After focusing a large part of my research on the changing Christian outlook on warfare before the First Crusade, I ran across an interesting link entitled The Travels of Ibn Jubayr:
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/prh3/259/texts/jubayr.htm
The text is a collection of journal entries by Ibn Jubayr, a Muslim traveling through the Crusader States in the year 1184. The journal entries describe the visual and narrative aspects of his journey as well as his opinions of the places he visits.
What I found most intriguing about this collection is the way Ibn Jubayr manages to express the Muslim ideology of the time through his journal entries. For example, he expresses disgust upon seeing Muslims living comfortably alongside Franks in the Crusader States. He also shows a lot of hate towards Christian settlers of his land, frequently praying that God may destroy their cities.
Overall, this link provides interesting and useful insight on a Muslim perspective of the Crusades.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Ibn Jubayr is generally considered a valuable witness to life in the Latin Kingdom, and Christian-Muslim relations in general. In part, this stems from his somewhat unique position as a Muslim from Iberia (where the Muslim kingdoms were under increasing pressure from Castile and Aragon) who traveled to the opposite end of the Mediterranean. He is hardly alone, however, in his negative assessment of both the "Franks" and disapproval of any accomodation of them. The Arab historians quoted in Gabrieli's popular study say similar things.
ReplyDeleteThis link is to one of Dr. Paul Hyams' course pages. Dr. Hyams teaches at Cornell, and his pages are gold mines of useful information, links, sources, and bibliographic material. The entire course page can be found here:
That would be here: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/prh3/259...
ReplyDelete