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[9/10]

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:
Those with brains, but no religion,
And those with religion, but no brains.

The poet who wrote these irreverent verses was a Muslim, born in the city of Al-Ma’arra in Syria, soon to be sacked by the ‘Franj� knights who came over to free the Holy Land from the hands of infidels. And what better way to conquer hearts and minds than to massacre the whole population of the city and, later, to dine on the corpses of their adversaries.

Radulph of Caen, another chronicler, wrote: "In Ma‘arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled."

This is probably the only instance of the book where the author doesn’t quote exclusively from original Arab sources at the time of the crusades. I thought he wanted to avoid accusations of bias and exaggeration, but in the end I came to believe Maalouf is critical of intolerance and bigotry towards both sides in the conflict.
He takes no sides in his account, and the stress he puts on this infamous incident is not meant to inflame the passions of today’s audience, but to try to find the breaking point of trust between Christians and Muslims, to put the events in the larger context of the rise and fall of civilizations: one on the ascendancy, the other in decline.
Maalouf arguments are persuasive, as is his capacity to extract the essential conflicts, influences and actors from almost 200 years of struggle for domination in the Middle East and present them to us in less than 300 pages.

At the time of the Crusades, the Arab world, from Spain to Iraq, was still the intellectual and material repository of the planet’s most advanced civilization. Afterwards, the centre of world history shifted decisively to the West. Is there a cause-effect relationship here? 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 the Arab civilization?
Although not completely false, such an assessment requires some modification. During the years prior to the Crusades, the Arabs suffered from certain ‘weaknesses� that the Frankish presence exposed, perhaps aggravated, but by no means created.
The people of the Prophet had lost control of their own destiny as early as the ninth century.

The quote comes from late in the book, but for me it highlights the balanced approach of the author, not taking sides or cherry picking the sources, and the scope of the project � not a comprehensive and complete account of the Crusades, but a synthesis, a resume if you want, with a focus on cultural and social impact.

The names of the leaders and the dates and outcomes of battles are all in here, but to me they feel more like bullet points. Often I was tempted to pause the lecture and go read more about some incident online, with Maalouf merely pointing me in the direction I need to go and mentioning the sources he used.

What kept me reading, despite having difficulties with the Arabic spelling conventions used by his editors, often at odds with the ones used by wikipedia and other online resources, is the clarity and the concision of the presentation. I was hoping for a general perspective on the Crusades, without getting swamped by minute details or by the writer inserting his own pet theories into the text, and this is exactly what I got: Amin Maalouf, with the exception of the concluding chapter, is just sampling from the chronicles of the Arab historians of the period, not from modern commentators. All the events are told from the perspective of 11th and 12th century writers.

Death did not advance step by step to destroy the people of my race, to annihilate them separately or to strike them down two by two. They all died in the twinkling of an eye, and their palaces became their tombs.

This passage describes an eyewitness account of the 1157 earthquake in Hama, Syria, a disaster made doubly poignant by events in 2023 in the same region. The next quote is about a scourge worse that the ‘Franj�, this time coming from the Far East and bearing the name of Genghis Khan:

If one day you are told that the earth has never known such calamity since God created Adam, do not hesitate to believe it, for such is the strict truth.

Instead of describing in detail the weapons, armour or siege engines used in the conflict, Maalouf turns his eye towards political and social vectors [plus a lot of religious fervour, for both sides in the conflict]. I believe he correctly identifies the main problems in the Arab kingdom and points out that these issues are often unrelated to the actions of the Franj. Before the Crusaders even appeared on the scene, the region was conquered and controlled by the Seljuk Turks, who provided the bulk of the later fighting. Even the great Saladin was actually from a Kurdish family. Before the last Christian fortress fell, the greatest cities in the Arab world were devastated by the Mongols. But the thorniest problem of all was the betrayal and the fratricide among the Arab/Seljuk rulers themselves, who would rather ally themselves with the ‘Franj� against a relative than unite against a common enemy.

Every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch, and every transmission of power provoked civil war.

There is no shortage of atrocities and unwarranted massacres in the book. Most of them can be laid at the door of the Westerners [Al-Ma’arra, Bilbeis, the sacking of Cyprus in 1156, the looting of Constantinople in 1204, etc] , but the final years of the wars saw similar atrocities committed by the Mamluks. I believe Maalouf is correct to link these brutalities with religion, with seeing their adversaries as less than human, as infidels. This is even more relevant for me, born in an Orthodox country, when I read about Franj attacks on Copts, Syrian Christians and Jews � minorities who were historically better treated under Arab rule than by Westerners.

The questions of honour and restraint are often settled here in the favour of leaders like Zangi, Nur al-Din, Saladin or Qalawun:

Saladin would never refuse a request from a man of honour, even the fiercest of his enemies. ;
He had signed a truce, and he would never betray his oath. [Al Mansur Qalawun]

The contrast the author wants to make here is not so much political, as cultural. The Crusaders didn’t feel bound by promises made to infidels, just as a few centuries later colonists in the New World didn’t put any value on treaties with the Natives. They were conquerors, not partners with equal rights.

For me, the most telling stories are the ones describing the reactions of local doctors and qadis [judges] on witnessing Christian medicine and jurisprudence in action. For these locals, there was no question who the barbarians and who the educated were.

The judges, or qadis, were highly respected men who were obliged to adhere to a meticulous procedure fixed by the Quran, before rendering their verdict: first came indictment, then plea, then testimony. The ‘judgment of God� to which the Occidental often resorted seemed a macabre farce to the Arabs. The duel described by the chronicler was only one of the forms of trial by ordeal. The test of fire was another. There was also the water torture, which Us’mah described with horror.

I bookmarked a lot of these cultural references for further study, among them the system of carrier pigeons for messages, the origins of the game of dice [ The Arabs called it al-zahr, a word the Franj adopted to designate not the game itself, but chance (hasard) ] and the fascinating rise and fall of the sect of Assassins. For the sake of brevity, I would once again let the author draw the conclusion:

In medicine, astronomy, chemistry, geography, mathematics, and architecture, the Franj drew their knowledge from Arabic books, which they assimilated, imitated, and then surpassed. Many words bear testimony to this even today: zenith, nadir, azimuth, algebra, algorithm, or more simply cipher. In the realm of industry, the Europeans first learned and then later improved upon the processes used by the Arabs in paper-making, leather-working, textiles, and the distillation of alcohol and sugar � two more words borrowed from the Arabic language.

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I like reading history, but in this rushing modern world my time is limited and my attention span is diminishing. Amin Maalouf somehow managed to find the right spot for delivering useful information without getting lost in academic research.
I’ve been putting off two other books I bought, about the Incas and about the French Revolution, because they are both about a thousand pages long. Now I kind of wish Amin Maalouf would write about these subjects in a more compact package, giving me the panoramic view and the historical context like he did for the crusades.
The reason he gives for writing the book in the way he did is also laudable: he sees a resurgence of the crusading / ‘kill the infidel� spirit in the modern world, on both sides of the barricade, and he tries to tell us how we got here, hoping we might learn from the lessons of the past. We can only hope!

In a Muslim world under constant attack, it is impossible to prevent the emergence of a sense of persecution, which among certain fanatics takes the form of a dangerous obsession. [...] And 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.