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The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
Tharik Hussain speaks to Danny Bird about the long but often overlooked and distorted history of Muslims in Europe – and the enduring resistance to its reappraisal
Danny Bird: You open your book by recounting a chance visit to an old mosque in Cyprus. What was so significant about that moment? Tharik Hussain: Nothing changed for me on the day itself, because I knew very little about Islam’s history in Europe at that time. On a long, cheap layover in Larnaca – a place I’d never heard of – I was simply looking for a way to pass the time with a toddler in tow. I’d found a brief reference to a nearby mosque, and decided to visit. At the time (2003), I was preparing to make hijrah – to leave Britain, because I felt that I no longer belonged. My education had led me to believe that there was no meaningful Muslim history in Europe. So when we arrived at this neglected Ottoman-era mosque at the Hala Sultan Tekke, I had no framework for understanding it. The elderly guide didn’t speak English, and neither of us knew what we were looking at. What unsettled me was a tomb inside the mosque, which clashed with the theological outlook my wife and I held at the time. We left, dismissing the place, though the guide handed us a small booklet as we went. Two years later, while working as an English language teacher in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I rediscovered the booklet. To my shock, it claimed that the tomb belonged to a relative of the Prophet Muhammad – his maternal aunt, Umm Harâm. That completely overturned my belief that Europe had no real Islamic history, let alone connections reaching back to the Prophet’s own family. When did Islam first come to Europe? If we look at the very beginnings of Muslim presence in Europe, it’s striking how quickly it arrived. Within 20 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death in AD 632, Muslims were present in places such as Cyprus and, later, Sicily, establishing themselves far more quickly than Christian or Jewish communities had done in the continent. Some of these early arrivals, including members of the Prophet’s family, were then buried in Europe, their tombs becoming sites of ziyara (pilgrimage), holding great spiritual significance. Medieval sources document these tombs as being attached to a mosque, and highly revered. That period also marked the creation of the first Muslim navy. Initially, ambitions to launch a maritime expedition to Cyprus were met with caution, because Muslims had previously conquered only overland territories. After persistence and strategic negotiation, the naval expedition was allowed. Umm Harâm accompanied her husband on that mission, and she died during the campaign. This acquisition of Cyprus and establishment of a naval presence were pivotal, securing Muslim control of the eastern Mediterranean and enabling subsequent campaigns across Greek islands, Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain. Far from being minor raids, these early campaigns were foundational to the long-lasting Muslim presence in Europe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/CR65R8webready-ae14d6f-e1770821971435.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An 18th-century painting showing a bearded man in red and gold robes sitting atop a white horse. Under the horse are several men being trampled. The background shows a blue and white sky" title="An 18th-century painting of Saint James ‘the Moor-slayer’ turning the tide in the legendary battle of Clavijo – a myth created centuries after the supposed clash (Image by Alamy)" /> Why do you think that the history of Islam’s presence in Europe has for so long been hidden or even denied? There are several factors, as I suggest throughout the book. Put simply, in the long contest between Christendom and Islam in Europe, Muslim powers – the Umayyads in Iberia, later dynasties in the south and, latterly, the Ottomans – eventually ‘lost’. As the aphorism goes, winners write history. From the crusades onwards, anti-Muslim narratives grew in tandem with a developing exclusionary ‘European’ identity in Christendom. In the regions I discuss, these later fed into the Spanish Reconquista story and anti-Ottoman rhetoric to develop what I call an anti-Muslim DNA that runs through western European identity. National legends such as Santiago Matamoros [‘Saint James the Moor-slayer’, patron saint of Spain] or the ‘tribute of 100 virgins’ myth [the false narrative that the Christian kingdom of Asturias had to pay such a tribute annually to the Muslim emirate of Córdoba] helped cement these attitudes, as did countless local stories in areas that once had Muslim communities. This isn’t always the result of deliberate design – it’s a common human pattern – but the effect is undeniable. I also refer to the erasure and neglect of Islamic heritage – sometimes through omission from history books, sometimes through archaeological indifference, and at other times through misrepresentation. In places such as the Alhambra in Spain, later European romanticism or orientalist projections have distorted how that history is presented. Even today, popular historians often reinforce these old tropes. Read more | Step onto the medieval Silk Road and you'll witness its intense wonders – and its hidden horror That’s why, after I first visited Larnaca, I was shocked to realise how much had been excluded from the history I’d grown up with. Even academic works often reflected a strongly Eurocentric perspective. To counter this, I draw heavily on Muslim sources, and occasionally Jewish ones, which offer a very different picture: richer, more nuanced and far more appreciative of these moments in European history. Ultimately, whether we are comfortable admitting it or not – and I include myself as someone educated within this system – an anti-Muslim thread shapes our sense of European identity. Take the Balkans: this region is full of indigenous European Muslims, full of Islamic heritage, yet we instinctively place it outside ‘real’ Europe and label it ‘eastern’. People often blame the Iron Curtain, but the region was being othered long before communism, largely because it was the heart of Ottoman – and, therefore, Muslim – Europe until quite recently. All of this is part of the same 1,400-year story. In telling it, I use the Islamic calendar intentionally, beginning with the first Muslim presence within Europe around AD 647. How does the historical record debunk the notion that Islam, rather than being ‘foreign’, has in fact been an integral part of European history? What’s striking is that, regardless of the period, long Muslim presences in Europe – 800 years in Spain, 500 in Portugal, more than 200 in Sicily – are still described as ‘invasions’. It’s an odd way to characterise communities who, over centuries, became as Spanish or Portuguese as anyone else. We would never describe the European presence in modern America as an ongoing ‘invasion’, yet traditional historians have spoken this way about Muslims in Iberia and, later, the Balkans. Whether the initial arrival of Muslim armies is seen as invasive or not, the people who lived there afterwards, and whose descendants still live there, were not invaders. When I began examining these histories from alternative perspectives, especially Muslim and Jewish sources, a more complex picture emerged. Take the Muslim arrival in Iberia. When Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed into the Visigothic territories from north Africa in 711, one neglected factor is the role of the local Jewish population [in Iberia], who were enduring severe persecution. Some Jewish historians suggest that those people actively sought Muslim support. There is certainly evidence that Muslims and Jews cooperated: the 17th-century scholar Ahmad al-Maqqari records that, when Muslim forces captured major cities such as Córdoba, Granada and Toledo, they often left the local Jewish community in charge – a sign of both trust and local collaboration. