The crusades in the Arab social and political discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

Throughout the period of the Arab National Renaissance (al-nahḍa), which unfolded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Arab intellectuals frequently referred to the age of the crusades, drawing parallels between that historical epoch and modern-day relations between Europe and the Muslim world. After analyzing the works of representatives of the three major ideological movements of that period: pan-Islamism, pan-Ottomanism, and Arab nationalism, the present article formulates the following major interpretations of the role of the crusades in the history of the Arab Middle East: (a) as a punishment for the distortion of the original Islam of the Prophet and his companions (for which some blamed the Seljuk Turks, others the Muslim mystics or Sufis); (b) as a reason for the subsequent prosperity and progress of Western societies after their contact with a superior Muslim civilization; (c) as a source of religious fanaticism in the Middle East; (d) as the events that foreshadow the modern military conflicts around the Mediterranean and beyond, especially the Mahdist rebellion in the Sudan and the Crimean War; (e) as an era that demonstrated the weakness of religion as a force of mass mobilization; (f) as a period when the Muslims of the Middle East protected Middle Eastern Christians from the Westerners. Moreover, at the end of the nineteenth century, some Arab intellectuals for the first time described the medieval crusader states of the Levant as ‘colonial’ (al-duwal al-musta’mira al-ifranjiyya).