Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [222]
53. See Harris, Aztecs, passim.
54. Calling for “thick description”? See Geertz, Interpretation, pp. 6–30.
Part Three
CHAPTER 7: TO THE HOLY LAND
1. This is different from the “national” history common to many societies. In Spain, two conflicting interpretations competed for the same native land. See Glick, Islamic, pp. 3–15, and Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. There is also a good chapter by Béatrice Caseau, “Sacred Landscapes,” in Glenn Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 21–59.
2. See Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 22.
3. Many of the cities of the Levant and Anatolia had sites associated with the heroic early days of Christianity and were accordingly treated with reverence.
4. Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, cited in Dupront, Mythe, vol. 3, p. 1361.
5. The common Arabic term for the city, Al-Quds, refers to its sanctity. Later the sacred terrain was extended to the area immediately around the city to become the Holy Land, al-ard al-muqaddasa. After Saladin’s reconquest this latter term was used to include the whole “Holy Land,” roughly as Christians conceived it. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 301–2.
6. See Gil, History, pp. 622–6.
7. Jerome, Epistle 46:9: “Time forbids me to survey the period which has passed since the Lord’s ascension, or to recount the bishops, the martyrs, the divines, who have come to Jerusalem from a feeling that their devotion and knowledge would be incomplete and their virtue without the finishing touch, unless they adored Christ in the very spot where the gospel first flashed from the gibbet.”
8. Jerome, Epistle 108, which is the longest of his letters and where he describes Paula’s journey through the Holy Land.
9. Cited in Gil, History, pp. 285–7.
10. It has been estimated that it cost a year’s income or more to undertake a pilgrimage. See J. Sumption, Pilgrimage, London: Faber, 1975, pp. 169, 205–6.
11. R. Röhricht, Die Deutschen im Heiligen Lande: Chronologisches Verzeichnis derjenigen Deutschen, welche als Jerusalempilger und Kreuzfahrer sicher nachzuweisen oder wahrscheinlich anzusehen sind c. 650–1291, Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1968 (new edition of 1894 edition), cited in Gil, History, p. 483.
12. This is Sir John Keegan’s image, in our joint book Zones of Conflict, and I am grateful to him for it.
13. The Fatimid rulers of Cairo were Shia Muslims, but Al-Azhar always attracted students and teachers from the entire Muslim world.
14. There is a huge literature on the various patterns of belief in Islam, and I do not propose to define the differences here. I would suggest that they represented different tendencies in belief, political and social practice, within the overall framework of Islam that altered over time, sometimes leading to further divisions and subdivisions. Modern historians of Islam also emphasize the traditions of Sufi practitioners, the various dervish traditions, and “folk Islam,” which bonded local cults and practices into the faith. In addition, there were later ascetic traditions such as the Wahabis in eighteenth-century Arabia. For a clear outline see Lapidus, History.
15. Although sectarian issues played some part, Sunni rulers fought Sunni rulers with the same verve that they confronted the Shia ones.
16. This is from the fifteenth-century Kitat by Al-Maqrizi, cited in Elizabeth Hallam (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam, Godalming: Bramley Books, 1996, pp. 22–5.
17. Gil, History, pp. 379–80. He notes that Al-Hakim