Holy Warriors (8 page)

Within this basic framework, however, some flexibility is possible. First, safe conducts enable trade and diplomacy to take place between Muslim and non-Muslim regions. Secondly, in the centuries before the crusades, political reality caused theorists to evolve an intermediate area between the House of War and the House of Islam: the House of Peace (Dar al-Sulh). This reflected a period of stability across Islamic lands that, at that time, stretched from Spain to central Asia. This is not to say that the concept of jihad disappeared entirely; in the mid-tenth century there was a period of holy war against the Byzantines in Asia Minor and numerous holy warriors (ghazis) flocked to join the fighting. By the time of the crusades, however, there is little evidence of the sermons and propaganda intended to incite Muslims to perform their religious duty: faction and disunity were rife, perfect conditions for the ideologically driven westerners to force their way to Jerusalem.

With no direction from their spiritual head in Baghdad the secular leaders of the Near East showed little enthusiasm for jihad. The crusaders, of course, represented a fusion of secular and spiritual interests and therein lay one of their great strengths. But in the Islamic world it took decades for this combination to form a shared agenda that would inspire Muslims to cohere in sufficient numbers to expel the Christians. It would be wrong to say that
no one invoked the idea of jihad against the Franks immediately after the First Crusade, and among those who tried to stir his people was the Damascene legist al-Sulami, who preached around 1105–6. Parts of his treatise
Kitab al-Jihad (The Book of Holy War)
survive to give a razor-sharp image of the religious classes’ perception of recent events; the text is no less interesting for its similarities with crusader writings.
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Al-Sulami often spoke from the elaborately carved pulpit (minbar) in the Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a magnificent building that remains one of the splendors of medieval Islam. He used Hadith to remind people that the holy war was the duty of all Muslims; he then offered an acute overview of the problems of the Islamic world. To him, the failure to prosecute the jihad was one cause of the present situation; it was a disgrace that such a state of affairs had been allowed to develop and now God punished such laziness and dereliction of duty through the breakup of the Muslim world. Al-Sulami also showed an awareness of the wider world when he (correctly) reminded his audience that the Christians had already captured Sicily and parts of Spain. Now, al-Sulami argued, the Christians perceived the divisions among the Levantine Muslims and set out eastward with Jerusalem as “their dearest wish”: an accurate appraisal of the crusaders’ primary target. He was also perceptive enough to describe the westerners as fighting a jihad themselves; in other words, he understood that religion was the crusaders’ dominant motive.

His speech was directed at the ruling military classes, the sultans: those men with a responsibility to protect and defend the people. He lambasted them for their inactivity: “drive away insignificant things and sluggishness and go to fight the jihad with your wealth and yourselves.” He regarded their present moral laxity as the cause of the crusader invasion: “the Franks acted as they did because of the Muslims’ blame of God. . . . He warned you with a punishment the like of which He did not warn you with before. . . . If only you would desist from sin! Otherwise He will make you fall into the hands of your enemy. . . . May God hasten your waking up from the sleep of neglect.”
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His appeal for action was couched in remarkably similar terms to contemporary calls for the crusade; in fact, it may be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that the removal of the word jihad and the modification of names would allow this to pass off as a crusade sermon. Al-Sulami’s emphasis on the duty to act, the defensive nature of the warfare, the need to protect one’s
coreligionists, the divine opportunity granted by God, the prospect of heavenly rewards, and the terrible consequences of lax behavior were all concepts used by Christian preachers. There was, however, no question of one set of ideas feeding the other; the texts simply display the shared principles of a monotheistic faith working through the concept of a holy war to arrive at many of the same interpretations and justifications for such actions. Al-Sulami wrote:

