There was little interest in thecrusades in Islamic culture prior to the 20th century. But since the 1950s, the crusades have become an ideological staple inSalafism andjihadism.
The crusaders of the 12th century mostly fought the TurkishSeljuks, and later theAyyubid dynasty, and were thus indirectly (and intermittently directly) allied with the ArabAbbasid Caliphate.For this reason, according to Hillenbrand (2000), Arab historians tended to align with a western viewpoint, discussing the "Frankish wars" in the context of their own fight against the Turkic expansion.[1] Phillips (2005) summarizes the general indifference by stating that "most Muslims" see the Crusades as "just another invasion among many in their history".[2] Contemporary Islamic accounts did not recognise any religious or military motive for the Crusaders, who instead were simply viewed as arriving from nowhere before wreaking havoc upon Muslims.[3] The veneration ofSaladin as chivalrous opponent of the Crusaders likewise finds no reflection in Islamic tradition before the visit ofGerman EmperorWilhelm II to Saladin's tomb in 1898.[4] The visit, coupled with anti-imperialist sentiments, led nationalist Arabs to reinvent the image of Saladin and portray him as a hero of the struggle against the West. The image of Saladin they used was the romantic one created byWalter Scott and other Europeans in the West at the time. It replaced Saladin's reputation as a figure who had been largely forgotten in the Muslim world, eclipsed by more successful figures such asBaybars of Egypt.[5] Modern Arab states have sought to commemorate Saladin through various measures, often based on the image created of him in the 19th-century west.[6]
Renewed interest in the period is comparatively recent, arising in the context of modernsalafi propaganda calling for war on theWestern "crusaders".[7]
The termṣalībiyyūn "crusader", a 19th-century loan translation from Western historiography, is now in common use as a pejorative; Salafi preacherWagdy Ghoneim has used it interchangeably withnaṣārā andmasīḥiyyīn as a term for Christians in general.[8]
ThePartition of the Ottoman Empire was, at the time, popularly depicted as a finaltriumph in the long history of the crusades against Islam: The London Punch magazine published a drawing of King Richard the Lionheart watching the post-WWI British army entering Jerusalem with the caption, “At last, my dream come true.”[9] In a similar fashion, when the French General Henri Gouraud took command of Syria, he remarked, “Behold Saladin, we have returned."[10] Madden (1999) argued that this European romanticising connection of the crusades with contemporary colonialismwas what has "reshaped the Muslim memory" of the medieval crusades.[11]Beginning in the 1950s, following the influentialHistory of the Crusades bySteven Runciman, western intellectual mainstream tended to depict the crusades as a shameful episode of colonialism. This, once again, tended to influence Muslim perception of the period, fuelling Arab nationalism and Islamist propagandistic depictions of westerners as hostile invaders:
Khashan (1997) has argued that the revival of "crusading" narrative in the west is connected with the end of theCold Warand the search for a new "good vs. evil" dichotomy in which to cast world politics.[12]Khan (2003) argues that the contemporary jihadist propaganda is substantially derived from the writings of early Islamists likeSayyid Qutb andAbul Ala Maududi who were educated in Western institutions in the 1950s and thus submerged in the "politically correct" narrative following Runcimann which was current in western academia at the time.[13] The "crusader" rhetoric was fully developed in Islamist extremism and Jihadism by the end of the 1990s.Notably, afatwa signed byOsama bin Laden andAyman al-Zawahiri in 1998 called forjihad against "the crusader-Zionist alliance" (referring to theUnited States andIsrael).[14]By 2008, TheOxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World claimed that "many Muslims consider the Crusades to be a symbol of Western hostility toward Islam".[failed verification][15]
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