YPG Kurdish fighters in the village of Al Jalabiyya, located in the northern Syrian province of Al Raqqa.
It is commonly said that memories in the Middle East are long, that although the crusades may have been forgotten in the West, they are still vividly remembered where they happened. This is false. The simple fact is that the crusades were virtually unknown in the Muslim world even a century ago. The term for the crusades, harb al-salib, was only introduced into the Arab language in the mid-nineteenth century. The first Arabic history of the crusades was not written until 1899.
Westerners may be surprised to learn that Muslims in the Middle East have only relatively recently learned of the crusades. How, one might ask, is that possible? How could they not remember centuries of Christian holy wars waged against them? It must be remembered that although the crusades were of monumental importance to Europeans, they were a very minor, largely insignificant thing to the Muslim world. Traditionally, Muslims took very little interest in people or events outside of the Dar al-Islam. There was, therefore, nothing to differentiate the crusades from any other wars fought against infidels. The crusades were, in any case, unsuccessful and thus irrelevant. A Western traveler in the eighteenth century would have been hard-pressed to find a Muslim in the Middle East who had heard of the crusades. Even in the nineteenth century they were known to only a handful of intellectuals. In the grand sweep of Islamic history the crusades simply did not matter.
Muslim perceptions of their own history changed in the twentieth century. Rescued from obscurity, the crusades were discovered and given a place of importance that they had never enjoyed before. The “long memory” of the crusades in the Muslim world is, in fact, a constructed memory—one in which the memory is much younger than the event itself. How did this come about? As we have seen, when European colonial powers took control of the Middle East in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they brought with them a concept of the crusades and an understanding of their own actions within that medieval context. In books and colonial schools, European colonialists taught the Muslim world about the crusades. They were vividly described as heroic enterprises whose aim, like those of the colonialists, was to bring civilization to the Middle East.
It was also at this time that Muslims were reintroduced to Saladin. Hard as it may be to believe, Saladin was virtually forgotten in the Middle East. On further reflection, though, that should not be too surprising. Saladin was a Kurd, an ethnic group not traditionally well liked by either Arabs or Turks. Although he had won the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and subsequently conquered Jerusalem and much of the crusader kingdom, Saladin’s successes as well as his dynasty were short-lived. The Third Crusade managed to erase most of his conquests. Even Jerusalem would not remain permanently in Muslim hands. The great hero of Arab folk literature was not Saladin, but Baybars. The latter had led his Mamluk slave army first to crush the Mongol invasion and then to eradicate the Latin Christian presence in Syria and Palestine. His victories were far more long-lasting and so were celebrated for centuries—indeed, are still celebrated today.
Saladin may have been forgotten in the Middle East, but he was very well remembered in western Europe. In part, this was because his manners and actions seemed to have much in common with a chivalric knight. There is no doubt that Richard the Lionheart thought highly of Saladin. This made him a perfect foil for the celebrated crusader king, and he therefore figured prominently in medieval romances. In time, storytellers would have Saladin being knighted and even secretly converting to Christianity. In medieval Venice the name Saladin had a brief period of popularity for Christian boys. Little wonder, then, that Scott made use of this legend in The Talisman. It was this idealized Saladin—the noble warrior, merciful ruler, and great unifier—that modern Europeans brought with them when they returned to the Middle East. This occurred dramatically in 1899 when Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany visited the neglected and largely forgotten tomb of Saladin in Damascus. Shocked at the poor state of the monument, Wilhelm paid for the creation of a new mausoleum on which he placed a bronze wreath with the inscription, “From one great emperor to another.”
Two main groups, nationalists and Islamists, stood in opposition to European colonialism in the Middle East in the twentieth century. Nationalists demanded sovereign states independent of European rule. Islamists looked to the Koran and Islamic history, insisting that Muslims must renew the jihad and restore the unity of the Dar al-Islam. Nationalists and Islamists were naturally antagonistic to each other, yet they both shared a common desire to eject European powers from the Middle East. Since the colonialists had themselves equated their occupation with the medieval crusades it was natural for Muslims, and especially Arabs, to do the same. This became particularly pronounced after the creation of the state of Israel, which Arabs, now well acquainted with the crusades, associated with the medieval crusader kingdom. The fact that Israel was Jewish was irrelevant. It was still a non-Muslim state planted in the former lands of the crusaders.
As we have seen, by the 1950s colonialism was largely discredited in the West. In the United States and Britain, intellectuals began to calculate the harm done to the world by the “legacy of imperialism.” Idealistic rhetoric such as “the white man’s burden” was dismissed as propaganda meant to cover the ruthless exploitation of non-Western peoples and their lands. The crusades, which had already been redefined as the West’s first colonial venture, were tarred with the same brush. They were, it was argued, nothing more than destructive wars of greed cynically covered in a thin veneer of pious platitudes.
