Part II

Culture, custom and cleanliness - the Muslims were superior

BETH PEARSON April 01 2005

MANY of the charges levelled against Ridley Scott's forthcoming Kingdom of Heaven centre on its telling of the Crusades from a western perspective. In this it is not alone: most accounts of the Crusades have been told from a western point of view as scholarship from the Muslim viewpoint is in relative infancy. Understanding why this is requires a leap in perspective. While icons such as Richard the Lionheart featured in childhood adventure stories and ideals of chivalry and honour are important to how we see our culture, Muslims do not single out the Crusades as an unprecedented, identity-defining event in their history.

Some commentators have attempted to extrapolate the origins of modern Islamic fundamentalism from how the western account of the Crusades incorrectly cast Crusaders as the force of progression and Muslims as victims. However, this is rejected by Dr Carole Hillenbrand, professor of Islamic history at Edinburgh University and author of The Crusades, Islamic Perspectives. "Fundamentalism is a phenomenon that exists in every religion," she says. "That is to say, you have periodic waves of religious sentiment that wants to go back to what's perceived as the pure religion of the early period and try to recapture that; try to strip away all kinds of innovations and things that have come from outside that have sullied the essential principles of the religion. "It happens in Christianity and Islam, it's an indigenous phenomenon. Islam has confidently tried to reform itself from within ever since the beginning. It has always been able to look at itself and criticise itself.

It has happened on a cyclical basis ever since the beginning." Hillenbrand says that the Crusades has, in fact, always been a western European phenomenon and didn't figure as such in Muslim eyes. "For the Muslims, the Crusades were but another intervention in their lives from outside, like the nomadic invasions from the east of the Turks and the Mongols. The western European Christians who came on Crusade were thought of being just like the Byzantine Christians who had raided the Muslim frontiers for centuries. "They 'discovered' the Crusades as a phenomenon that affected them rather late and there aren't many Muslim scholars nowadays who are interested in the Crusades.

It's taking off now, but it's been rather slow." When Muslim scholars documented Islamic history, they concentrated on matters rooted in their culture rather than invasions from outside. Accordingly, information about the Crusades appears in various sources and not in one comprehensive text. A further influence on the Islamic perspective on the Crusades is that Islam turned in on itself following the Crusades and Mongol invasions, as at the time being the subject of attack was thought to have been a result of sin. When western historians began researching the Crusades from a Muslim perspective, language was a barrier and important documents are still being translated from Arabic to English, such as the publication five years ago of the diary of Saladin's secretary. However, as soon as records of the Muslim perspective began to emerge, they cast light on stereotypes and historical inaccuracies. "On the level of culture and social custom, it's quite clear that the Muslims were superior," says Hillenbrand. "We have these incredibly well-known stories from the Muslim side by the great writer of memoirs of the time who has the unfortunate name, nowadays, of Osama.

He describes how 'uncivilised' the Crusader knightly class were and how they learned about civilised behaviour from the Muslims. "They learned about using soap, all kinds of ways of living, they adopted Muslim food, clothing. If one looks at the evidence of the time, one realises there was a great deal of acculturation going on, of Crusaders adapting to the Muslim way of life and quite a lot of friendly interchange between Muslims and Crusaders on the personal level." Indeed, the level of fraternisation between the two sides has traditionally been underestimated. The Crusades lasted for 200 years and the popular belief is that this involved continuous battle, but it was not so. Peace treaties, inter-marriages and ideological alliances were formed between Muslim and Christian groups "Muslims and Crusaders would fight other Muslims and Crusaders across the ideological divide," says Hillenbrand. "That was particularly so between the period of 1100 and 1150, but it happened after that, too, in the early thirteenth century. So let's not see the stereotype of the Muslims being on one side and the Crusaders on the other side.

There was often a great deal of rather pragmatic alliances with nothing to do with religion, but to do with getting access to trade and all sorts of local interests." Dr Jonathan Phillips, lecturer in history at the University of London and author of The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, agrees. "Some of the Muslim and Christian nobles did get on. They liked hunting and hawking and riding; you got the same things in common at that level in society at that time." Research into Islamic sources has also resulted in a multi-dimensional account of Saladin, the Muslim leader who led the campaign against the Crusaders in the Battle of Hattin. In western accounts, Saladin was a model of chivalry and ranked in greatness alongside Greek heroes. He was also exalted by Sir Walter Scott and became popular in the Arabic world only as a result of such veneration. "Saladin and Richard the Lionheart stand together as two chivalric heroes in many medieval European minds," says Hillenbrand. "There's not much to choose between them, except Saladin is shown to be more merciful and compassionate than any of the Crusader heroes.

It's European literature that has made him so. The Muslim sources of the time have Saladin as having human failings but also coming as across incredibly magnaminous in conquest. "There's a big contrast drawn between the brutality of the 1099 fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders, where blood flowed through the streets - and that's what the Crusaders say as well - and Saladin, who according to Muslim sources and some of the Crusader sources, avoids the temptation to take revenge for what happened in 1099 and instead is remarkably merciful." Phillips also stresses that Saladin wasn't perfect. "He's a hero of Islam, he threw the Crusaders out of Jerusalem and that's why Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda are prepared to invoke his image, but he killed a lot of Muslims to get there and he was also brutal towards Christians.

He's a complex character." Richard the Lionheart is an equally complex character. He earned his name through his fighting skill and bravery, but was known also as the absent king because he spent only six months of his 10-year reign in England. His overriding ambition was to lead the Crusade prompted by Saladin's capture of Jerusalem in 1187 and imposed a tax on the English people called the Saladin tithe in order to raise money for the campaign. After a year's fighting, Richard made a truce with Saladin that permitted the Crusaders to hold Acre and gave Christians access to the holy land. Richard had no children by Queen Berengaria and relations with his wife seem to have been merely formal. Some historians have claimed that he was homosexual.