1176) in the promotion of jihad against the Crusaders.īoth scholars draw the parallel struggle of the Muslims during the Crusader period and today. We can see it clearly in Saʿid ʿAshur’s influential book on the history of the Crusades, published in 1963, and in Ahmad Halwani’s 1991 popular book that examines the role of Ibn ʿAsakir of Damascus (d. This theme has been generally adopted by Muslim scholars in the last century.
Inspiring modern jihadistsĬonceiving themselves adherents and protectors of “true” Islam, modern jihadists are inspired by a selective reading of Islamic foundational texts (Qurʾan, Sunna, etc.) and history, and by modern grievances (relating to direct or indirect colonial and hegemonic subjugation of the Muslims).įor them, the crusader period was not different from the current clash between the Muslim world and the Christian West. The result is Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments in the West, as well as “Westophobia” (hate of the West) and paranoia in the Muslim world. In other words, modern scholars (and the media), inadvertently for the most part, have put at the disposal of modern hate groups and terrorists a very suitable narrative that these groups have effectively employed to anchor and spread the discourse about an inevitable clash of civilizations. The focus on violence has dominated modern interest in the Crusades (the area most researched by scholars is crusader military orders and Holy war/Jihad). This complex reality is generally ignored, and if modern scholars acknowledge some of it, they do so only to emphasize its abnormality.
What was the goal of the crusades full#
The Christians had full control of their religious places while the Muslims maintained control over their sacred places in the city and the surrounding villages.įrederick II, Holy Roman Emperor (left) meets al-Kamil Muhammad al-Malik (right), from a manuscript of the Nuova Cronica, between circa 1341 and circa 1348. Manfred’s father, emperor Frederick II, used to regularly write to Muslim scientists asking for scientific information, and when he led the Sixth Crusade in 1228-1229, he negotiate a peace with Sultan al-Kamil that allowed the Muslims and Crusaders to share Jerusalem. 1298) spent two years in southern Italy on a diplomatic mission in early 1260s, during which he authored a book on logic, which he dedicated to emperor Manfred of Hohenstaufen. Muslim chronicler and historian Ibn Wasil (d.
No doubt they speak of countless battles, but they also describe innumerable political and military alliances, systematic sharing of sacred spaces, commercial dealings, exchange of science and ideas, etc., between Muslims and crusaders.
Indeed, medieval Muslim sources tell a different story about the Crusades. What irritated him the most was not only that the Crusaders were not harming them, he actually bemoaned the fact that those Muslims did not seem to be bothered by their mingling with what he described as “Christian pigs and filth”. 1217) described countless farming villages inhabited by Muslims who seemed to him to live in complete harmony with the Crusaders. Aroconchichon/Wikimedia, CC BY-NCįor example, while travelling through northern Palestine in late summer of 1184, the medieval scholar Ibn Jubayr (d. What is left out of the modern narrative – conceptualized as such by Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as, for example, in Joseph-François Michaud’s Histoire des Croisades (the first volume was published in 1812) – is that the crusaders were not as fanatic as modern scholars allege, and they had good relations with the Muslims. They are also seen as medieval ancestors of modern Western colonialists and imperialists. In the Muslim public imagination of today, the crusaders are remembered as medieval Christian barbarians who assaulted the Muslim world and slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people before the Muslims could mount an effective jihad campaign to drive them away. Crusaders as Christian barbariansĪctually, this is not the first time Muslims have told their story of the Crusades, and the story has changed over time. The only difference is that the al-Jazeera documentary alleges to tell the story of the Crusades “for the first time” from an Arab perspective, which actually means that it is the turn of the Muslim Arabs to tell, not a different story, but rather the same story of the clash of civilisations. All three documentaries share the same plot about the clash of civilizations fuelled by the religious ideologies of holy war and jihad.