Fields of Blood (41 page)

But if the emirs had forgotten the jihad, a handful of “fighting ulema” had not. Immediately after the conquest of Jerusalem,
Abu Said al-
Harawi, qadi of Damascus, led a deputation of Muslim
refugees from Jerusalem to the caliph’s mosque in
Baghdad and begged the caliph to call for a jihad against the invaders. Their terrible stories reduced the congregation to tears, but the caliph was now too weak to undertake any military action.
⁷³
In 1105 the
Syrian jurist
al-Sulami wrote a treatise arguing that jihad against the Franks was
fard ayn,
an “individual obligation” incumbent on the local emirs, who must step into the vacuum created by the caliph’s incapacity and drive the invaders out of the
Dar al-Islam. He insisted that no military action would be successful unless it was preceded by the “
Greater Jihad,” a reform of hearts and minds in which Muslims battled with their fear and apathy.
⁷⁴

Yet still there was little response. Far from being maniacally programmed for holy war by their religion, the Muslims had little appetite for jihad and were preoccupied by new forms of spirituality. In particular, some of the Sufi mystics would develop an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions. The learned and highly influential
Muid ad-Din ibn
al-Arabi (1165–1240) would claim that a man of God was at home equally in a synagogue, mosque, temple, or church, since all provided a valid apprehension of God:

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period of the Crusades,
Sufism ceased to be a fringe movement and in many parts of the Muslim world became the dominant Islamic mood. Few were capable of achieving the higher mystical states, but Sufi disciplines of concentration, which included music and dancing, helped people to abandon simplistic and narrow notions of God and chauvinist attitudes toward other traditions.

A few ulema and ascetics found the presence of the Franks intolerable.
In 1111 Ibn al-Khashab, qadi of Aleppo, led a delegation of Sufis,
imams, and merchants to
Baghdad, breaking into the caliph’s mosque and smashing his pulpit in an unsuccessful attempt to rouse him from his inertia.
⁷⁶
In 1119 the troops of
Mardin and Damascus were so inspired by the qadi’s preaching that they “wept with emotion and admiration” and achieved their first Muslim victory over the Franks by defeating Count
Roger of
Antioch.
⁷⁷
But no sustained action was taken against the Crusaders until 1144, when, almost by accident,
Zangi, emir of Mosul, conquered the Christian principality of
Edessa during his campaign in
Syria. To his surprise, Zangi, who had little interest in the Franks, became an overnight hero. The caliph hailed him as “the pillar of religion” and “the cornerstone of Islam,” though it was hard to see Zangi as a devout Muslim.
⁷⁸
The
Turkish chroniclers condemned his “roughness, aggression, and insolence that brought death to enemies and civilians,” and in 1146 he was murdered by a slave while in a drunken stupor.
⁷⁹

It was the spectacle of the huge armies arriving from Europe to recover Edessa in the Second Crusade (1148) that finally galvanized some of the emirs. Even though this Crusade was an embarrassing fiasco for the Christians, the local people were beginning to see the Franks as a real danger. The Muslim riposte was led by
Nur ad-Din, Zangi’s son (r. 1146–74), who took the advice of the “fighting scholars” and first dedicated himself to the
Greater Jihad. He returned to the spirit of the Prophet’s ummah, living a frugal life, often passing the whole night in prayer, and setting up “houses of justice” where anybody, whatever his faith or status, could find redress. He fortified the cities of the region, built madrassas and Sufi convents, and cultivated the ulema.
⁸⁰
So moribund was the jihad spirit among the populace that reviving it was hard work, however. Nur ad-Din circulated anthologies of
ahadith in praise of Jerusalem and commissioned a beautiful pulpit to be installed in the
Aqsa Mosque when the Muslims recovered their holy city. Yet never once in his twenty-eight-year reign did he attack the Franks directly.

His greatest military achievement was the conquest of
Fatimid
Egypt, and it was his
Kurdish governor of there,
Yusuf ibn Ayyub, usually known by his title
Salah ad-Din (“Honor of the Faith”), who would reconquer Jerusalem. But Saladin had to spend the first ten years of his reign fighting other emirs in order to hold Nur ad-Din’s empire together, and during this struggle he made many treaties with the Franks. Saladin too first concentrated on the Greater Jihad and endeared himself to the
people by his compassion, humility, and charisma, but as his biographer explained, his real passion was the military jihad:

Like Nur ad-Din, Saladin always traveled with an entourage of ulema, Sufis, qadis, and
imams, who recited
Quran and
ahadith to the troops as they marched. Jihad, which had been all but dead, was becoming a live force in the region; it had been resurrected not by the inherently violent nature of Islam but by a sustained assault from the West. In the future any Western intervention in the Middle East, however secular its motivation, would evoke the memory of the fanatical violence of the First Crusade.

