The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

<p>In August 1099, Abu Saad al-Harawi, a judge from Damascus, stormed into the Caliph’s court in Baghdad, condemning its luxury while Muslims in Syria and Palestine were slaughtered by the Frankish invaders.<br><br>With this charged scene, Amin Maalouf opens his exhilarating narrative history of two centuries of war that, nearly a millennium later, still cast their shadow on Arab-Western relations. The Crusaders’ first major triumph came with the sack of Jerusalem in 1099. After two days of carnage, not a single Muslim was left alive within the city walls. Yet it would take another fifty years before the Arab East mounted a united resistance.<br><br>Maalouf recounts in gripping detail the fall of city after city: Antioch, betrayed from within; Tripoli, besieged and stripped of its priceless library; Ma’arra, where the Franj committed unspeakable atrocities. Against this devastation, he sketches vivid portraits of the Arabs who rose in response: Nur al-Din, the ‘Saint-King’ who forged the first united defence of Muslim nations, and Saladin, the reluctant leader who would ultimately reclaim Jerusalem.</p>