Source 10.3: Muslim Perspectives on the Crusades

Well before the Crusades, Muslim impressions of the Christians, who they called Franks, were stereotypical and negative. In a word, they were uncivilized barbarians — personally dirty, sexually promiscuous, and allowing their women altogether too much independence. According to one Arab writer of the twelfth century, Europeans were “animals, possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, nothing else.” The Crusades hardened and supplemented such perceptions.

Beyond the trauma of invasion and military defeat during the First Crusade, the very presence of the Christians defiled the sacred spaces of Islam, cutting Muslims off from God. Particularly offensive was the placing of a Christian cross atop the beloved Dome of the Rock. Widely associated with filth, disease, and contamination, the Crusaders were also seen as a threat to the sanctity of Muslim women. Moreover, as Muslims became aware of the fundamentally religious impulses that motivated the Crusaders, their perception of the differences between Islam and Christianity sharpened. The Christian faith seemed to many Muslims absurd and immoral. If Jesus was God, why could he not prevent his own humiliating death? And what kind of god would be born from a woman’s private parts? Both the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity flew in the face of Islam’s firm monotheism.1

One Muslim perspective on the Crusades derives from the writing of the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir. Known as The Complete History, his book was composed around 1231and contained an extensive account of the Crusades. In the excerpts provided here, he begins with a description of the Europeans’ bloody conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, followed by a portrayal of the Muslim retaking of the Holy City in 1187. The latter event had occurred under the leadership of Saladin, a heroic figure to Muslims, for he had unified the fragmented Muslim Middle East and had begun to push the Crusaders out. A final brief selection by the Persian historian Imad ad-Din recounts the aftermath of Saladin’s victory.

Questions to consider as you examine the source:

Ibn al-Athir

The Complete History, ca. 1231

Jerusalem was taken . . . on the morning of Friday 22 sha’ban 492 / 15 July 1099. The population was put to the sword by the Franks, who pillaged the area for a week. A band of Muslims barricaded themselves into the Tower of David and fought on for several days. They were granted their lives in return for surrendering. The Franks honored their word, and the group left by night. . . . In the Masjid al-Aqsa [a major mosque] the Franks slaughtered more than 70,000 people, among them a large number of Imams [leaders of worship in mosques] and Muslim scholars, devout and ascetic men who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the Holy Place. The Franks stripped the Dome of the Rock of more than forty silver candelabra, . . . and a great silver lamp as well as a hundred and fifty smaller silver candelabra and more than twenty gold ones, and a great deal more booty.

[Muslim] refugees from Syria reached Baghdad in Ramadan [the month of fasting]. . . . They told the Caliph’s ministers a story that wrung their hearts and brought tears to their eyes. On Friday they went to the Cathedral Mosque and begged for help, weeping so that their hearers wept with them as they described the sufferings of the Muslims in that Holy City: the men killed, the women and children taken prisoner, the homes pillaged. Because of the terrible hardships they had suffered, they were allowed to break the fast. It was the discord between the Muslim princes that enabled the Franks to overrun the country.

[Now al-Athir’s account turns to the Muslim retaking of Jerusalem in 1187.]

When the Franks saw how violently the Muslims were attacking, . . . meeting no resistance, they grew desperate, and their leaders assembled to take counsel. They decided to ask for safe conduct out of the city and to hand Jerusalem over to Saladin. They sent a deputation of their lords and nobles to ask for terms, but when they spoke of it to Saladin he refused to grant their request. “We shall deal with you,” he said, “Just as you dealt with the population of Jerusalem when you took it in 492/1099, with murder and enslavement and other such savageries!” The messengers returned empty handed. Then Balian ibn Barzan [an important French noble in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem] asked for safe-conduct for himself so that he might appear before Saladin to discuss developments. Consent was given, and he presented himself and once again began asking for a general amnesty in return for surrender. The sultan still refused his requests and entreaties to show mercy.

Finally, despairing of this approach, Balian said: “Know, O Sultan, that there are very many of us in this city, God alone knows how many. At the moment we are fighting half-heartedly in the hope of saving our lives, hoping to be spared by you as you have spared others; this is because of our horror of death and our love of life. But if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold — 5,000 of them — and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honour, or win a noble victory!”

Then Saladin took counsel with his advisers, all of whom were in favour of his granting the assurances requested by the Franks, without forcing them to take extreme measures whose outcome could not be foreseen. “Let us consider them as being already our prisoners,” they said, “and allow them to ransom themselves on terms agreed between us.” The Sultan agreed to give the Franks assurances of safety on the understanding that each man, rich and poor alike, should pay ten dinar, children of both sexes two dinar and women five dinar. All who paid this sum within forty days should go free, and those who had not paid at the end of the time should be enslaved. Balian ibn Barzan offered 30,000 dinar as ransom for the poor, which was accepted, and the city surrendered on Friday 27 rajab / 2 October 1187, a memorable day on which the Muslim flags were hoisted over the walls of Jerusalem. . . .

The Grand Patriarch of the Franks left the city with the treasures from the Dome of the Rock, the Masjid al-Agsa, the Church of the Resurrection and others, God alone knows the amount of treasure; he also took an equal quantity of money. Saladin made no difficulties, and when he was advised to sequestrate [seize] the whole lot for Islam, replied that he would not go back on his word. He took only the ten dinar from him, and let him go, heavily escorted, to Tyre.

At the top of the cupola of the Dome of the Rock there was a great gilded cross. When the Muslims entered the city on the Friday, some of them climbed to the top of the cupola to take down the cross. When they reached the top a great cry went up from the city and from outside the walls, the Muslims crying the Allah akbar in their joy, the Franks groaning in consternation and grief. So loud and piercing was the cry that the earth shook.

[Another Muslim historian, Imad ad-Din, writing in the late twelfth century, described the aftermath of Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem.]

When Saladin accepted the surrender of Jerusalem, he ordered the mihrab [a niche in a mosque which points toward Mecca] to be uncovered. . . . Structures between the columns [were] demolished. The spaces created were carpeted with deep carpets instead of matting. . . . [R]eadings of the revealed text [Quran] [were] given, and thus truth triumphed and error was cancelled out. The Quran was raised to the throne and the Testaments [Bible] cast down. Prayer mats were laid out and the religious ceremonies performed in their purity. . . [T]he muezzins [those who made the call to prayer] were there and not the priests; corruption and shame ceased, and men’s breaths became quiet and calm again.

Source: Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (trans. E. J. Costello) (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 6–7, 84–86, 97–98. Translation copyright © 1969 Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Reproduced with permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS in the format Republish in a book via Copyright Clearance Center and by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

Notes

  1. Carol Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 5. The quote is on page 274.