-93),
the Muslims began to reconquer lands taken by the crusaders. They came to
realise that the crusaders were not mere mercenaries of the Byzantine emperor
and that the crusades had religious aims. Therefore at the same time as the
military offensive there was an intensification of anti-Christian polemic.
Much of this polemic concerned Christian attitudes to sex. For example, the Bahr
al-Fawa'id (The Sea of Precious Virtues), a pious treatise on moral life which,
though written in Persian, was composed in the Arab city of Aleppo at the time
when its ruler, Zenki, was reviving the practice of jihad. Although the
authorship of the treatise is obscure, the opinions it put forward are
representative of the age. Chapter twenty-four of the treatise is entitled `The
Book of Refutations of the Errors of the Greeks and the Franks'. How can a God,
who cannot protect himself from being crucified, protect others? asked the
anonymous author. `Anyone who believes that his God came out from a woman's
privates is quite mad; he should not be spoken to and he has neither
intelligence nor faith'.
According to the Bahr al-Fawa'id, Christians allowed fornication with unmarried
women and their judges fixed the going rate for sexual intercourse at four
copper coins a time. The children of this sort of prostitution were presented to
the church where they were received with joy. The women visited the churches to
fornicate with priests. Christian women do not veil their faces, but they say
`We are not stingy like the Muslims'.
Similar anti-Muslim libels were, of course, produced by Christian polemicists.
According to the (spurious) Letter of the Emperor of Constantinople, produced at
the time of the First Crusade, the Turks perpetrated pornographic atrocities on
the Greeks of Asia Minor. Greek daughters were ravished in front of their
mothers and were made to sing obscene songs, and Greek clergy were subjected to
homosexual rape by their Turkish captors.
Native Christians -- Melkites, Copts, Jacobites, Maronites and others -- living
under Muslim rule suffered from being tarred by association with their crusading
co-religionists. Christians, who had often been employed by Muslim lords as
government scribes or tax-collectors, became distrusted as potential traitors.
In 1249 the sultan of Egypt and Syria, al-Salih Ayyub, in his dying testament to
his son, Turanshah, counselled him to distrust the Copts in the military and tax
bureaux.
The appearance of the Mongols in Syria in 1259 intensified yet further Muslim
fears of Christian spies and collaborators, for some of the Mongols were
Nestorian Christians and, when they entered and briefly occupied Damascus in
March 1260, the Mongols had been hailed as liberators by the city's Christians.
Anti-Christian reprisals followed when the Mongols withdrew from Syria later
that year.
Even after Acre and the remaining crusader cities on the Palestinian and Syrian
coast had been occupied by the Egyptian sultan, al-Ashraf Khalil, in 1299, fears
persisted that native Christians would co-operate with a future crusader
invasion of Egypt or Syria. A sermon against the Copts preached in Egypt in 1300
puts the matter plainly:
By God they are the source of all
misfortune and treason. It is because of
them that strangers beset us. While you
are trying to destroy the enemy's
country, they are building here in safety
a country of their own. And major
secrets will leak out to the enemy
through them.
Stories circulated about native Christian involvement in arson and terrorism in
Cairo and elsewhere. One such story (with no historical basis whatsoever) was
posthumously attached to the heroic jihad-leader, Nur al-Din. According to this
story, Nur al-Din had dreamt that he was in Medina in the company of the
Prophet. The Prophet pointed insistently to two brown men. Intrigued and puzzled
by the dream, Nur al-Din set out the following morning from Damascus heading
towards Medina. As soon as he arrived in Medina, he set about distributing money
to everyone in the city. However, the two men whom he had been directed to in
his dream did not appear. Then the sultan ordered everyone in the city to
present themselves before him, but with no better result. Finally, he ordered a
house-to-house search of the city and through this the two brown men were
located. They claimed to be wealthy and pious Muslims from Morocco, but by now,
alerted by their suspiciously" evasive behaviour, Nur al-Din had their house,
which was near the tomb of the Prophet, searched. There, hidden under the floor,
Nur al-Din's officers found books on explosives. The two brown men, having been
tortured, confessed to being Christian agents on a mission to blow up the
Prophet's tomb. Needless to say, there is no evidence to indicate that the
historical Nur al-Din ever encountered such an infernal conspiracy.
