Download PDF | Carole Hillenbrand - Islam and the Crusades_ Collected Essays (Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture)-Edinburgh University Press (2021).
418 Pages
Preface
In summer 1967, both I and my future husband Robert resigned from the Civil Service (where we both worked as administrators) to embark on a two-month visit to Turkey as a prelude to applying to the University of Oxford to work in Islamic studies. Accordingly, it was an exciting moment in autumn 1967 when, on return from that fascinating exploration of Turkey, I visited Somerville College. This was the ‘sister’ college of Girton in Cambridge airs. where Thad studied for a degree in Modern and Medieval European Languages. On arrival at Somerville (without an appointment), I asked if I could speak to the Principal, Dr Barbara Craig. She graciously agreed to meet me. I told her about my wish to embark on another BA degree, this time in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic. To my amazement she said ‘yes’ immediately and invited me to start my studies the following year. She explained that she was an archaeologist and had lived for five years in Baghdad. She said she was especially delighted for me to join Somerville, as I would be the first undergraduate ever to study Arabic in the college.
The task of learning Arabic proved both fascinating and difficult, but I was fortunate to be taught by very good scholars who specialised in different aspects of classical Arabic. Arabic grammar was the particular specialty of Professor Alan Jones. His first-year class in Arabic was large and lively, and in my year it included two students who later became well-known scholars of Islamic studies, Stefan Sperl and the late Norman Calder. In 1969-70 I took leave from the Arabic degree to go to Iran with my husband, whose doctoral thesis required a year of fieldwork there. Living and working in Iran made it natural for me to start learning Persian.
On my resuming my Arabic degree in Oxford in 1970, I also began studying Turkish. In the final two years of the degree I was taught the Qur’an and classical literature by Professor Alfred Beeston and medieval Arabic historical texts — especially the World History of Ibn al-Athir — by Mr Donald Richards. I also studied aspects of Islamic thought, including the writings of al-Ghazali, with Father Richard McCarthy, SJ. The teaching which I received from these last two lecturers was for me alone. It was an absorbing experience. But I still had a lot to learn and I realised at the end of my studies in Oxford that it would take a very long time to master Arabic to the requisite level. So, in 1972, on my arrival in Edinburgh, where my husband had been appointed to a post in art history, I began a PhD. This involved deciphering and translating two unpublished twelfth-century Arabic historical manuscripts in the British Library about the Artugid Turkish dynasty in Diyar Bakr. It was a dauntingly steep learning curve, not made any easier by the need for us both to raise two daughters — who ensured that academic work did not dominate our lives unduly.
In 1979 I was awarded the doctorate and began a Lectureship in Arabic at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter, I remained permanently committed to the study of medieval Arabic texts as the fundamental core of my research. My first decade in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies — 1979-89 — was very heavily overloaded with teaching first-year Arabic five times a week and Islamic history (seventh-seventeenth century) three times a week; both courses lasted three terms, the entire academic year. Moreover, I supervised many postgraduates, some of whom were working on medieval Arabic historical texts. My first book was an English translation of Volume XXVII of Ta 7ikh al-rusul wal-muluk, the famous history of al-Tabari. My contribution, entitled 7he Waning of the Umayyad Caliphate, was published in Albany, New York, in 1989.
That project made me engage seriously both with poetry and with high prose, which was a new and challenging experience. A year later, the core of my PhD was published in Leiden as a book entitled A Muslim Principality in Crusader Times: The Early Artuqid State. The turbulent atmosphere which had prevailed in the Department in Edinburgh then changed dramatically in 1990 with the arrival of Professor Yasir Suleiman, who was appointed to the Chair of Arabic. He proved to be a very skilful and dynamic leader and a most encouraging colleague. I count him a very dear friend.
In the 1980s at Edinburgh I conducted as much research as my unusually heavy teaching load would allow. My writing was not theory-driven but rather was always based on information and ideas gained from a careful reading of primary source materials — chronicles, monumental inscriptions, sermons, letters and poetry — in Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
A good number of the papers in this volume deal with aspects of the Crusades, and my way into that subject was indirect. In 1982 the recently retired Professor of Arabic at the University of Edinburgh, William Montgomery Watt, a true celebrity in the field, relinquished his editorship of the Islamic Surveys series which he had founded a couple of decades earlier. The Secretary of the Edinburgh University Press, Archie Turnbull, invited me to take on that job. I agreed to do so and thus began a happy association that lasted until Archie’s retirement in 1987.
