Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [113]
This colorful tale may have recalled a real event, or perhaps it was simply an anecdote. But the Franks certainly baffled Usāmah. “You will observe,” he wrote, “a strange contradiction in their character: they are without jealousy or a sense of honour, and yet at the same time they have the courage that as a rule springs only from the sense of honour and the readiness to take offence.”66 As Carole Hillenbrand has observed:
This story touches on the essential difference perceived by Muslims between their own society and that of the Franks. In a society where women were protected by their menfolk, not allowed to reveal their unveiled faces except to a prescribed number of close male relations, the conduct of the French knight and his wife … both castigates Frankish immorality and also [by contrast] reinforces the values of Muslim society.67
In fact their transgression went further than this. For Muslims, the Crusaders, by breaking the bounds between the forbidden (haram) and the permitted (halal), disrupted and destabilized not only their own lives but also the entire world around them. In Muslim eyes, the Franks created a constant and highly visible desecration. The dominant symbol of the cross was everywhere, atop churches and even the holy mosques of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. The military orders established within the Crusader states all used the cross as their emblem and it became a graphic symbol of defilement. This sense of pollution runs through one of the tales incorporated in the Thousand and One Nights. It tells how the dried excrement of the high patriarch in Constantinople was so revered among Christians that it was preserved and made into the “holiest incense for the sanctification of Christians on all solemn occasions, to bless the bride, to fumigate the newly born and to purify a priest on ordination.” Since the patriarch could not produce the volume required, “the priests used to forge the powder by mixing less holy matters with it, that is to say, the excrements of lesser patriarchs and even of the priests themselves.” Later, this same sanctifying incense was smeared upon a great wooden cross, which Christian soldiers were forced to kiss, and in this case, the narrator avers, “there could be no doubt as to the genuineness of the powder as it smells terribly and would have killed any elephant in the Muslim army.”68
This Rabelaisian burlesque, like Usāmah’s tale, related directly to the perceived filthiness (in a physical sense) of the Westerners but it also suggested their deeper offense to Muslim sensibilities. For them, the concept of Christ on the cross transgressed a wide range of taboos. God made flesh was unthinkable, and even more so a God who experienced a physical birth. In Islam God was transcendent, while the Western Christians proclaimed his materiality. The Crusaders’ capacity to pollute seemed limitless. They had, unwittingly or deliberately, defiled the holy site in Jerusalem (the Haram al-Sharif) from the first moments of their occupation. They had killed thousands within the holy precinct. They had briefly stabled their horses by the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, while one later visitor recorded that “as for the Dome of the Rock, the Franks had built upon it a church and an altar. They had adorned it with pictures and statues.” The same writer saw “pictures of grazing animals fixed in marble and I saw amongst those depictions of the likenesses of pigs.”69 Whether or not pigs were depicted is perhaps less significant than the certainty that for Muslims it seemed entirely plausible. Another Muslim traveler was shocked when he climbed up to the holy sites. “I entered Jerusalem and I saw monks and priests in charge of the