For the Barnes and Noble History Book Club last month we read Maalouf's Crusades Through Arab Eyes. The amazing thing is that the accounts are pretty much the same as the "Western Version" in that certain figures are characterized as great (Saladin jumps to mind) and others are vicious butchers. Which means that chroniclers were particularly objective at this certain point in history. The main difference is that the crusades aren't divided up into 1st, 2nd, 3rd; it's just a continuous stream of reinforcements.
For the first two thirds of the book, I kept thinking to myself when are the Arabs going to get it together? The Franj come down and slaughter cities and every leader is looking out for themselves or believes that the invading army will go elsewhere. This of course makes sense. The Franj came to take back the Holy Land; a singular focus, while the Arab leaders have to beware of the tribal lines, the invaders, and to a lesser extent later, the Mongols. At certain points the Arabs form truces with Franj to attack other Arab cities and occassionally even prefer to live under Franj rule instead of a rival Arab leader.
But the strongest section of this book is the Epilogue. The author points out that at the time of the Crusades, the Arab world was actually culturally, scientifically, and intellectually ahead of the rest of the world. The Franj army invaded and took not only land but also their ideas. The ideas went back to Europe, were improved upon, and led to the rise of Western power. The new technology inevitably flows back into the Arab world much to the detriment of the culture. Before the invasion, Westerners were seen as barbaric oafs who had nothing to offer; now, the Arab world wants nothing to do with anything Western so even if it demonstrably improves their lives they reject.
This line of thinking is prevelant today. When the man shot John Paul II, he said he was attempting to kill the leader of the crusades, when nations reject "democracy" in the Middle East they reject the Western way of governing, being told how to set up their state. During the crusades when a Franj leader died everyone knew who the successor was; when an Arab leader died a civil war broke out. Nation building has never been a goal. When the Arab world thinks about getting back to a time when they were superior to the Western world they don't look at adopting our advances and improving on them, they look backward at a time when the mindset was even more militantly anti-Western.
