Crusading Perspectives

I've not been able to get on with much solid reading since getting back from KL. I was making pretty good progress, in KL and Melaka, on Carole Hillenbrand's The Crusades - Islamic Perspectives but have now stalled. It's a book I've had for quite a while. Noi bought it for me as a birthday present about three years back. She'd seen me glance at it with interest in Wardah Books, our favourite bookshop for material related to Islam, and assumed I really wanted to read it and so, generously, made a present of it. It's a handsome volume, beautifully illustrated, and nice to own - but it's not a great read, being actually quite a dry, technical sort of tome. Ms Hillenbrand may be a fine historian but she has no great gift for words. And that was essentially why I'd not bought it for myself, despite being interested in the period in question, and, I suppose, why it's taken me so long to get round to reading it.

But I'm grateful now I have got into it (and really must see it through to its conclusion.) The early chapters focusing largely on the politics of the Muslim kingdoms facing unwelcome, and generally unfathomable, invaders were ponderous, tending to deal with generalities with little in the way of individual human interest (basically, what I find valuable) but things perk up considerably later, especially in the material relating to the notion of the generation of jihad against the invaders. The development of a sense of jihad was a highly complex, non-linear business, and by no means sustained in the period under scrutiny. I'm now in a chapter dealing with How The Muslims Saw The Franks (the whole book draws on Muslim sources, many only recently translated into English; in fact, the majority not at all) and It's fascinating to witness the mechanics of Muslim prejudices being generated at first hand. Also very funny in places.

I suppose the single most striking thing that emerges from the Muslim sources is the speed with which some sort of messy détente was established between various Muslim factions and the peoples they saw as simply the Franks, despite the powerful sense of those Franks as the unwelcome Other. In the need to deal with the ordinary business of being alive there's always room for the most unlikely forms of accommodation.