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/P9GMRXwebready-c14b821-e1770821776100.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Medieval-style illustration showing two seated figures beneath stone arches. On the left, a bearded figure in purple and red robes sits on a throne with a small dove near his shoulder; on the right, another bearded figure in tan clothing sits holding a sheathed sword across his lap, both facing slightly toward each other against a pale parchment background." title="A 14th-century miniature depicts Roderic, the usurper Visigothic king of Spain, and Tariq ibn Ziyad, who led the Muslim forces against him in 711 (Image by Alamy)" /> From Jewish and Muslim perspectives, the arrival of Muslim rule could legitimately be seen as a liberation, given the conditions the Jewish communities had endured under Christian Visigothic rule. What followed was a celebrated period of coexistence – even a Jewish ‘Golden Age’ – in what became known as al-Andalus. Yet conventional European history insists on framing this as a conquest, which later justified the narrative of the Reconquista created by northern Iberian Christian realms – a narrative made even more curious by the fact that many leading figures of the so-called reconquest were descended from people who came from outside Iberia altogether. One of the most evocative parts of your book deals with what you term the ‘Córdoban Caliphate Culture’ – a world of poetry, architecture and science. What was this civilisation really like? It’s hard to summarise briefly, but this was a period of extraordinary scientific, philosophical and cultural achievement unlike anything Europe had seen. Lost Hellenic works returned to Europe through Muslim scholars who flourished in centres such as Córdoba, Palermo, Kairouan [in what’s now Tunisia] and, later, Cairo. Córdoba, in particular, became the intellectual heart of this vast cultural sphere. What’s remarkable is how widely these advances spread. They shaped not only Muslim societies but also Europe long after the caliphate fragmented. Yet this influence is still rarely acknowledged. Figures such as Ibn Sina [known in the west as Avicenna], al-Razi and al-Zahrawi were central to this transformation. Al-Zahrawi’s Kitab al-Tasrif (The Method of Medicine), published around the year 1000, described sophisticated surgical procedures, including draining fluid from an infant’s brain and treating migraines, at a time when England was still relying on remedies from ‘leechbooks’ and folk cures. His work covered surgery, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, dentistry, pathology and childbirth, and remained authoritative for centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL3085389webready-fe4d4ea-e1770822370370.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An 18th-century miniature depicting three men wearing white and red turbans sitting together. On the left is a man with a long beard wearing a green robe, sitting crossed legged on a wooden bench. Behind him, another man wearing a blue robe stands, looking over the scene. To the right, another man dressed in red robe holding a horizontal stick with a basket on each end" title="An 18th-century miniature from what’s now Turkey shows treatment for smallpox based on Ibn Sina’s earlier writing (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Equally influential was Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, which synthesised Greek knowledge with Arabic scholarship and became a foundation of European medical education. In philosophy, Ibn Rushd [Averroes] made Aristotle accessible, earning the byname ‘the Commentator’. Muslim scholars didn’t simply preserve knowledge – they expanded it and pushed it forward. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The cultural impact was just as striking. Ziryab (Abu al-Hasan ’Ali ibn Nafi), arriving in Córdoba from Baghdad like a rock star in 822, revolutionised etiquette, cuisine and music. Under his influence, Europeans adopted table coverings, cutlery, crystal glassware, three-course meals and refined dining customs. These innovations spread across the continent. All of this helped sow the seeds of the Renaissance, from which the Enlightenment eventually emerged. When you trace the intellectual lineage backwards, you find it leads directly to this era. Comparing medieval Córdoba to the cities of northern Europe, the 20th-century author Victor Robinson captured the contrast perfectly: “Europe was darkened at sunset, Cordova [sic] shone with public lamps; Europe was dirty, Cordova built a thousand baths; Europe was covered with vermin, Cordova changed its undergarments daily; Europe lay in mud, Cordova’s streets were paved; Europe’s palaces had smoke-holes in the ceiling, Cordova’s arabesques were exquisite; Europe’s nobility could not sign its name, Cordova’s children went to school; Europe’s monks could not read the baptismal service, Cordova’s teachers created a library of Alexandrian dimensions.” It’s a vivid reminder of just how brilliant this period truly was. When did Europe’s erasure of its Islamic past begin – and what drove it? The construction of an anti-Muslim identity in Europe began with the crusades, when papal calls urged Christians to unite against what was depicted as an infidel presence. In Spain, this sentiment gained momentum with narratives such as that of Santiago Matamoros, who was said to have miraculously appeared on a white horse to help Christians defeat Muslims at the mythical ninth-century battle of Clavijo. This legend emerged only in the late 12th century – long after the supposed battle. Another powerful myth was the aforementioned ‘tribute of 100 virgins’, in which the king of Asturias allegedly sent 50 noble and 50 common virgin girls to Umayyad rulers each year. Both narratives became central to emerging Spanish cultural identity, appearing in festivals and plays. To this day, many Spanish churches have statues depicting Saint James slaying Muslims. Through such myths, imagery and ritual, these narratives reinforced anti-Muslim sentiment and helped shape what became a modern Spanish identity. If you could sneak a few more pages into every European history textbook, which stories or people would you add first, and why? One of the most fascinating figures is Abd al-Rahman III, the first Umayyad ruler in Iberia to declare himself caliph. His story begins with the massacre of the Umayyads by the Abbasids in the Middle East in 750, in which his great ancestor Abd al-Rahman I was the sole heir to survive. Abd al-Rahman I fled first to north Africa, where he gathered support, crossing into southern Iberia a few years later. Drawing on the