Arab Historians of the Crusades

Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: A good book. It has many parallels with accounts of the original Muslim invasions and subsequent 700 year occupation of most of the Iberian (Spain/Portugal) Penninsula. Due to this initial Muslim invasion and occupation of Christian Europe, the Christian Crusades were launched into Spain and the Holy Land. Same story in the Balkans and Anatolia with the Seljuk and Ottoman Turk invasions of those Christian lands. First hand accounts of events always make for good reading. A good book, unfortunately I lost it.

Rating:
Summary: Great achievment
Review: Gabrieli must be congratulated on condensing the mass of Islamic sorce material for the covered period, into one condense book that fairly reflects the Islamic view on events all well known to the armchair historian from the Christian chronicles.

Not only is it a great work of selection, editing and translation, but it is an enthralling read throughout. Always intersting, sometimes shocking and humourous.

An essential accompliment to anyone's book collection who is intersted in crusader history.

Rating:
Summary: Very Informative
Review: I read this book for a class on the Crusades. This is an extremely informative book that provides a different viewpoint on the European invasions of Palestine and Egypt from 1098-1303. Gabrieli includes excerpts from several Islamic historians who wrote copiously on this topic, and the information they provide gives the reader a different view of the fight for the Holy Land.

This book reads quite fast, as the excerpts for the most part are very short. The best section of the book has to be the detailed information on Saladin, the Arab general and sultan who dealt the Christians a punishing blow at Hittin in 1187, and who eventually retook Jerusalem. Lots of stories provide an interesting character study of this Islamic hero. We read about his military heroism, his religious piety, his sense of justice and honor, and his relationship with the Christians. There is the interesting story of how Saladin helped a Christian woman recover her child. The child was seized and was almost sold into slavery until Saladin intervened on her behalf and returned the child to its mother. The other sections of the book deal with the initial campaigns of the Christians during the First Crusade, such as the taking of Antioch and the legend of the Holy Lance, a ridiculous story that the Arab historians rightly perceive as total bunk. The last part of the book deals with the Egyptian campaigns of Louis IX and the eventual collapse of the Christian occupation in Palestine.

Most of these writings are pretty interesting, but there are a few drawbacks. Many of these accounts are propaganda meant to paint the Muslims in the best possible light. Also, this would be a useless review unless I mentioned the amazingly horrible writings of Imad ad-Din, who served as a close official to Saladin. His prose is so turgid and congealed that it is very taxing to get through. He spends a whole page giving EXTREMELY gory descriptions of the dead Christians at Hittin. There are only so many descriptions of bashed in heads and ripped livers a person can take! His prose is so difficult that it is hard to glean the actual history out of his writing. A final downfall of the book, which is more my fault then anything else, is the complicated names of the Arabs. These guys have more names then you can shake a stick at. It takes a leviathan effort to wade through them.

Overall, this is a very worthy book for someone interested in this time period. Any serious historian should always look at as many sides of an event as possible, and this book will give many insights. Just be prepared for Imad's interesting accounts!

Rating:
Summary: Why were the Crusaders there - any way?
Review: The history of the Crusaders cannot be complete without the contribution of the inhabitants of that part of the world.

There are only a few books, probably no more than two or three, that attempt to relate the stories of the invaded against probably hundreds written from the view point of the invaders.

The earnest reports of the Arab historians of the time contained in the book must be a reflection of the pain and outrage that must prevailed throughout the 100-year invasion of Syria's littoral region. Sensitive readers would find it easy to understand!

Serious teachers of history will find this book authentic, clear and revealing. It represents a very interesting example in history writing by Arab historians of those days. For a narrative of some of the historic text included in this book, the invaluable work of A. Maalouf and J. Rothschild, "The Crusaders Through Arab Eyes" is a rich companion.