One distinctive feature of the Islamic approach emerges: in direct contrast to Pope Urban II’s words at the Council of Clermont where he warned the crusaders to act out of devotion alone, rather than striving for honor or glory, there was an offer of both secular and spiritual rewards: “God and his Prophet promised to whomever fought the jihad in His cause to gain their [enemies’] wealth, women and lands;” a more realistic approach, perhaps.
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Al-Sulami chose to interpret the arrival of the crusaders as a divine challenge to the ruling classes and a task they had been specially chosen to face: “Know that God, who is praised, only sent this enemy to you as a trial, to test your steadfastness with it. He, who blesses and is exalted, said: ‘Let us test you so that We will know those of you who fight hard and are steadfast.’”
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The notion of a test was frequently used by Christian preachers, as was al-Sulami’s next suggestion—the need for a moral regeneration to provide the proper preparation for holy war.
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In both cases, spiritual purity, or “right intention” was requisite: “Give precedence to jihad of yourselves over jihad of your enemies, for if yourselves are among your enemies. . . . Make right what is between you and your Creator, and what is wrong with your [current] state of being will be made right for you.”

Toward the close of his tract, al-Sulami called for a restoration of unity in the Muslim world and repeated his injunctions directed at the region’s leadership
to fulfill their Koranic responsibilities to guide the people and to guard the faith. He was well aware that the fragmented condition of the Islamic Near East had aided the crusaders’ cause. Al-Sulami was not entirely pessimistic, however; he made a terse and accurate critique of the Franks’ position at the time (c.1105–6) and mentioned “the paucity of their horses and equipment and the far distance of their reinforcements and support.” These were perpetual difficulties for the settlers and proved core reasons for their eventual defeat.

Again in his closing comments the writer castigated his audience; he complained of the shame in delaying opposition to the Franks and the disgrace in fearing them. In spite of the power of this call to jihad, the most telling indicator of its failure to resonate with the people of Damascus was the size of al-Sulami’s audiences—on one occasion just six people attended. Divisions among the warlords of the Muslim Near East were so profound that it was decades before the religious classes could exert sufficient influence on the ruling elites to make the jihad the primary rallying call against the Christian colonists. As we shall see, it was Imad ad-Din Zengi’s capture of Edessa in 1144 that marked the first major advance for the counter-crusade, and it was his devout and powerful son, Nur ad-Din (1118–74), who brought faith and fighting together to pose an even greater test to the crusaders.