legacy of his family, in 755 he defeated the governor of al-Andalus and then established himself as emir Abd al-Rahman I, with Córdoba as his capital. Over subsequent generations, his descendants gradually extended Umayyad control over most of the Iberian peninsula. By 929, his great-great-great-great-grandson Abd al-Rahman III felt powerful enough to declare himself caliph – a bold move in a period when the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Shia Fatimids in Tunisia also claimed that title. He built the magnificent city-palace of Madinat al-Zahra – sometimes called the ‘Versailles of Muslim Spain’ – as a statement of his caliphate. He was of European descent, with white skin, blue eyes and reddish-blonde hair – so much so that he reportedly dyed it black to appear more ‘Arab’. His personality and appearance add another layer to his intriguing character. Read more | Divided they fell: how war, revolution and sectarianism led to the end of the Ottoman empire Are you optimistic that both Muslim and non-Muslim readers in Europe can embrace this shared heritage together and foster a fuller understanding of its past? I’m tentatively hopeful because more people today are willing to revisit accepted historical narratives. The challenge is undoing 1,400 years of anti-Muslim European storytelling and recognising the Muslim contribution to European culture often mislabelled as ‘Judaeo-Christian’. That term itself is misleading, given the repeated persecution of Jewish communities by historical European Christians while many found safety in parts of Muslim Europe. Acknowledging these shared histories could slowly shift perceptions, but it will take immense effort, courage and time. Many are uncomfortable with the idea that Europe is as Muslim as it is Christian or Jewish, reflecting the deep-rooted othering of Islam in European identity. Historians who challenge widely held narratives, such as David Olusoga or Sathnam Sanghera, often face significant hostility. Speaking openly about these histories requires resilience because it challenges beliefs central to people’s sense of identity. It’s urgent, though, because leaving Muslim contributions out of mainstream European history has allowed Islamophobic sentiment to flourish, giving contemporary far-right rhetoric room to portray Islam and Muslims as a ‘foreign’, invasive presence rather than a long-standing part of European culture – a myth repeated even in recent public demonstrations. Tharik Hussain is an author, historian and travel writer. His latest book is Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History (Viking, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
In 1756, a young Englishwoman was taken hostage by Barbary pirates. This is her story
Taken hostage by a Barbary ship’s captain in the 18th century, a young Englishwoman found herself fighting for her freedom in Marrakech. Adam Nichols introduces a brave captive who later wrote a book about her dramatic experiences
The Barbary corsair ship appeared suddenly on the horizon, bristling with cannon. Its decks swarming with armed men, it sliced through the waves at a clip that its quarry – the British merchant ship Ann – could not match. At that time, in the mid-18th century, such pirate attacks were violent, bloody affairs; if the Ann’s captain tried to resist, he would be risking the lives of his crew, his passengers and himself, and would likely see his ship sunk. He surrendered. The corsair captain swaggered aboard the British vessel without firing a shot, and surveyed his captives. He was one of the infamous Sallee Rovers operating out of Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who sold any Europeans they captured into slavery. The captain ordered the Ann’s four passengers to be taken to his ship, along with the crew, who were chained up in the hold. One of the passengers was a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Marsh, barely 21 years old. It is because of her that we know these details. She later published an account of her experiences: The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself. The corsair attack occurred in August 1756, a few months after the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Marsh’s father, an administrator for the Royal Navy, had moved his family from their home in Menorca to Gibraltar, which he considered safer. To further protect his daughter, he then booked her a berth on the Ann, which set sail for England in late July. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates Marsh’s family aspired to be “respectable people”, and she had received a genteel education. The future planned for her was typical of young women of her position and era: to marry a well-to-do man and bear his children. Now, torn from that sheltered life, she faced a very different fate. As a young, attractive European woman, Marsh would have been a highly sought-after commodity in north African slave markets – one that any Moroccan sultan would be very interested in acquiring for his harem. The corsair captain kept Marsh isolated – not for her comfort but to keep her safe and unmolested. One of the other passengers, an English merchant named James Crisp, had been tasked by Marsh’s father with looking after her; he convinced the corsairs that he was her brother, so they permitted him to stay by her side. African captivity After a week at sea, the corsairs reached Salé. There, the British party was housed in a dilapidated building for several uncomfortable and uncertain days. Their situation was complicated. In 1750, England and Morocco had concluded a treaty of mutual cooperation, and were trading partners, with Morocco supplying beef to the British garrison in Gibraltar. However, the Moroccans found the treaty unsatisfactory, and had also been incensed by what they considered to be the disrespectful actions of a British emissary who had attended an audience with the sultan while wearing muddy boots. Marsh and her companions were, technically, hostages rather than outright captives. But the British feared that Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Moroccan sultan’s son and heir, might live up to his reputation and take an amorous interest in Elizabeth Marsh. And that is what happened. Marsh and her companions were taken to Marrakech, Sidi Mohammed’s home city – a journey of some 300 miles across rough, mountainous country. On the way, Marsh and Crisp received some advice from a friendly slave: they should now claim to be husband and wife. Sidi Mohammed was in his forties. His father was aging and sick, and Sidi Mohammed would soon inherit the sultanate. For all his power, though, he could not force Marsh into his harem. The Qur’an’s Chapter 4, Verse 24 decrees: “Forbidden to you are women already married, except those whom your right hand possesses” – that last clause being a euphemism for slaves. Marsh was not a slave so, if she and Crisp successfully maintained the fiction of their marriage, Sidi Mohammed could not take her for his harem. Before the acting sultan In Marrakech, Marsh was housed with the other English captives in a house in the town, hostages in the ongoing negotiations between the Moroccans and the English. She was quickly brought before Sidi Mohammed, though, alone and still dishevelled from her long journey. He grilled her about her marriage, observing that married English women customarily