4 - The Reactions of Seljuq, Fatimid and Syrian Elites

Summary

The ‘Counter-Crusade’ and ‘la maqam’ Paradigms

There are two seemingly contradictory, but interlocking historiographical frameworks through which historians have approached the Islamic Near East's responses to the onset of the Crusades. The first is the ‘counter-Crusade’ movement, which is generally applied to nearly all Muslim military, social and cultural reactions to Frankish entanglements in the eastern Mediterranean. The second is Michael Köhler's ‘la maqam’ or ‘no place’ theory, which contends that the Frankish polities established in the Levant were almost directly integrated into the Syrian political milieu by local autonomous rulers, who prioritised mutual survival over the religious obligations of jihad against the Franks.

The term ‘counter-Crusade’ (contre-croisade) was first coined in the 1930s by the French Orientalist René Grousset. According to Grousset, the counter-Crusade encompassed any attempt by Muslim peoples to combat the Crusaders, from 491/1098 onwards. Just one year after the publication of the first volume of a three-volume history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Grousset's ‘false conception’ of the Muslim counter-Crusade was strongly disputed by Hamilton A. R. Gibb. For Gibb, Grousset's interpretation of the ‘counter- Crusade’ was far too broad, as there was no Muslim ‘mass movement … swept forward by a wave of emotion’ until the time of Nur al-Din ‘at the earliest’.

Gibb's assertion that there was no organised opposition to the Crusaders during the first fifty years of the sixth/twelfth century was built upon by the Israeli scholar Emmanuel Sivan, who charted the development of an anti- Frankish jihad or counter-Crusade movement around the ‘pivot’ of Nur al-Din's career. As such, Sivan was the first to conflate the counter-Crusade with medieval Islamic conceptualisations of jihad, placing great emphasis on the writings of the early sixth/twelfth-century Damascene hadith scholar ʿAli ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 500/1106). Recent scholarship, based upon a broader range of source materials including religious hadith literature and jihad poetry, has corroborated much of Sivan's thesis.

However, some historians have drawn a distinction between counter- Crusade activity by Syrian and Egyptian political elites and non-elites, and jihad sentiment among the religious classes. There are also ongoing debates about the chronology underpinning the counter-Crusade movement.