Most accounts of the Crusades written in western Europe, from
contemporary chronicles to recent historical studies, have been
written from the Christian perspective, seeing these wars, which
lasted for 200 years between the end of the 11th and the 13th
centuries, as an attempt to civilize the heathen Arab world. The
people of the Middle East, however, have always viewed this episode
very differently, as a long and bitter struggle to resist invading
armies bent on destroying Islamic religion and culture. Maalouf
gives us a history of the Crusades from this Arab perspective and
describes their wars of resistance, culminating in Saladin's
conquest of Jerusalem in the late 12th century. Well informed by
the primary sources, his narrative and novelistic style brings
these distant events vididly to life. (Kirkus UK)
European and Arab versions of the Crusades have little in common.
For Arabs, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were years of
strenuous efforts to repel a brutal and destructive invasion by
barbarian hordes. In "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes", Amin Maalouf
has sifted through the works of a score of contemporary Arab
chroniclers of the Crusades, eyewitnesses and often participants in
the events. He retells their stories in their own vivacious style,
giving us a vivid portrait of a society rent by internal conflicts,
and shaken by a traumatic encounter with an alien culture. He
retraces two critical centuries of Middle Eastern history, and
offers fascinating insights into some of the forces that shape Arab
and Islamic consciousness today.
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