Arab nationalists and Islamists agreed fully with this interpretation of the crusades. Poverty, corruption, and violence in the Middle East were said to be the lingering effects of the crusades and subsequent European imperialism. The Muslim world had failed to keep up with the West because it had been dealt a debilitating blow by the crusaders, a blow that was repeated by their European descendants in the nineteenth century. The dictators who ruled the now independent Arab states seized on this as a means of deflecting criticism of their own regimes. The crusades also provided a way of approaching the reality of the Israeli state. Muslims, it was said, could once again rise up and crush this latest crusader state. As the Arab historian Said Ashur wrote in his History of the Crusades (1963), “Our condition is very close to that of our ancestors eight and a half centuries ago; it is consequently incumbent upon us to study the movement of the crusades minutely and scientifically.” Generations of Arab schoolchildren have been taught that the crusades were a clear case of good versus evil. Rapacious and zealous crusaders swept into a peaceful and sophisticated Muslim world leaving carnage and destruction in their wake. Yet Saladin, the great and heroic leader, led the Muslims to victory, capturing Jerusalem and defeating the invaders. Not surprisingly, Arab leaders continue to invoke this recovered memory of Saladin. In 1992, the Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad placed a life-size equestrian statue of the sultan, complete with defeated crusader lords groveling below, directly in front of the Damascus citadel not a hundred yards away from a massive portrait of Assad himself. A depiction of the statue even appears on the Syrian currency. Former president of Iraq Saddam Hussein regularly referred to himself as a new Saladin who would unite the Arab world against its common Western foes.
For Islamists the West, in particular the United States, continues to prosecute a crusade, one that is being fought on many fronts. American military bases in the Middle East are described as the return of crusader forces. When Osama bin Laden issued his “Declaration of Jihad” on February 23, 1998, he did so against the “Jews and Crusaders.” He wrote, “The Arabian Peninsula has never—since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas—been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts.” The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, were viewed by Islamists and some others in the Middle East as an act of jihad against a crusading state. When the United States declared war on Afghanistan and Islamist terrorism, European countries rose up in support. This, too, Islamists viewed through the prism of the crusades. In an October 2001 Al Jazeera interview bin Laden remarked, “This is a recurring war. The original crusades were brought by Richard from Britain, Louis from France, and Barbarossa from Germany. Today the crusading countries rushed as soon as Bush raised the cross. They accepted the rule of the cross.”
In Amin Maalouf’s very popular book, The Crusade through Arab Eyes (1984), he asks the question, “Can we go so far as to claim that the Crusades marked the beginning of the rise of Western Europe—which would gradually come to dominate the world—and sounded the death knell of Arab civilization?” With some qualification he answers in the affirmative. “Although the epoch of the Crusades ignited a genuine economic and cultural revolution in Western Europe, in the Orient these holy wars led to long centuries of decadence and obscurantism. Assaulted from all quarters, the Muslim world turned in on itself.” He goes on, “There can be no doubt that the schism between these two worlds dates from the Crusades, deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.”
Maalouf, who is a novelist, offers a conclusion that is perfectly in keeping with the modern popular consensus in both the Middle East and the West. Popular it may be, yet it is nonetheless wrong. Scholars have long argued that the crusades had no beneficial effect on Europe’s economy. Indeed, they constituted a massive drain on resources. The rise of population and wealth in Europe predated the crusades, indeed, allowed them to happen at all. Rather than decadent or “assaulted on all sides,” the Muslim world was growing to ever new heights of power and prosperity long after the destruction of the crusader states in 1291. It was the Muslim world, under the rule of the Ottoman sultans, that would invade western Europe, seriously threatening the survival of the last remnant of Christendom. The crusades contributed nothing to the decline of the Muslim world. Indeed, they are evidence of the decline of the Christian West, which was forced to mount these desperate expeditions to defend against ever-expanding Muslim empires.
The crusades were a medieval phenomenon, a part of a medieval world that is very different from our world today. Christians saw crusades to the East as acts of love and charity, waged against Muslim conquerors in defense of Christian people and their lands. For their part, medieval Muslims had no understanding of or interest in the crusades. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was simply one more state in an already chaotic political landscape. When the Muslims finally united they dispatched the infidels, and that was all.
It is not the crusades that have led to modern tensions between the Muslim Middle East and the West but the artificial memory of the crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists and Islamists. The medieval expeditions were stripped of every aspect of their age and dressed up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism. As such, they have become an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.
