• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1214 0

come except there is a falling away first and that man of sin be revealed, the sin of perdition. Who exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped.”15 For many Christians, the self-evident man of sin was the Prophet Mohammed. Yoking Muslims with the Antichrist made them implacably hostile to Christians, but it also assured their ultimate defeat. It is risky to be too definite in matters of perception. A single event, text, or image should not be read outside its original context, and we can never be sure that the few written documents are not chance (and thus misleading) survivals from the distant past. But from the late medieval period onward, there was a shift in the image that the communities, Christian and Muslim, had of each other. Both were hostile and suspicious, but while the Western image of the East seemed to be in a constant state of flux and mutation, the Islamic attitude stabilized. The closest we can get to popular attitudes were the tales of folk heroes who vanquished their opponents, sometimes Christian Crusaders, sometimes Byzantines. In addition to traditional folk heroes like Abu Zayd and Rustam, there were new and historical heroes like the ruler of Egypt, the Mamluk (Turkish) sultan Baybars, who finally expelled the Franks from their last foothold in the land where the sun rises, the al-mashreq.16

The tradition of these tales is entertaining fantasy, which is what the people wanted. Narratives that were full of drama, excitement, and colorful characters were the stock-in-trade of professional traveling storytellers. So the Sirat al-Zahir Baybars is a long succession of wildly improbable adventures. The sultan defended the poor and righted wrongs. He was transported magically to England and had many thrilling encounters there. Nonetheless his experience of Christians was typified by the “treachery” of “Juwan”—John—who eventually received his just deserts at the sultan’s hands. In another folk epic, the Dhat al-Himma, even the bravest of the Franks was described as “a very wicked and guileful man.”17 These were all stock villains, just as Baybars was a one-dimensional hero figure. But like the Western characterization of the men (and women) of the East, these were images of the infidel readily recognizable to Muslims, who already knew that Western Christians were essentially wicked. They had heard that the Franks were dangerous, treacherous, and vicious, both physically and spiritually corrupt. Ultimately, not much survived of the admiration for the Crusaders’ courage which had appeared in the writings of Usāmah ibn Munqidh.

THE CONFRONTATION IN THE LEVANT ADMINISTERED A DEEP SHOCK to both Western Christendom and the world of Mediterranean Islam, imprinting deeply upon both cultures. Every conquest engendered a desire for reconquest. To understand how and why this effect persisted over many centuries lies within the domain of social psychology, and then the difficulty is finding methods of interpretation that are not simply anachronistic or inappropriate. Kimball Young, one of the early pioneers of the discipline, set out the essence of the problem: “Propaganda may be open and its purpose avowed, or it may conceal its intention. It always has a setting within a social-cultural framework, without which neither its psychological nor its cultural features can be understood.”18 The fear and hatred that grew out of the confrontation between Islam and Christendom were a conditioned, or “Pavlovian” response.19 The reinforcement sustaining that response was sometimes a personal experience, but more often it stemmed from a firm conviction acquired by other means. Most of those who believed that the infidels—“Saracens,” “Agarenes,” “Ishmaelites,” “Turks”—were savage and barbarous had never met a Saracen or a Turk in their lives. Yet this understanding was as real to them as if they had. They knew it from their neighbors, from listening and reading, from visual images, much as we do today. This infusion of new knowledge was vital to maintaining hostility.

Pavlov’s message was that unless