Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity

1. Memory, Wonder, and Desire in the Travels of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta

29 chapter one Memory, Wonder, and Desire in the Travels of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta christine chism Memories are not reconstructive but creative, concocted through flexible chains of association, pointing forward and backward in time in ways that are haphazard, proleptic, not fully in control. Memory simultaneously creates its subject, the rememberer, and its object , the past, which exist in a given form only as long as the process of memory continues. Memories are processes, yielding utterly and invisibly to constant re-creation—and their energy depends on intimacy—an urgency and implication within the events described that more institutionalized genres of past-making, such as formal history, often strain to keep at a distance. It is this intimacy of memory—in particular, the moments of wonder, amazement, and desire that arrest and re-create the rememberer —that I want to track in this chapter, as they emerge in the two Muslim travelers’ accounts, Ibn Jubayr’s Account of the Events That Befell upon Certain Journeys (1183–85) and Ibn Battuta’s Travels (ca. 1355).∞ Ananya Jahanar Kabir and Deanne Williams have usefully refocused attention to wonder in cultural encounter, by treating it not as a trope calculated to mystify the other and render it up for consumption and delectation, but rather as a trope that rivets attention and thus conduces to the questioning of cultural paradigms.≤ The accounts of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta are structured by moments of wonder and amazement; they draw on the Arabic genre of ‘aja’ib (‘‘wonder-tale’’), a variety of literary adab (polite literature for instruction and enjoyment).≥ However, what happens at moments of wonder in these texts goes beyond generic obligation. The moments of wonder, I argue, open out to culture-crossing fantasies and desires that complicate the more paradigm-building functions of cultural memory.∂ They suggest other modes of relationship be- 30 remembrance and response tween Christian and Muslim cultures, centered in bodily encounters that reach across cultural and religious distance to acknowledge the hauntings, losses, and desires incurred by centuries of crusading warfare. These memorial texts, driven by wonder, make history intimate in strikingly unpredictable ways. Each of these accounts by Muslim travelers complicates assumptions about the significance of the crusades as the working out of ongoing ideological rifts between the various sects of medieval Christians and Muslims. These accounts yield flashes not just of interreligious opposition but also of indifference, amicable coexistence, pragmatic and sustainable mutual profiteering, and even longing and desire, as they stage and restage the travelers’ astonishments at the unique local arrangements to be found while treading the history-worn landscapes of the medieval Levant at the height of twelfth-century crusading warfare and of the Levant after the Mamluk reconquest. By attending to the way wonder and desire complicate the travelers’ narratives, we can begin to dismantle the crusades as a cultural monolith: the substantiating origin of an opposition between East and West, Islam and Christianity, past and present that is rendered mythical and inescapable through its construction. We can resubject the specter of crusade as implacable intercultural warfare—which has done and is doing so much sinister ideological work—to the uncertainties of remembered experience from which it was abstracted and mythologized, and thus work to render the mythologies themselves less certain. Even more interestingly, we can see the strains and errant desires in compensation for which the mythologies are generated, and begin to unpack the mythologies themselves not as immemorial cultural truths but rather as historically specific narratives of desire and fear. Chronicle and ‘Aja’ib: Genres of Memory The travel account of the twelfth-century medieval Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr purports to be travel notes, written while on the road either daily or at frequent intervals.∑ It is organized by the months of the Islamic lunar calendar as a chronicle: at its outset it roots itself with a prayer for safety, a date, and a location: ‘‘The writing of this chronicle was begun on Friday, the 30th of the month of Shawwal, 578 AH (25th of Feb. 1183) at sea, opposite Jabal Shulayr [Sierra Nevada]. May God with His favour grant Memory, Wonder, and Desire of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta 31 us safety’’ (Ibn Jubayr, 27). At the time of writing, the traveler was already well on the road, having set out from Granada three weeks before. The intervals between the dates given for the...