Not only did fantasies about Christians, crusaders and Christendom circulate as
urban folklore, such material also infiltrated its way into the literature of
instruction and entertainment. According to a late thirteenth-century
chronicler, Qirtai al-Khazindari, the Christians were governed by monks and
priests. They knew nothing about buying and selling, or any form of commerce,
but were experts only in gambling and wine. The thirteenth-century Persian
cosmographer, al-Qazwini, praised the Franks as being `mighty in courage and in
the hour of combat they do not even think of flight, rather preferring death'.
However, he also described them as a filthy race with an aversion to washing and
he disapproved of their custom of shaving, which, he claimed, left them with an
ugly stubble. But, then again, according to al-Qazwini, the Franks disapproved
of the Muslim women's custom of shaving their pubic hair.
Arab and Persian writers showed surprisingly little interest in the places of
origin of the crusaders. The twelfth-century geographer, al-Idrisi, who was
based in Sicily, described England as a land of perpetual winter. As for
Scotland, it was yet more desolate, being totally uninhabited. Abu'l-Fida was an
Ayyubid prince and a descendant of Saladin who took part in the final siege of
Acre in 1291. He also wrote a treatise on geography. According to this book,
England was an island off the coast of Brittany. The English king who fought
Saladin [Richard the Lionheart] came from that island, but the English kings
were subordinate to the French king. They had to present the French king with a
vessel full of food as an annual tribute. England, which had gold and silver
mines, used the products of these on the purchase of French wine.
England, France, Rome, Genoa and Constantinople were all also favoured settings
for the adventures of the heroes of such medieval Arab popular epics as the
Sirat al-Zahir Baybars and Sirat Antar. The historical Baybars was a Turkish
slave soldier who ruled as sultan over Egypt and Syria from 1260 to 1277. Among
the many real triumphs of Baybars against the crusaders were the capture of
Caesarea, Krac des Chevaliers and Antioch. After his death, however, he became
the hero of folk epic, the Sirat al-Xahir Baybars, which took the form of a kind
of medieval Flash Gordon serial, in which his struggle against the crusaders
assumed much grander proportions and became more exciting. Some of the
Christians he defeats in fair and open combat. But others turn out to be masters
of dissimulation, disguise, drugs and sorcery. In particular, Baybars'
archenemy, Juwan (John) is a malevolent Portuguese Christian, who masquerades as
a Muslim qadi, or judge, at the Egyptian court.
Baybars and his allies have various adventures in Europe. For example, Miriam, a
beautiful Christian princess who converts to Islam, has to be rescued from Genoa
after being kidnapped by Juwan. England is a land of magic in Arab fantasy. One
day a ship from England arrives at the harbour of Alexandria. Greatly curious,
Baybars steps on board. No sooner has he done so, than the ship sets sail for
England. The journey takes six months and, having arrived in England, Baybars is
entertained for a year by the island's twelve petty kings, before being
presented at the court of the high king. There he falls and passes out. When he
recovers, he is back in Alexandria and only a day has passed since he left the
place.
Later in the preposterous saga, Kundafarun, lord of all the English islands,
attacks Aleppo. Although Kundafarun is almost invulnerable because he is solidly
made of bone, like a crocodile, he is killed by a blow to his armpit by one of
Baybar's officers. Towards the end of the saga, the traitor Juwan, is hunted
down through the streets of Constantinople. Juwan takes refuge in one church
after another. The churches are death traps, furnished as they are with
poisonous snakes, quicksilver pools, death-dealing automata and other dangers,
but none of these can save Juwan from the death he deserves.
The Sirat Antar is notionally set in the pre-Islamic period, but the story seems
actually to have been composed in the period of the crusades and there are all
sorts of muddled echoes of the conflict. The desert warrior, Antar, not only has
to fight at various times against Byzantine Christians and pagan fire
worshippers, but also against Kalijan, `the terror of men and jinn', at the head
of an army of 200,000 Franks who `want to stay in Syria and visit Jerusalem'. In
the end, Antar pressures the Franks to make peace by capturing Damascus and
killing all the priests and monks there.