wore wedding rings – which she did not. Marsh declared that she had taken off her ring for safety during her voyage. He was not convinced, but he allowed her to depart and rejoin the other captives. At their next meeting, Sidi Mohammed – dressed in a pink satin vest with diamond buttons – presented Marsh with “a great collection of rarities” and told her that, as she recounted it, “he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, his palace to the confined way of life I was then in… and that the curiosities I had seen should be my property”. Marsh declined this offer. Sidi Mohammed, used to having his own way, was not pleased. But then something unexpected occurred. A woman who was in the room started talking to Marsh, using a phrase in Arabic and making encouraging gestures for her to repeat it, which Marsh did. “Too late,” she wrote, “I discovered that I had renounced (completely innocently) the Christian religion by saying in Morisco: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet’.” Read more | Barbary pirates: the Muslim corsairs and their role in the slave trade Marsh was now in real trouble, having unintentionally recited the Shahadah – and thus converted to Islam. According to Qur’anic law, this automatically invalidated her Christian marriage to Crisp, making her fair game for Sidi Mohammed. The Prince, as Marsh refers to him, then resorted to threats. Here is her account: “Throwing off the mask he had hitherto worn, he cruelly informed me that I had renounced the Christian faith and turned Mohometan [Muslim], and that a capital punishment – namely burning at the stake – was, by their laws, inflicted upon all who recanted from... their religion. “The shock of this pronouncement was severe...I assured the Prince that, if I was an apostate, it entirely proceeded from my being tricked, and not from my own inclination, and that if my death would give him any satisfaction, I no longer desired to avoid that last and final remedy to all my misfortunes, for to go on living under the terms he proposed would only add to my misery. “The Prince seemed greatly perplexed by my resolute declaration, and, though he continued his importunities, yet it was now more with the air of a supplicant than that of a sovereign.” Marsh’s language does not really do justice to the drama of the situation. Sidi Mohammed, the second most powerful man in Morocco, threatened to have her burned at the stake if she refused to join his harem. Alone and defenceless, Marsh faced him down and dared him to do it. Baffled by such unexpected and indominable resistance, Sidi Mohammed capitulated and let her rejoin the other captives. Read more | Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell Release and return The political tensions between Britain and Morocco were eventually resolved – in part by the arrival of a British warship – and Marsh and her companions, along with the Ann’s crew, were allowed to depart. Marsh returned to England, where she married James Crisp. However, Crisp went bankrupt and fled to India to try to revive his fortunes, leaving Marsh behind with two small children. Without any means of support, she went to live at her parents’ home in Chatham, Kent. Desperate for money, she resorted to writing a memoir of her captivity in Morocco. Marsh eventually joined her husband in India, where she travelled widely. She died there of breast cancer at the age of 50, surviving a mastectomy without anaesthetic but then succumbing to the disease. Her memoir, The Female Captive, is the first full-length Barbary corsair captivity narrative written by a woman in English. The book enjoyed some notoriety when it was first published but was never a bestseller, and only a single copy is known to survive. If that copy had disappeared, we would likely never know Elizabeth Marsh’s remarkable story. Marsh was not famous. She played no role in world events. Hers was a private life. Yet the courage she showed during her Moroccan ordeal is an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Adam Nichols is a historian and writer. His latest book is Corsairs and Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates (Pen & Sword, 2024), featuring Marsh’s full account This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
When was Ramadan, Islam’s holy month of fasting, first observed? And how have its practices changed? Here, Remona Aly considers its history and evolution across the world…
Ramadan, Islam’s holy month of fasting, has been observed and celebrated by Muslims around the world for more than 14 centuries. In the seventh century, Prophet Muhammad stated that Islam is built upon five pillars and that fasting in Ramadan was one of them. Today, nearly a quarter of the world’s population mark or observe the fast during daylight hours, giving great respect to the Islamic month in which the holy book of Islam, the Quran, was revealed to the Prophet. What does Ramadan mean? Ramadan literally means ‘intense heat’, denoting the scorching summer month to which it was originally ascribed. It formed part of the pre-Islamic Arab calendar well before Islam came to Mecca, the holy city in today’s Saudi Arabia, in the seventh century. When is Ramadan? Muslims embrace Ramadan as the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. Moonsighting – the practice of spotting the new moon on the first night of each Islamic month with the naked eye – is a tradition that has endured to this day, as Muslims across the world wait in anticipation and excitement for the birth of the Ramadan moon. The practice of fasting was familiar to the pre-Islamic Arabs, as the Quran mentions: “You who believe, fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may be mindful of God.” (Quran 2:183) It was during Ramadan that the very first revelation of the Quran occurred. This took place in 610 AD, when Muhammad retreated to a cave on Mount Hira on the outskirts of Mecca for secluded contemplation. The timing of this initial revelation is given special significance as the “night of power”: “We have revealed it (Quran) in the night of power. And what will explain to you what the night of power is? The night of power is better than a thousand months.” (Quran 97:1–4) Why do Muslims fast during Ramadan? The Quran was revealed to Prophet Muhammad over a period of 23 years, and the verses instructing Muslims to fast the entire month of Ramadan came in the latter half of that period. During the first 12 years in Mecca, the Muslim minority faced torture, tyranny and persecution from the Qurayshi ruling pagan tribe, with many losing their lives. The surviving Muslims migrated to the city of Medina in 622 AD, over 300km away. Two years later, the verses about fasting in Ramadan were revealed, with Prophet Muhammad establishing the holy month’s practices in the sanctuary of their new home. How did the practices of Ramadan begin? The early Muslim community would awake for the pre-dawn meal, known as suhoor, and refrain from eating, drinking and marital relations until sunset, when they broke their fast (iftar), typically on dates. As well as spiritual discipline and increased worship, fasting placed a strong focus on improving behaviour, as Prophet Muhammad stated: “If a person does not avoid false talk and false conduct during the fast, then God does not care if he abstains from food and drink.” During the final years of his life, Prophet Muhammad