Like the Crusaders, Saladin discovered that his enemy could be its own greatest foe. He ultimately owed his military success to the chronic infighting of the Franks and the hawkish policies of newcomers from the West who did not understand regional politics. As a result, in July 1187 he was able to destroy the Christian army at the Horns of Hattin in
Galilee. After the battle, he released the king of Jerusalem but had the surviving
Templars and
Hospitalers killed in his presence, judging correctly that they posed the greatest danger to the Muslim reconquista. When he took possession of Jerusalem, his first impulse was to avenge the Crusaders’ massacre of 1099 but was persuaded by a Frankish envoy to take the city without violence.
⁸²
Not a single Christian was killed, the Frankish inhabitants of Jerusalem were ransomed for a very moderate sum, and many were escorted to
Tyre, where the Christians maintained a stronghold. Christians in the West were uneasily aware that Saladin had behaved more humanely than the Crusaders and developed legends that made him an honorary Christian. Some Muslims, however, were more critical:
Ibn al-Athir argued that this clemency was a serious military and political error, because the Franks managed to retain a narrow coastal state stretching from Tyre to Beirut, which continued to threaten Muslim Jerusalem until the late thirteenth century.
⁸³

Ironically, as military jihad became embedded in the spirituality of
the
Greater Jihad, Crusading was increasingly driven by material and political interests that sidelined the spiritual.
⁸⁴
When Pope
Urban summoned the First Crusade, he had usurped the kings’ prerogative in his bid for papal supremacy. The Third Crusade (1189–92), led and convened by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa,
Philip II of France, and
Richard I of
England, reasserted the temporal rulers’ monopoly of violence. While Saladin inspired his soldiers with hadith readings, Richard offered his men money for every stone of
Acre’s city wall torn down. A few years later the Fourth Crusade was hijacked purely for commercial gain by the merchants of
Venice, the new men of Europe, who persuaded the Crusaders to attack their fellow Christians in the port of
Zara and plunder
Constantinople in 1204. Western emperors governed Byzantium until 1261, when the
Greeks finally managed to expel them, but their incompetence in the intervening period may have fatally weakened this sophisticated state, whose polity was far more complex than any Western kingdom at this date.
⁸⁵
Pope Innocent III reclaimed papal
libertas in 1213 by summoning the Fifth Crusade, which attempted to establish a Western base in
Egypt, but the Crusaders’ fleet was incapacitated by an
epidemic and the land army cut off by the rising flood waters of the
Nile during the march to Cairo.

The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) entirely subverted the original Crusading ideal because it was led by the
Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, who had recently been excommunicated by
Pope Gregory IX. Brought up in cosmopolitan
Sicily, Frederick did not share the Islamophobia of the rest of Europe and negotiated a truce with his friend Sultan
al-Kamil, who had no interest in jihad. Frederick thus recovered Jerusalem,
Bethlehem, and
Nazareth without fighting a single battle.
⁸⁶
But both rulers had misjudged the popular mood: Muslims were now convinced that the West was their implacable enemy, and Christians seemed to think it more important to fight Muslims than to get Jerusalem back. Because no priest would perform the ceremony for an excommunicate, in March 1229 Frederick defiantly crowned himself King of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulcher
Church. The Teutonic
Knights of the
Holy Roman Empire proudly declared that this ceremony had made him God’s vicar on earth, and that it was the emperor, not the pope, who stood “between God and mankind and was chosen to rule the entire world.”
⁸⁷
By now a Crusade’s political impact at home seemed more important than what was happening in the Middle East.

Christians lost Jerusalem again in 1244, when the marauding
Khwarazmian
Turks in flight from the Mongol armies rampaged through the holy city, a portent of a terrifying threat to both Christendom and
Islamdom. Between 1190 and 1258,
Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes had overrun northern
China,
Korea,
Tibet, Central Asia,
Anatolia,
Russia, and eastern Europe. Any ruler who failed to submit immediately saw his cities laid waste and his subjects massacred. In 1257
Hulugu, Genghis Khan’s son, crossed the
Tigris, seized
Baghdad, and strangled the last
Abbasid caliph; then he destroyed
Aleppo and occupied Damascus, which surrendered and was spared destruction. At first King
Louis IX of France and
Pope Innocent IV hoped to convert the
Mongols to Christianity and let them destroy Islam. Instead the Muslims would save the Crusaders’ coastal state and, possibly, Western Christendom from the Mongols. Finally, the Mongol rulers who established states in the Middle East would convert to Islam.

In 1250 a group of disaffected
Mamluks took over Saladin’s
Ayyubid Empire in a military coup. Ten years later the brilliant Mamluk commander
Baibars defeated the Mongol army at the
Battle of Ain Jalut in
Galilee. But the Mongols had conquered vast swaths of Muslim territory in
Mesopotamia, the
Iranian mountains, the
Syr-Oxus Basin, and the
Volga region, where they established four large states. Mongol violence was not caused by religious intolerance: they acknowledged the validity of all faiths and usually built on local traditions once a region had been subjugated; so by the early fourteenth century, the Mongol rulers of all four states had converted to Islam. The Mongol
aristocracy, however, still followed the
Yasa, Genghis Khan’s military code. Many of their Muslim subjects were dazzled by their brilliant courts and were fascinated by their new rulers. But so much Muslim scholarship and culture had been lost in the devastation that some jurists decreed that the “gates of
ijtihad
[independent reasoning]” had closed. This was an extreme version of the conservative tendency of agrarian civilization, which lacked the economic resources to implement innovation on a large scale, valued social order over originality, and felt that culture was so hard won that it was more important to conserve what had already been achieved. This narrowing of horizons was not inspired by an inherent dynamic of Islam but was a reaction to the shocking Mongol assault. Other Muslims would respond to the Mongol conquests very differently.