He was, in many respects, every author’s dream publisher: dynamic, visionary, inspiring, and possessed of an infectiously can-do attitude, and with a sixth sense which enabled him to ferret out key gaps in many fields despite having only a necessarily superficial acquaintance with them. Before long he was encouraging me to write a book on the Crusades. He had a very specific brief. He did not want me to produce yet another conventional history on this subject written from a Western European viewpoint. Archie urged me not to continue in this tradition, but instead to write a book entirely based on how the Muslims had viewed the sudden and totally unexpected invasion of the Middle East by the Crusaders and their conquest of the Holy City of Jerusalem in 1099. However, at that time my teaching and administrative responsibilities made progress on such an intriguing project impossible. Nevertheless, the idea remained tucked away in a corner of my mind.
A decade later, after I had been studying for a long time the fraught relationship in the eleventh and twelfth centuries between the Sunni Muslim caliphate of Baghdad and the military power of nomadic Seljuq Turkish sultans, a new phase in my research began. I was lucky enough to win a research award that freed me from all departmental responsibilities for two years (1994-6). Almost simultaneously, however, I was struck down with an illness that nearly proved fatal. While I was recuperating, I took stock of what direction my research should take. I had planned to write a book on the Seljuq Turks in Anatolia, a subject of absorbing interest to me and quite a few other scholars, but of relatively little concern to a wider public. I now realised that my previous research could also be put to profitable use by concentrating on events in the Middle East during the crucial years 1100-1300.
It was then that Archie’s idea of a book on the Crusades drifted back into the forefront of my mind. It was exciting to contemplate a book that would also have an audience outside the charmed circle of Middle Eastern specialists. As it began to take more definite shape and as I broadened my reading, I realised how the entire history of the Crusades had been colonised by Western historians. Their natural academic centre of gravity lay in Christian Europe, and their resultant Eurocentric bias, acknowledged or not, had for generations distorted perceptions of the meaning and impact of the Crusading movement as a whole. So I resolved to try my hand at telling the story from an exclusively Muslim point of view and deliberately using only medieval Arabic sources — also a distinct bias, but a salutary one in these circumstances. It is all but incredible that this had not been attempted before.
There had of course already been a few scholars who had used Arabic sources alongside Western ones in writing about the Crusades; W. B. Stevenson, who wrote a book called The Crusaders in the East in 1907, is perhaps the best early example. I was also impressed by Emmanuel Sivan’s brilliant pioneering analysis of the evolution of jihad as an ideology and its role in the Muslim response to the Crusades in his book, L ‘Islam et la Croisade, published in 1968.
But there still remained many topics to discuss in any overall coverage of Muslim reactions and responses to the phenomenon of the Crusades; these needed to be considered through a consistently Muslim lens alone, ‘uncontaminated’ by Western prejudices. On the other hand, a popular Lebanese novelist, Amin Maalouf, writing in French, had boldly crashed into this same territory long before and his work had been translated into English as The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983). It is a powerful and passionate work, depicting the Muslim side of the conflict in bold colours. The narrative draws on some medieval Arabic sources, but it is also dramatised and forcefully written to shock the reader. Maalouf asserts in his preface that his book is ‘the true-life novel of the Crusades, of those two centuries of turmoil that shaped the West and the Arab world alike’.
‘There was also by now a personal dimension to my project. Before the publication of my book on the Crusades, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, I was fortunate enough to make several visits to the Middle East; we spent one family summer in Jerusalem and another in Damascus.
It was hard to forget the beauty of the two most sacred Muslim monuments in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque, so often mentioned in the medieval Arabic chronicles, and this helped me to understand better the grief of the Muslims when the Crusader invaders took over these buildings. In March 1992 I was in Jerusalem again, having been invited to speak at an international conference held at Bir Zeit University, where I gave a paper which examined the evidence of jihad propaganda on Muslim monumental inscriptions in Syria in the Crusading period. A research trip to Syria, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was also very memorable. The whole family stayed for the summer in Damascus, the key centre of Muslim power during the Crusades until the death of Saladin in 1193. This visit to Syria involved visiting key sites, such as the Crusader castles, and especially Krak des Chevaliers, and the castles of the Assassins, notably Masyaf.
In addition to this ever-growing personal experience of the Middle East, I was very fortunate, through my reading and teaching, to get to grips with the history of the medieval Islamic world. This impacted on how I wrote my book on the Crusades and indeed on my later articles and book chapters on that subject. As the book took shape, and thanks in part to many discussions with my husband, who is an Islamic art historian, I increasingly came to value the pictorial evidence of art, and material culture in general, in evoking the Muslim world within which the Crusades took place. Edinburgh University Press were extremely generous in the number of pictures and drawings they allowed me to include in my book.