began to perform extra night prayers in Ramadan called taraweh. His companions started joining him in the mosque and as the numbers grew, the Prophet became concerned they would regard it an obligation, so he continued his prayers alone at home. Ten years after the Prophet’s death, the leader of the Muslims, Caliph Umar saw Muslims scattered around the mosque praying the extra night prayers in separate groups, and established a congregational prayer to unify their worship. Since that time, congregational taraweh has become a defining feature of Ramadan, and one through which the Quran is recited in its entirety. One particular dietary development that aided worshippers to perform the long night prayers was coffee – possibly derived from the Arabic word qahwa originally meaning wine, or from quwwa, meaning power or strength. When coffee was cultivated in Yemen in the 14th or 15th century, it was first consumed in zawiyas, or spiritual centres, and helped Muslims stay alert for their nightly Ramadan vigil. Read more about the history of world religions How has the observation of Ramadan changed through history? While the core rituals and significance of Ramadan have remained unchanged since 624, the spread of Islam over the globe gave texture and diversity to the global Ramadan experience. In Ottoman times, drummers in Turkey woke people for the pre-dawn meal, and similarly in Morocco, a nafar (town crier) dressed in traditional Moroccan robe and leather slippers roamed the streets rousing people to the sound of an instrument, like a horn, trumpet, or daff. These special Ramadan callers were also to be found in Syria, and future Tunisia and Algeria. In Egypt, a Ramadan lantern or fanoos, probably originating during the Fatimid dynasty of the 10th-12th centuries, became a symbol of the sacred month – perhaps to symbolise the spiritual light and blessings that Ramadan brings. Today, intricate lanterns are seen lighting up homes, shops and lining the streets. Egypt was also said to have instigated the ‘iftar cannon’, or ‘midfa al-iftar’, where a cannon was fired to dramatically announce the time for breaking the fast. This tradition is said to have begun around 200 years ago, although some historians trace it further back to the Mamluk period of the 15th century, when the sultan in Cairo was test-firing a new cannon at the time of sunset prayers. Locals thought the sultan was signalling the time to break their fast, and seeing how much joy it brought his people, the sultan made it a daily Ramadan routine. Ramadan also entered the sphere of poetry and captured the imagination of Sufi poets, acting as their muse while they penned love poems to the holy month. The famous 13th-century Persian Muslim mystic poet and scholar, Jalaluddin Rumi, wrote: “O moon-faced Beloved, the month of Ramadan has arrived. Cover the table and open the path of praise.” Read more about the history of Muslim worship in Britain Prophet Muhammad stipulated that the Muslims feed the poor in this month. Towards the end of Ramadan, zakat-al-fitr, or ‘alms of the breaking of the fast’, was a duty on every able Muslim, and equated to a portion of dates or barley given directly into the hands of the poor. Over time, the bartering system translated into a monetary one, and now a Muslim gives a minimum of £5 to mosques or charities for distribution to the poor on their behalf. It was incumbent that the zakat-ul-fitr be distributed before the festival of breaking the fast, known as Eid ul-Fitr, which marks the close of Ramadan. Prophet Muhammad appointed it as a day of community and celebration, beginning with a special communal prayer. It was tradition to begin the day with eating something sweet, which has given rise to the fond nickname of the ‘Sweet Festival’, or ‘Sweet Eid’. In the Prophet’s time, Eid morning began with a simple breakfast of dates, but the spread of Islam through different lands departed from the humble beginnings and gave rise to a variety of sweet dishes. Like sheer-kurma, a milky dessert of vermicelli, nuts and dates which is popular in the Indian subcontinent, or cambaabur, the Somali Eid bread covered with sugar and yoghurt. Read more: Britain's relationship with Islam has long been perceived as troubled, but that is not the whole story… What was initially practiced by around a hundred early Muslims in the seventh century is now emulated by 1.8 billion people around the world, who continue to follow the Prophetic tradition while marking Ramadan in their own culturally unique ways. This article was first published on HistoryExtra in April 2020
Trading and crusading in the Middle Ages
Mike Carr reveals how there was more to Muslim-Christian relations in the medieval era than the Crusades
Mike Carr speaks to David Musgrove about Muslim-Christian relations in the medieval era, revealing how Papal-sanctioned trade was going on despite the background of the Crusades. How to download the HistoryExtra podcast Download as MP3
Neil Faulkner reveals how the Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 helped give rise to the first modern jihad
Neil Faulkner, author of Empire and Jihad, describes how Britain’s entanglements in the Middle East and north Africa in the decades leading up to the First World War helped trigger a radical Islamic insurgency. Neil Faulkner is the author of Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 (Yale, 2021) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
'Arib al-Ma’muniyya: the enslaved medieval woman who sang her way to wealth
Coveted by caliphs, lauded by the elite, censured by the pious: Chase F Robinson presents a medieval Iraqi enslaved woman whose artistry and erudition won her emancipation
“I never saw a more beautiful or refined woman than ‘Arib,” one authority on music opined, “nor one who sang, played music, wrote poetry or played chess so well.” Part Elizabeth Taylor, part Amy Winehouse, ‘Arib al-Ma'muniyya was the most famous (and infamous) of the qiyan, female slave performers of the urban elite of Iraq. Muslim societies produced many elite women, who sometimes held very public positions, most notably the queens of 17th-century Aceh. Yet none confounded the social and gender categories typically ascribed to Islamic civilisation more than ‘Arib. ‘Arib’s birth date is usually given as 797, during the reign of the great Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786–809). She claimed high birth, but it’s not clear if she was born to a legal union; certainly, she was sold into slavery early in life. In most Middle Eastern societies, slavery typically involved domestic service to urban households, rather than agricultural labour on rural estates or the like. For ‘Arib, it entailed service for the social and economic elite, and her education was tailored for this market. It began in Baghdad, at the time rapidly becoming one of the world’s most prosperous cities, and continued in Basra, southern Iraq. Not only was ‘Arib literate at a time when few could read and write, she also acquired the arcane knowledge and skills of courtly life: she could ride, compose poetry and prose, sing, and play several instruments, along with backgammon and chess. Such skills made her attractive in the most rarefied circles, and increased the value of her services to her owner – and, with her eventual manumission, to herself. Read about more historical women, in our list of 100 