Review of the Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

In the study of history, it is often tempting to reify cultures and movements for the sake of cohesive narrative or linear structure. Many historians have fallen into this trap, evinced even by the ordinal numbering of the Crusades, but particularly in the condensation of their participants into the Arabs and the Westerners. Drawing primarily on the works of Islamic chroniclers, Maalouf is led not into temptation, but delivers instead a more complex account of the Crusades, emphasizing regional politics and power struggles rather than clashes between monolithic ideologies.

Indeed, while the Seljuk Turks nominally controlled the entire Muslim East, the empire was little more than a loose confederation. What's more, the Muslim world into which the Crusaders entered was hardly the tyrannical and impoverished 'Mohammedan' world that the Catholic bishops had railed against. On the contrary, Middle Eastern culture and living conditions were superior to those of their western counterparts. While Europe was still recovering from its Dark Ages, Maalouf recounts the work of Muslim scholars debating Aristotelian mathematics, sciences, and philosophy.

Seemingly superior in culture and, for a time, warfare, the Muslims perceived the Franj as solidly barbaric, thoroughly unclean, and deadly treacherous. As armor-clad knights began filtering into the Middle East, though, mounted Turkish archers became obsolete, and the Franj were eventually feared for their brutality and mercilessness. It chills the blood to read Maalouf's primary source transcriptions of the sack of the Holy City or of the cannibals at Ma'arra. However, to claim that the Franj were all so barbaric is to give into temptation. While brutality had certainly become the Frankish rule, Maalouf finds an exception in the emperor Frederick II. Far from religious zealotry, it is insinuated that Fredrick II was an atheist. His peaceful takeover of Jerusalem stands out in the history of the Crusades as not just the last, but also the least bloody.

Indeed, Maalouf portrays the relationships between the Crusader Kingdoms and the Muslim rulers as adhering more to realpolitik than religious concerns. The success of the Crusade of the 1090s and the nearly century-long occupation of Jerusalem was due, in large part, to Muslim disunity. Maalouf contends that the lack of a coherent succession tradition in the East bred divisive conflict between princes and their emirates. As power is thicker than blood, the princes would frequently assist the Franj in order to gain the upper hand in their own personal power struggles. The book is rife with references to Islamo-Frankish coalitions, including a conflict at Tel Bashir where both armies were comprised of French-Muslim coalitions.

Maalouf thus presents a more complex view of the Crusades than many history books present, and his use of Muslim primary sources helps to deliver a perspective not before seen in the West. The Crusades through Arab Eyes is a seminal work in a field that had previously been dominated by a Western perspective of simplified, monolithic cultures designed for narrative cohesion rather than historical accuracy.

Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades through Arab Eyes. New York: Schocken Books, 1984.