Middle East - Anthony Ham [26]
* * *
After the Crusaders took Jerusalem and adopted many of the local customs, the nun’s habit, the quintessentially Roman Catholic garment, was adopted and adapted from the veils that Muslim women wore in Palestine.
* * *
Bitterly fought on the battlefield, the Crusades have provoked similarly bitter debates among Muslim and Christian historians ever since, and this era remains one of the region’s most divisive historical moments. For the Muslims, the Christian call to arms was a vicious attack on Islam itself, and the tactics used by the Crusaders confirmed the Muslim suspicion that Christianity had strayed far from its roots of tolerance and was more concerned with imperial conquest. So deep does the sense of grievance run in the region that President Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was widely portrayed as the next Christian crusade. In the Christian world-view, the Crusades were a necessary defensive strategy, lest Islam sweep across Europe and place Christianity’s very existence under threat.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, the crusading rabble enjoyed considerable success. After linking up with the Byzantine army in 1097, the Crusaders successfully besieged Antioch (modern Antakya, in Turkey), then marched south along the coast before turning inland, towards Jerusalem, leaving devastation in their wake. A thousand Muslim troops held Jerusalem for six weeks against 15,000 Crusaders before the city fell on 15 July 1099. The victorious Crusaders then massacred the local population –
Muslims, Jews and Christians alike – sacked the non-Christian religious sites and turned the Dome of the Rock into a church.
* * *
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, by Amin Maalouf, is brilliantly written and captures perfectly why the mere mention of the Crusades still arouses the anger of many Arabs today.
* * *
Curiously, even after the gratuitous violence of the Crusades, Christians and Muslims assimilated in the Holy Land. European visitors to Palestine recorded with dismay that the original Crusaders who remained in the Holy Land had abandoned their European ways. They had become Arabised, taking on eastern habits and dress – perhaps it was not an unwise move to abandon chain mail and jerkins for flowing robes in the Levantine heat.
Even with their semi-transformation into locals, the Crusaders were never equipped to govern the massive, newly resentful Middle East. A series of Crusader ‘statelets’ arose through the region during this period. Contemporary Arab observers noted these regimes were relatively stable in contrast to Muslim political entities, where matters of succession were always occasions of bloodshed and armed conflict. Stable political institutions were very rarely created, a problem that continues in much of the Arab world to the modern day.
These statelets aside, the Middle East remained predominantly Muslim, and within 50 years, the tide had begun to turn against the Crusaders. The Muslim leader responsible for removing the Crusaders from Jerusalem (in 1187) was Salah ad-Din al-Ayyoub, better known in the West as Saladin (see the boxed text, below).
* * *
In 1118, the fanatical religious Order of the Knights Templar was founded in Palestine. The Templars later became a powerful force in Europe, until King Phillip IV of France executed thousands of them to capture their wealth.
* * *
Saladin and his successors (a fleeting dynasty known as the Ayyubids) battled the Crusaders for 60 years until they were unceremoniously removed by their own army, a strange soldier-slave caste, the Mamluks, who ran what would today be called a military dictatorship. The only way to join their army was to be press-ganged