women who changed the world News of her talents reached Baghdad while she was in her teens, and by about 810 she was connected with the caliph, al-Amin. His successor, al-Ma’mun (r813–33), paid 50,000 dirhams for ‘Arib. That sum was remarkable: in the ninth century, a skilled labourer would earn no more than 20 dirhams per month. Slave-singers had become a popular feature in the permissive culture of Baghdad’s elite, exemplifying the libertinism sheltered from public view by palace walls. Hidden in plain sight, these women moved in and out of private spaces, attracting as much fascination as opprobrium. Al-Ma’mun was the second of a string of caliphs who enjoyed ‘Arib’s company and talents; one, al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847–61), paid 100,000 dirhams for her. Female slaves, especially those hired for entertainment, were “badges of conspicuous consumption”, as Julia Bray, scholar of Arabic literature, put it. By her own account, ‘Arib had sexual relations with eight caliphs, and narrated episodes of her sexual history; to those listening in Baghdad and Samarra, she was as coarse as she was refined. Several accounts portray ‘Arib as a master of musical traditions and styles, and an arbiter of taste. She is credited with writing some 1,000 songs. A public figure in the private realm of elite households and ruling courts, as quick-witted as she was erudite, ‘Arib frequented salons and performances, and oscillated between paramours and partners, leaving the pathetic entreaties of spurned lovers in her wake. Her writings reflect her tumultuous love life: “As for the lover he went away In spite of and against my will. I erred in being separated from one For whom I have found no substitute. Because of his absence from my sight. I have become tired of life." [Translated by Fuad Caswell] Abu Nuwas (died 814), the leading poet of the day, was both an observer of and participant in this elite culture, and his verses about another slave girl capture something of its ambivalence: “She demonstrates piety outwardly to God’s people Then meets me with coquetry and a smile. I went to her heart to complain [about her] But wasn’t alone – there was a queue for a mile.“ [Translated by Philip Kennedy] When ‘Arib died, apparently in her nineties, she was a woman of considerable wealth who had much earlier secured free status. Both her career and her life had been a performance, balancing elite culture with middlebrow entertainment, and a story of vertiginous social mobility realised through education, talent and insouciant ambition. By definition, celebrities belong to the public; because she belonged to high society as a whole, she belonged to no one but herself. Born a slave, she found a freedom enjoyed by few men or women of her time. Chase F Robinson is distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York, and author of Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives: The First 1,000 Years (Thames & Hudson, 2016) This article was taken from issue 12 of BBC World Histories magazine
Ibn Battuta: the most famous traveller of the medieval Arab world
Justin Marozzi traces three decades of travels by the unparalleled 14th-century wanderer across the Dar al-Islam – the vast Muslim world
Who was Ibn Battuta? Revered today as the ‘Traveller of Islam’, Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Lawati al-Tanji ibn Battuta was born in the Moroccan port of Tangier in 1304. Of Berber stock, rather than an Arab, his was a family of Islamic legal scholars, an intellectual heritage that would underpin later stints as chief judge to foreign rulers. Few other details are known about his background, other than what featured in his memoir, and even there reliable information – such as the number of his wives and children – is scant. We know, though, that his lifetime coincided with the highpoint of splendour under the Moroccan Marinid dynasty, which ruled swathes of North Africa between 1244 and 1465, making its imperial capital in Fez. This ancient city, where Ibn Battuta dictated his memoir to the young scribe Ibn Juzayy, was a seat of learning known as the ‘Athens of Africa’, hosting al-Qarawiyyin, a complex of mosque, madrassa, library and university dating back to the ninth century. This rich cultural hinterland likely provided the foundations for Ibn Battuta’s Muslim self-confidence and sense of superiority when encountering non-Islamic cultures, such as those in China and parts of Africa. As for his curiosity, wanderlust and insatiable desire for adventure, who knows where they came from? Perhaps he took at face value the Prophet Muhammad’s famous exhortation: “Travel in search of knowledge, even though the journey take you to China”. Ibn Battuta died in c1368–69, aged around 65. It’s not known where or how he died, nor indeed much about his life after the writing of his memoir – which, 650 years later, remains one of the greatest works of travel literature ever written. Where did Ibn Battuta travel? On a piercingly clear day in June 1325, a 21-year-old Moroccan from Tangier fastened his sandals, checked he had everything he needed, and said his goodbyes to family and friends. He was setting out on Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – a long and arduous journey from the northwest tip of Africa, but one that usually took months or a few years, not decades. He departed alone, “having neither fellow-traveller in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me, and a desire long cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries… I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones… and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.” Little did any of them know that this relatively straightforward pilgrimage would somehow be extended into a 29-year, 75,000-mile odyssey across Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the far east. East to Egypt Alone on his donkey, Ibn Battuta headed east across empty, sun-scoured valleys, over the Rif mountains and on through cedar and oak forests. In what’s now western Algeria, he joined a caravan of travellers, which provided some companionship – though it did not prevent an acute pang of homesickness outside Tunis. “I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started in my eyes, and wept bitterly,” he wrote. And not just homesickness: as on other occasions during his later travels, at Bougie in Algeria he fell ill from fever, though soon recovered enough to continue. In Tunis he threw himself into his books, lodging in a madrassa (Islamic college) and hobnobbing with illustrious scholars and judges. It was the earliest display of his evident ambition, and a glimpse of the inveterate social climber he would become. Extraordinarily, on leaving Tunis in November 1325 amid a swelling caravan of travellers, he was appointed their qadi (judge) in recognition of his burgeoning intellectual talents. Somewhat frustratingly, his later accounts rarely mention his experiences of life on the road; descriptions of landscapes and conditions are notable by their absence from his story. So we know little of the details of his journey across north Africa – but rather more about his impressions of cities, and of people he encountered. Marriages came and went for Ibn Battuta like the desert winds. Two were contracted before he reached Cairo, the “mother of cities”, which mesmerised him as it does