Indeed, the rich illustrative material of the book has contributed to its success; it is still in print twenty years after its first publication. As it happened, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives appeared in 1999, the 900th anniversary of the Crusader capture of Jerusalem. This was a fortunate conjunction of dates. But what sadly proved still more relevant, perhaps, were the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), which gave the distant past of the Crusades an unexpectedly topical relevance and importance that continue to this day. It is well known that after the devastating attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, President Bush spoke the words “This is a crusade’. Moreover, it was not long before the world’s media broadcast the news that Usama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had delivered uncompromisingly hostile speeches about waging jihad against global ‘Jews and Crusaders’.
My book on the Crusades marked a turning point in my career, for I have continued to work on aspects of the vast horizons which it opened, filling out in more detail the general picture that I sketched in it. Thus, in several papers included in this volume, I have explored the perennially fascinating personality of Saladin via the insights provided by his contemporary biographers and by his rich posthumous legacy. In other papers I deal with the varied manifestations of jihad in poetry and speeches, and with the fortunes of Saladin’s descendants, the Ayyubid dynasty. The field of Crusades studies from Muslim viewpoints has indeed flourished and other scholars have taken up the baton. Anne-Marie Eddé and Jonathan Phillips have recently both written excellent biographies of Saladin. Paul Cobb has published 7he Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014), an admirable and beautifully written work which covers Spain, North Africa and Sicily as well as the Levant.
I should also mention Donald Richards, with his epochal translations of the parts of Ibn al-Athir’s World History that deal with the Crusading period, and R. Stephen Humphreys, with his much earlier book From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260, which placed Saladin’s dynasty within a wider context. In the past decade, younger scholars like Alex Mallett, Niall Christie and Kenneth Goudie have tackled aspects of jihad in Crusader times. And another major task looms ahead for their generation, namely the translation of more key medieval Arabic sources, such as the chronicle of al-‘Azimi (recently completed by Alex Mallett), the history of Ibn Wasil (to be undertaken by Taef al-Azhari) and many more thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Mamluk chronicles. So the field of Crusade studies seen from the Muslim side is now clearly vibrant; this was proved in 2016 when, thanks to the generosity of St Andrews University, I was able to organise a conference which was attended by a stellar group of established and promising younger scholars who spoke on the subject of Crusader Syria.
I then edited their excellent, wide-ranging papers in a volume entitled Conflict and Co-existence: Syria in Crusader Times, published in 2019 by Edinburgh University Press.
To sum up, when I entered the field of Islamic studies it could fairly have been described as a backwater of the humanities. Similarly, when I began to write about the Crusades as the Muslims saw them, this was a neglected field of Islamic studies. But that is no longer the case. Nor is interest in Crusade history just the preserve of academics and their students. Events over the last fifty years have propelled it to the forefront of public attention. The steady growth of interest in the Muslim world in general, and the Crusades in particular, especially since the shattering events of 9/11, has led to many invitations coming my way to write newspaper articles and to participate in radio and TV programmes on subjects such as jihad, famous battles, the interesting but lesser-known topic of Muslim—Crusader coexistence, and the career of Saladin.
For example, Jonathan Riley-Smith and I were interviewed on American television to discuss our views on Ridley Scott’s popular film about Saladin, Kingdom of Heaven. | must admit that we disagreed, but very amicably, about this film; he did not approve of it and I did. In general, it has been a pleasure, and also an education, to learn how to tailor information so as to reach a non-specialist audience, and here my years of experience as a teacher of undergraduates have stood me in good stead. Most of the invitations I have received have required me to talk about the Crusades. So there is little doubt that the history of the Crusades still interests many people: a fascinating story in its own right, and a parable for our own times.
Looking back on my career after more than half a century, I realise more clearly than ever how richly I have been repaid for the heavy and unremitting labour of learning the three major languages of the central Islamic lands, and Arabic in particular. The medieval Muslim world within which I work is as full of interest as it ever was, with far more areas to be explored than there are scholars to do the work. But in my own lifetime it has begun to capture the headlines, and I am indeed fortunate to have received honours and prizes for my work. As editor now of three separate series at Edinburgh University Press, I count myself lucky to be in constant touch with scholars across the globe who are driven by the desire to explore that perennially fascinating world.
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