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 enlarge | Author: Amin Maalouf
Publisher: Schocken
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $9.00
You Save: $7.95 (47%)
New (37) Used (44) Collectible (3) from $7.12
Avg. Customer Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 21328
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 293
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0805208984
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.09767101
EAN: 9780805208986
ASIN: 0805208984
Publication Date: April 29, 1989
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Perspective Everybody Must Read August 17, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I ordered this book along with one on the Crusades from the Christian perspective (or the 'Western' perspective) hoping to get each side of the story, so to speak.
In picking up both books I was a bit apprehensive wondering whether or not they would be overly one-sided. For example, I was not looking for a piece of 'slam' journalism justifying the Middle East's current ills on the invasions of Crusaders 1000 years ago. This book is certainly not that. Mr. Maalouf painstakingly takes the stories of the Crusades, written by Arab chroniclers, court attendants of the Sultans, and other historical records written during the Crusades themselves, and gives you the story of the Crusades through Arab eyes.
What I found very refreshing about Mr. Maalouf's writing is that he simply didn't rely on the writings as the end all to tell the story, when it was clear that the contemporaneous writings aren't telling the whole story. At times when accounts don't seem credible, or when two accounts differ substantially (such as over the number of deaths at a battle), Mr. Maalouf looks past the hyperbole and rhetoric that can often accompany such tales and notifies the reader that the conflicts exist, or that agreement over such details has not been reached. He then generally takes the effort to research city populations, and army sizes, etc. to come to a satisfactory answer to the question posed. As you can imagine, there are accounts of "10,000" people slaughtered - when we know, now, that the town probably was not big enough to hold more than a couple thousand. Mr. Maalouf goes out of his way to bring you the truth, and not just the rhetoric of the day.
Another thing I truly enjoyed about this account was that the author went out of his way to put the words and writings of the chroniclers in their proper context, which, as you can imagine, makes a big difference, especially for Westerners who may be unfamiliar with Muslims/Arab tradition and the Middle Eastern makeup of the time. For example, before, during, and after the Crusades, the Middle East was wrought with fighting not just between Muslims and Christians, but also between other Muslims (Shia vs. Sunni, Kurd v. Arab v. Persian v. Turk, etc.), and from with other non-Muslim and non-Christan foes (Arabs v. Mongols). The sultans were battling each other. The different sects were battling each other. The Turks and the Persians were encroaching on Arab lands, as were the Byzantines and the Mongols. The Crusaders were attacking Jerusalem. During some points, some Muslim groups even allied themselves with the Crusaders to fight other Muslim groups. Thus, each chronicler (the Crusades lasted hundreds of years) wrote in a different time with a different attitude towards the peoples and places. Some wrote during relative peace, when Christian and Arab coexisted, while some wrote during all-out war. Some wrote when the tensions between Muslims themselves were high, some when there was relative accord. Some chroniclers wrote during periods of Muslim domination, and some wrote during times where it seemed inevitable the Christians would control the Middle East and Islam would die out. Mr. Maalouf ably ties all of the stories together, explaining the different attitudes among chroniclers.
All in all, an excellent book. It is eye-opening, not because it tells some one-sided story as interpreted by today's Muslims, but because it really gives you an understanding about how the people felt then. It truly does tell the story through their eyes - the Arabs of 1000 years ago.
Oh, and it is a "quick" read. That is, nothing in this book bogs down the reader or requires you to grab other books for explanation.
 An oftentime misunderstood book July 19, 2007
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a good book and a great read. However, it is often read as a "real" history book, which it is not by a long shot, and probably was not intended as such either - Amin Malouf is a very political author, after all. Malouf has written an elegant text as well worth reading as many other introductory books to the crusades. It is telling, however, that the passage most often quoted from "The Crusades through Arab Eyes", Usama ibn Munquidhs 12th-century negative third-hand commentary on "frankish" medicine, has been cut and pasted by Malouf from its original context, omitting the autobiographer's original first-hand positive assessment of the newcomer's medical arts. That example is hardly the only one it the book that makes it readily apparent that Malouf is not a historian and lacks a lot of in-depth knowledge of the period he describes (or worse, has decided to omit details he does not find support his take on things). I read this book much as I read Malouf's other works of historical fiction, but I would not treat it as a real history book.
Through a mirror darkly... June 27, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is a good companion to a serious study of the Crusades. It gives a lot of interesting info on the state of the arab muslim world in the time period, and the effect the invasion of the Franks had on Islamic identity and political cohesion. The parallels to modern times are inescapable, especialy as regards the seemingly absolute inability of the arab muslim world to unite around a single leader for longer than that leaders lifespan, and sometimes not even that long. What it does accomplish is to humanize the inhabitants of the levant during the crusades, abolishing the "richard lionheart"/ chivalrous knights ideal westerners may still carry. Heat, dirt, disease, terror, death, these were the daily companions of the Crusades, and thier gifts to the people of the eastern mediterranean coast.
Cultures Clash and Culture Deceives April 19, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book explains the crusades as primarily political invasions, without much true spirituality involved for many participants. He shows, interestingly, that many Christians were better treated under Muslim rulers than under the rule of Europeans. You will benefit from seeing how there were good people on all sides of the conflicts, as well as the bad.
An important part of this book, is the Epilogue. In this summary, a comparison is made of the "Franj-administered" and "Occidental-administered" territories, with emphasis on the rights and responsibilities of rulers and subjects. There is a lot of wisdom in this comparison, and should be studied well by those attempting to envision institution-building in the future. Especially when any act of violence against the western lands or westerners can be portrayed in Arab media simply as vengeance for expeditions in 1191AD. For reviews of similar books, see the resources pages at civilsociety at seedwiki. Thanks.
An entertaining popular history of the Crusader states March 6, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Contrary to absent_minded_prof's assertion, anyone who's read popular non-academically oriented histories of the Middle East (those aimed at laymen instead of college students) is well aware that Arab and Turkish historians dutifully recorded the events of their day. What we have not had, however, is a chronicle of these histories translated into English and presented in a straightforward way for the average person to digest.
Amin Maalouf does an excellent job at presenting these events in a chronologically accurate context, and does a very good job at introducing the various Arab and Turkish factions who found themselves under attack by the "Frankish" horde. Maalouf is less adept at differentiating these European barbarians and leaves some questions unanswered because the original Arab historians didn't seem to care, either. Who are these Franks, exactly? Why did they come? What, exactly, was it they wanted, and for whom? This lack of curiosity about the "barbarians" from abroad is a major recurring theme in Islamic history, but Maalouf lets it pass without comment.
Where the book excels is putting together a picture of a Muslim Middle East whose rulers are more interested in fighting other Muslim princes than they are in repelling Christian invaders, and we also learn how and why the center of power changed hands between the Arabs and Turks, and how the inexorable decline of the Byzantine Empire started in earnest.
This book has little to do with George Bush, but everything to do with Osama bin Laden. Contemporary events bear only a shadow of relation to the Crusades, but a reader will be left with a healthy curiosity regarding the history of the Middle East, Christianity, and Islam.
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