first-time visitors to this day. Packed with peerless monuments, the city “surges as the waves of the sea with her throngs of folk and can scarce contain them”. Like any tourist in Egypt, after admiring the city’s mosques, colleges and an impressive hospital that offered medical services free at the point of delivery, Ibn Battuta took to the Nile (which “surpasses all rivers of the earth in sweetness of taste, breadth of channel and magnitude of utility”). There was something of the prude about the young traveller, who was appalled by what he saw in one bathhouse, where he found men “wearing no covering. This appeared a shocking thing to me, and I went to the governor and informed him of it.” Sailing up the Nile, Ibn Battuta attempted to cross the Red Sea to the Arabian peninsula, but was stymied by conflict and returned to Cairo before departing in July 1326 to travel to Mecca via an alternative route. In Jerusalem, then a small town of around 10,000 inhabitants noted for its sacred Muslim sites such as al-Aqsa Mosque, he was smitten by the Dome of the Rock. “Both outside and inside, the decoration is so magnificent and the workmanship so surpassing as to defy description. The greater part is covered with gold so that the eyes of one who gazes on its beauties are dazzled by its brilliance, now glowing like a mass of light, now flashing like lightning.” By contrast, Damascus – a short journey of 150 miles or so from Jerusalem – was a full-blown metropolis with a population around 10 times as great. In 634, Damascus had been the first major Byzantine city to fall to Muslim warriors – a feather in the cap for the fast-spreading Islamic empire. With a history stretching back centuries – it’s often claimed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world – Damascus had long attracted florid praise from Muslim visitors. Ibn Battuta considered its Umayyad Mosque “the greatest mosque on earth”, and Damascus “the city that surpasses all other cities in beauty and takes precedence of them in loveliness”. Apart from rubbing shoulders with the cream of the city’s scholars, holy men and officials, we know he married again in Damascus, and just as quickly divorced; we also know that he took many concubines and fathered numerous children across several continents. In September 1326, Ibn Battuta’s caravan set off south from Damascus towards Arabia, passing the mighty castle of Karak, “one of the most marvellous, inaccessible and celebrated of fortresses”, still standing today. Once on the Arabian peninsula, he recounted that the caravan “pushes on speedily day and night, for fear of this wilderness”. After four days in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Ibn Battuta and his fellow pilgrims finally reached Mecca “with hearts full of gladness at reaching the goal of their hopes” – a spiritually uplifting experience. But once his pilgrimage was over, in mid-November, it was clear the young Moroccan had been bitten by the travel bug. There was no question of returning home. Instead, Ibn Battuta set his sights on travelling north. In November he was invited by a rich official to share a relatively luxurious camel litter in a caravan bound for Mesopotamia (a land corresponding roughly with what’s now Iraq). Having passed through Basra, they looped through the mountains and orchards of Persia via Isfahan – “one of the largest and fairest of cities” – and Shiraz, where he admired the local women’s piety. He reached Baghdad in 1327, and recalled the famous verse his father used to recite to him:“Baghdad for men of wealth has an ever-open door / But short and narrow shrift is all she gives the poor.” A spa-lover before his time, Ibn Battuta was again fascinated by the city’s public baths, impressed by their state-of-the-art facilities and by the Baghdadis’ generosity with fluffy towels. “Every bather is given three towels: one to wear round his waist when he goes in, another to wear round his waist when he comes out, and the third to dry himself with.” More scholarly appetites were sated with visits to “the wonderful Nizamiya College” and, a stone’s throw from the river Tigris, Mustansiriya University, Baghdad’s finest ancient monument and one of the world’s oldest universities, founded in 1233. Ibn Battuta was a proud, observant Muslim travelling – and later writing – in an era when the self-confident blaze of Islam illuminated much of Africa and Asia. For any Muslim, Baghdad – capital of the mighty Abbasid caliphate from 762 to 1258 – was a hallowed city, an architectural gem steeped in glorious history. In his words: “She is the abode of peace and capital of al-Islam, of illustrious rank and supreme preeminence, abode of caliphs and residence of scholars.” Beyond Baghdad After Baghdad, the adventures had to continue. There was a pause – understandable after totting up around 4,000 miles in frequently challenging conditions – while Ibn Battuta returned to his books. He backtracked to Mecca, where he studied and prayed for a year – then it was time to hit the road again. In c1329–30, he sailed down the Red Sea, visiting Yemen before continuing south along the east African coast, calling in at Mogadishu and Mombasa, successfully dodging pirates and an unscrupulous guide’s plot to kill him. His party then sailed north again, rounding Oman and traversing the Gulf of Hormuz before crossing the Arabian peninsula from Bahrain to Mecca. From 1330, he retraced his footsteps north and continued to Anatolia, aspects of which thrilled and disgusted him. In one city he learned that “they buy beautiful Greek slave girls and put them out to prostitution, and each girl has to pay a regular due to her master. I heard it said that the girls go into the bathhouses with the men, and anyone who wishes to indulge in depravity does so in the bathhouse – and nobody tries to stop him.” Sailing across the Black Sea to the Crimea, Ibn Battuta ventured up the Volga, then travelled south through the Balkans. Reaching Constantinople in 1332, the Moroccan did what he did best and indulged in some more shameless social climbing. As an erudite young scholar and man of letters, he managed to secure an audience with the Byzantine emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos, who gave him a robe of honour and assigned him a horse on which, to the accompaniment of “trumpets, fifes and drums”, he was paraded around the city to admire its “marvellous and rare sights”. He was made to sing for his supper and finery, quizzed by the curious emperor on Islamic cities including Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad. Though impressed by its great size, Ibn Battuta considered the Byzantine capital more like a dozen individual villages separated by fields than a single city. He caught the unmistakable whiff of imperial decline – broken bridges, filthy markets – in his description of the city, counterbalanced by a recognition of its powerful Christian identity, heritage and practice, not least in the Hagia Sophia, the great basilica church that he was told contained “thousands” of monks and priests. That autumn, Ibn Battuta set out east again for central Asia, travelling via Bukhara to reach Samarkand, which he thought “one of the largest and most perfectly beautiful cities in the world”. Of its large palaces and impressive monuments, though, he saw that “the greater part are ruined and a portion of the city is also