Our next guide to twelfth-century Islam led a truly remarkable life: Usama ibn Munqidh was born on July 4, 1095, just four months before Urban II launched the First Crusade, and he died aged ninety-three on November 17, 1188, a little over a year after Saladin’s reconquest of Jerusalem.
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He lived through a vast spectrum of events that encompassed Muslim defeat and revival, warfare among his coreligionists, and conflict with the Franks. His family held the fortress of Shaizar, a castle that still clings to a spine of rock overlooking the River Orontes in central Syria. The Banu Munqidh were one of the numerous small lordships that emerged from the chaotic events in the late-eleventh-century Muslim Near East and, as such, Usama’s people had to navigate between the competing pressures of the incoming crusaders and the larger local power centers of Aleppo, Hama, and Damascus. They
also had to deal with less predictable forces such as the Assassins, a group who lived within ten miles of Shaizar and whose uncompromising negotiating techniques brought them notoriety across the medieval world.
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Usama’s father, Murshid, was a man of immense piety who combined an enthusiasm for the hunt with intensive study of the Koran. He created more than forty copies of the text himself and composed commentaries on its meaning and style. He managed to conduct his two passions simultaneously, as Usama recounted: “On the day he went forth to the mountain to hunt partridge, while he was on the way there, yet still distant from it, he would tell us, ‘Go, split up. Any of you who still hasn’t done his recitation should now go and do it.’ For we, his children, had memorised the Koran. And so we would then disperse and recite the Koran until he arrived at the hunting spot and ordered someone to summon us. He would then ask us how much we had recited. Once we had informed him, he would say, ‘Me, I’ve recited one hundred verses,’ or something close. My father (may God have mercy on him) could recite the Koran just like it was when it was first revealed.”
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Murshid was not, however, interested in heading the family and when he stood aside for his younger brother, the tensions generated among the Banu Munqidh clan led to Usama leaving home in June 1131: a moment of profound sadness for him and, in several senses, an event from which he never recovered. Throughout the remainder of his adult life he hoped to return to Shaizar and become its lord, yet this never happened. He began a career that took him across the courts of the Muslim Near East and brought him service with a cosmopolitan series of rulers: at Hama he worked for the brutal Zengi (with whom he stayed until 1138), then to Unur of Damascus (1138–44), the Fatimid court in Cairo (1144–54), then back to Damascus and Nur ad-Din (1154–64), next to the remote Upper Tigris city of Diyar Bakr (1164–74), and finally to Damascus a third time under the patronage of Saladin (1174–88). He was not, however, employed solely as a military man, and it was his celebrated reputation as an individual of learning and culture (adab) that enabled him to attract such a powerful and varied range of employers and to crisscross the Sunni–Shi’a divide. Adab required good manners, great prowess as a writer and orator, and the ability to memorize a huge store of verse; at its most developed, Usama’s task was to provide an intellectual focus to a court, as well as a sense of refinement. Usama even wrote a manual of ideal male conduct,
The Kernels of Refinement
, which
stressed ideas of honor and military strength. Skill as a hunter, a pastime that interested him enormously, was also helpful. Finally, it was desirable to be thin and handsome: needless to say, gifts possessed by Usama himself.
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Usama was a prolific writer and gained a great reputation in his own lifetime as a poet. Poetry was probably the most important method of communication in medieval Islam and was used to entertain, to impress, and to propagandize the jihad.
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Poetry was also employed to conduct affairs of state and when, on behalf of Nur ad-Din of Damascus, Usama conducted lengthy diplomatic negotiations with the vizier of Egypt, they were in verse.

Among the many items in Usama’s oeuvre was a hugely popular collection of poetry; Saladin himself kept a copy with him. He also composed works on sleep and revelatory dreams and on women; a history of recent events; a
Counsel to Shepherds;
an anthology of
Dwellings and Abodes
(an analysis of the erotic prelude, a genre of classical Arabic literature); a study of especially ornate poetry,
The Creator of High Style;
and finally, a book on the lore of the stick,
The Book of the Staff.
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The last of these was written around 1171–72 and was a collection of verse and prose incidents connected with the symbol of Usama’s old age—his walking stick. Some were tales of famous sticks, such as that of Moses; some told of his own experiences (a few involving the Franks); others were designed simply to amuse. In one incident, a man complained to his local qadi (judge) that his wife had beaten him with a stick so fiercely that it broke. The qadi looked sad, which prompted the man to say that there was nothing to worry about—she had done this from her evil nature and lack of education. But the qadi responded, “I would not grieve, even if she killed you. My only worry is that she may think that all men are like you.”
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His best-known book in modern times is his
Kitab al-I’tibar, The Book of Contemplation—
partly because it contains so many lively anecdotes and partly because it has been translated from Arabic. As the title suggests, it was not a narrative history but principally a work of instruction. Through
The Book of Contemplation
we can glimpse much of Usama’s view of the world and his thoughts on the Franks. In the broadest sense he reflected the widely shared feeling of Muslim cultural superiority over the Christians. The latter were brave—in the way that animals could be brave—but lacked modesty and sophistication. “Glory be to the Creator, the Maker! Indeed, when a person relates matters concerning the Franks, he should give glory to God and sanctify Him! For he will see them to be mere beasts possessing no
other virtues but courage and fighting, just as beasts have only the virtues of strength and the ability to carry loads.”
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The latter years of Usama’s career overlapped with the efflorescence of the jihad under Nur ad-Din and Saladin, yet his writings lack a sustained polemical thrust against the Christians, perhaps an indication that the author’s own concerns and personality were largely secular in nature.