ABSTRACT
Today, the period of the Crusades holds a particular, and infamous, place in the Muslim psyche. With Arab nationalism contributing to the end of European colonialism in the Middle East, Muslims found it useful to regard, as various Islamist groups still do, the Crusades as a European proto-colonial exercise, a view that has generally fallen out of favour among western scholars of the period. This view is kept alive and reinforced by the existence of the state of Israel, particularly since many of the Jews living there migrated from Europe and because the boundaries of the state closely resemble those of the pre-H. at.t.ı¯n Kingdom of Jerusalem; consequently, Israel is seen as a covert European colonial entity, and is thus linked to the crusading period. Such a view has thus led to the widespread Modern Muslim perception of the crusading period as a time of European despoliation of Islamic lands religiously, politically, and economically, and the oppression of the Muslim inhabitants of the region. Yet this rather tidy narrative is not an accurate representation of how Muslims have perceived the Crusades across the centuries. Perspectives on the Frankish presence in the Levant and the events of the period have varied significantly over the centuries, ranging from viewing this with the utmost horror to regarding the Franks as simply one more in a pantheon of actors upon the stage that was the medieval Levant. The aim of the following chapter is to sketch, in fairly broad terms, how the Crusades have been remembered by Muslims from the first appearance of the Franks in the region in the late eleventh century up to the present day, and to highlight the main bases for these modes of commemoration.
