The Memory of the Crusades in the Arabic Folk Epics: Images and Patterns

Abstract

Considering the importance of the topos of the Crusades for the Arab discourses of the 19th - 21st centuries and its influence on the collective memory in modern Arab countries, the challenge of finding the roots of this phenomenon is of vital importance. This problem can be solved only through the analyses of the memory of the Crusades in Arab culture from the late 13th to the beginning of the 19th centuries. Proceeding from this, it seems relevant to study the preservation of the memory of the Crusades in one of the most important types of works of Arabic literature, Arabic Folk Epics. The analysis of the image of the Franks in this kind of sources shows that during the era of the Crusades itself and in the subsequent centuries a huge number of the Arab tribal pre-Islamic narratives and passages about the struggle against Byzantium were transformed into the ones dedicated to Jihad against the Franks. Thus, first the Crusades reshaped this kind of narratives, and then the Arab tradition itself began to support and reproduce the image of the Christian-European-Crusader in the collective memory in Egypt and Levant due to the high popularity of the Folk Epics, which might have created a horizon of expectation for the perception of the European colonial policy of the 19th-20th centuries, i.e. “the return of the Crusaders”.