The Frankish incursions into the Near East and the establishment of the crusader
states stimulated hostile polemic and bizarre fantasy about Christian aims and
practices. It would be pleasant to think of local Arab scholars, stimulated by
the proximity of the crusader states, taking up, say, the study of Anselm or
translating the poetry of Chretien des Troyes. Unfortunately, this sort of
cultural interchange did not take place in the Near East. The Arabs showed as
little interest in the literary culture of the crusaders as the crusaders did in
Arab literature. Only in the field of material craftsmanship and most
specifically in the production of high-quality glass and metalwork are there
signs of a bridging of the two cultures. Inlaid brass vessels and flasks
produced in thirteenth-century Egypt and Syria quite frequently combined
Christian with Muslim imagery. For example, a flask (now in the Freer Gallery,
Washington) is decorated with images of what seem to be Christian saints,
together with praises of the Sultan al-Salih Ayyub as leader of the jihad.
It is also clear that much high-quality Muslim metalwork was produced for export
to Europe. While there are no good grounds for thinking that the so-called `St
Louis basin' (now in the Louvre) had anything to do with the French crusading
king, Louis IX, this fine piece does, nevertheless, seem to have been produced
for the market for exotic luxury goods in Europe. Moreover, even after the
expulsion of the crusaders from the Holy Land at the end of the thirteenth
century, local Arab craftsmen continued to produce glass bottles and other
artefacts, decorated with Christian imagery to sell to visiting pilgrims from
Europe. A thirteenth-century glass beaker (now in the Walters Art Gallery,
Baltimore), for example, is painted in enamels with the entry of Christ on a
donkey into Jerusalem.
In fourteenth-century Jerusalem, there was a quarter, the Harat al-Turufiyya,
which specialised in the production and sale of souvenirs. The saqati were the
specialist dealers in curiosities, mementoes and antiques. It was at this level,
the sale of luxury goods, kitsch souvenirs and spurious relics. that the most
substantial cultural interaction between Muslim and European Christian took
place in the lands once occupied by the crusaders.
Other cross-cultural influences are harder to pin down. It seems fairly clear
that the crusaders learned little or nothing from Muslim military architecture,
since at the beginning of the twelfth century there was nothing much in Syria of
any sophistication to be influenced by. Although Nur al-Din carried out
important refortification work in Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, in general the
Muslims relied on large garrisons, rather than stonework, to defend their cities
and castles. In the thirteenth century, Ayyubid and Mamluk princes commissioned
the building of larger defence works, possibly in emulation of the crusaders,
and they seem to have copied the latters' use of machicolation. How-ever, the
fortifications they built seem usually to have been put up to defend themselves
against each other, rather than being a response to a crusader challenge.
Again, it is tempting to speculate that the ways in which music-making developed
in Christendom and the Islamic world owed something to Crusader-Muslim contacts.
Although actual crusader songs, such as Marcabru's `Pax in Nomine Domini' (1137)
or Guiot de Dijon's `Chanterai Por Mon Corage' (1189) show no particular
oriental influence, it seems indeed plausible that such instruments as shawms,
nakers and lutes were brought back to the West by returning crusaders (though
Spain and Sicily provided alternative channels of transmission). Crusaders are
not likely to have been often exposed to gentle lute solos. The sort of music
they would have heard more often would have come from Muslim military
orchestras. Apparently they did not like them very much. According to the French
knight, Joinville, who fought at the Egyptian port at Damietta in 1249, the
`noise they made with their kettledrums and trumpets was terrible to hear'. For
their part, Syrian and Egyptian Muslims did not mention Christian music (apart
perhaps from the aforementioned Bin al-Qaysrani who liked Maria's tambourine).
Although all sorts of things, such as pilgrim souvenirs, brass trays, shawms,
windmills, hoods for falcons, playing cards, ogives and polylobed arches seem to
have entered Christendom from the Muslim world, it really is much more difficult
to detect any comparable flow of devices and techniques in the opposite
direction until at least the fifteenth century.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, (Routledge, 1969); Malcolm
Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 3 vols, (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Amin
Maalouf, 77, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, (Al Saqi Books, London, 1984);
Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed ), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades,
(Oxford University Press, 1995); Usamah ibn Munqidh, Memoirs of an Arab Syrian
Gentleman, tr. P.K. Hitti. (Columbia University Press, 1929)
Robert Irwin, was formerly lecturer in the Department of Medieval History at the
University of St Andrews, and is the author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion,
(Viking, 1994)
SOURCE: History Today- April, 1997 - COPYRIGHT 1997 History Today Ltd.
- COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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