Saladin and the Problem of the Counter-Crusade in the Middle Ages

In 1105 a Muslim Damascene scholar named Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami argued in a treatise that Muslims needed to learn anew the practice of jihad. A wicked race of unbelievers, polytheistic Christians who insisted on worshipping three gods instead of one, was waging war—their own version of jihad—against Islam. After centuries of wrangling, the faithful needed finally to set aside differences and together drive out the invaders.

The enemies of whom al-Sulami wrote, the "Franks," which included but was not limited to the crusaders, had made significant incursions into Muslim territory. From al-Sulami's perspective, these Franks had together orchestrated a worldwide conspiracy. Only recently they had captured Sicily and southern Italy, and for years now they had been attacking Muslim lands in Spain. But worst of all and most shamefully, they had conquered Jerusalem and its two great shrines, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. In response, the Islamic world had done nothing. Muslims needed to awake from their torpor and wage war, a focused jihad, against Christianity.

But the disunity that al-Sulami decried was simply too ingrained—an attribute of the Islamic world rather than an anomaly. Most obviously there was the great Sunni-Shia confessional divide, given political form by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad and the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. But there existed also smaller sects and rivalries, both political and religious, that had made unified Islamic action against the crusade impossible. A disputed succession to the Fatimid Caliphate in 1094, for example, had led to the birth of the Ismaili sect, better known as "the Assassins" and best remembered for their expertise at political murder. As for the Abbasids, they were under the domination of Seljuk Turks, who had seized power in the 1050s and inaugurated an era of loosely organized military expansion. The western frontier of the Sunni Caliphate had become exactly that: a frontier society run by small-minded territorial princes and peopled by Muslims, Jews, and Christians of a variety of traditions, languages, and ethnicities.

Had the political landscape been any less variegated, the crusaders probably never would have reached Jerusalem, as they did in 1099. Ultimately, the Franks established four major settlements with capitals at Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli, and Jerusalem—yet another set of middling power players in the fragmented medieval Middle East, where the dreams of al-Sulami were but crusader castles built on clouds. Arguably, no one fully grasped al-Sulami's program until 1983, when the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf published The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Schocken Books). Occupying an uncomfortable space between history and literature— Maalouf himself describes it as a "true-life novel"—professional historians have largely dismissed it. But somehow The Crusades Through Arab Eyes has worked its way into crusade syllabi and occasionally into the footnotes of peer-reviewed articles and books. At the very least, however much we might hate to admit it, it has given shape to our ideas and arguments.

One explanation for the book's success is that it is highly readable, in no small part because it is highly polemical, even without the original French subtitle: "Christian Barbarism in the Holy Land." For example, the first thing that The Crusades Through Arab Eyes shows its readers—even before the title page—is a two-page map of the medieval Middle East. The last thing it offers, on the final two pages, is a map of the modern Middle East. The message isn't subtle: the crusades are how we get from map A to map B. Maalouf 's narrative fills the gaps.

At the beginning of the crusade era, Maalouf argues, the cultural, intellectual, and economic centers of civilization lay in the Arab world. At the end of the era, everything had moved west. It is a surprising outcome. After all, Islam did "win" the crusades in every conventional sense. Except for the First Crusade, all of the major campaigns ended in failure, and in 1291 the Egyptian Mamluks razed Acre, the last crusader capital, to the ground. But Islamic society by this time had...