ABSTRACT
In a short talk delivered to a Cambridge seminar in 1985, Michael Cook, a leadinghistorian of Islam gently mocked what 'might be dubbed the "Dynorod model"; the view that somewhere in Islamic history there was a blockage, the removal of which in counterfactual speculation would enable an Islamic miracle to gush forth'.1 Although Cook has no sympathy with such a model, various blocks on the 'Islamic miracle' have been adduced in the past by Arab historians and more generally by Arab intellectuals. Some of these historians and intellectuals have sought to blame the Crusades for the failure of the Muslim Near East to compete in the long term with the social, commercial, technological and military advances made by Europe from, say, the twelfth century onwards. The leading Syrian historian and belletrist, Muhammad Kurd Ali (1876-1953) certainly held such a view: 'From the Prankish point of view, one of the principal benefits they derived from the Crusades was the obstruction of Muslim progress'.2