devastated – it has no wall or gates and there are no gardens outside the city itself”. Such scars were the legacy of ruinous Mongol invasions unleashed by Genghis Khan a century before. Ibn Battuta’s visit in 1333 came just a few decades before the arrival of Timur (often known as Tamerlane), who chose this ancient Silk Road city as his capital, and developed it into a great cultural and commercial centre. The Moroccan was particularly excited to visit the tomb of Kusam ibn Abbas, cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, reputed to have arrived here in 676. Brimming with missionary fervour, Kusam was on a mission to convert Zoroastrian fire-worshippers to Islam. The local population did not take kindly to this foreign preacher, however, and he was apprehended and beheaded. Legend has it that he picked up his head and jumped down a well, where he has remained ever since, ready to resume his work. Arabs venerated him, and the tomb attracted many of the faithful over the centuries – and still does today. From central Asia, Ibn Battuta pushed south-east, in 1334 arriving in India where he finagled his way into the service of Muhammad bin Tughluq, sultan of Delhi. Tradition dictated that visitors should bestow valuable gifts on the sultan, so Ibn Battuta borrowed goods from an Iraqi merchant, and presented 30 horses, camels, arrows and slaves. The return on his investment was immediate: the position of chief qadi, a huge signing-on bonus of 12,000 dinars and a fabulous annual salary of 12,000 dinars. He was rich. Working for the notoriously cruel ruler was no picnic, though. The sultan was “far too free in shedding blood”, Ibn Battuta reckoned, a firm believer in hideously imaginative torture. Criminals were skinned alive or thrown into pens to be gored by elephants with tusk-mounted swords. Hundreds were brought in chains daily to the audience hall, the Moroccan reported, to be executed, tortured or beaten. At one point, Ibn Battuta himself was suspected of disloyalty and was forced to abandon his possessions, don a beggar’s rags and live with a hermit in a cave for five months until things calmed down. One can easily imagine his relief when, in 1341, the sultan appointed him ambassador to the Mongol court in China, offering an escape route from a paranoid, disintegrating state. Mission to China The journey had barely begun when Ibn Battuta’s party was attacked by 4,000 Hindu rebels. Then, chased by horsemen, he was overrun and robbed, narrowly escaping death. More scrapes followed, including a shipwreck resulting in the loss of his companions and the death of a slave girl pregnant with his child. Down but not out, Ibn Battuta decided to continue east alone. Sailing on, he stopped in the Maldives for nine months, where he became chief judge (again), joined the royal family and took another clutch of wives. After another diversion to Sri Lanka, where he hobnobbed with the king and climbed the holy summit of Adam’s Peak, in 1346 he docked at the port of Chittagong, in what’s now Bangladesh. Ibn Battuta thought it squalid, “a hell crammed with good things”, the latter presumably including the “extremely beautiful” slave girl he purchased. Sailing south again through the Strait of Malacca, he reached the Chinese port of Quanzhou later that year, though only after pirates and shipwrecks had once again robbed him of all his possessions. The orthodox Muslim did not take to China. Though impressed by the size of cities such as Hangzhou, at that time probably the most populous city on Earth, he confessed to being “greatly troubled” by the country’s “paganism”. The truth is that he was invariably happier travelling among his fellow Muslims, and by 1348 he was en route home via Sumatra. During the 6,000-mile journey back to Morocco, in Damascus he learnt of the death of his father some 15 years earlier and of a 10-year-old son he had never met. Yet no sooner had he returned to Morocco than he resolved to cross the Sahara to visit the empire of Mali, and set out in late 1351. Once there, he was disappointed by the food, including millet porridge and a yam-like root that made him seriously ill. But he was as determined as ever to receive the lavish presents from the ruler that he felt were his due. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/Ibn-Battuta-medieval-journeys-1-db9a703.jpg" width="1024" height="683" alt="Camels traverse the Sahara Desert in North Africa" title="Camels traverse the Sahara Desert in North Africa. In 1325, the young Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta set out east from Tangier through such desert landscapes - and didn't return home for a quarter of a century (Hemis / AWL Images)" /> “I have journeyed to the countries of the world and met their kings,” he told Mansa (emperor) Sulayman of Mali quite brazenly. “I have been four months in your country without your giving me a reception gift or anything else. What shall I say of you in the presence of other sultans?” The unabashed request had the desired effect: a house, an allowance and a quantity of gold. Not that this in any way curbed his acerbic comments on what he called the “feeble intellect” of his fellow Africans. Returning to Morocco from Mali, in 1354 Ibn Battuta settled in Fez, the great imperial city of Morocco. It was there, under the orders of the great Marinid Sultan Abu Inan – who was understandably impressed by the scholarly traveller – that he dictated the story of his life to a young writer, Ibn Juzayy. The result was his voluminous memoir, The Precious Gift for Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel, known in Arabic as the Rihla (‘Journey’). The ultimate Arab travelogue is as fresh today as it was when first dictated in the mid-14th century, at once erudite, anecdotal, humorous, humane and consistently entertaining. Want to read more about famous expeditions? Here are some of our most popular articles... A tale of Tudor travel: John Cabot’s voyage to America The first great polar expedition: Fridtjof Nansen’s 1888 traverse of the Greenland Ice Sheet In the footsteps of Alexander Gardner, a Victorian adventurer who travelled to the Hindu Kush Justin Marozzi is a historian and travel writer, and the author of Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization (Allen Lane, 2019) This article was taken from issue 18 of BBC World Histories magazine
Why does Saladin have such an enduring reputation?
Jonathan Phillips discovers how Saladin became a role model – both for medieval chivalry and the modern world
On 2 October 1187, the sultan Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – known commonly today as Saladin – captured Jerusalem for the people of Islam. It was the crowning achievement of his career – an extraordinary triumph that ensured his name has echoed down the centuries. Over the previous years, Saladin had drawn together a fragile coalition of Muslims from across the Middle East to take on and crush the Christians – or ‘Franks’, as the inhabitants of the Crusader States were known – at the battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187, opening the way for the recovery of Islam’s third most important city. Jerusalem is also, of course, the fulcrum of Christianity, and news of its fall inevitably provoked outrage. The desire to avenge this loss triggered the Third Crusade, an expedition launched by the greatest rulers of western Europe, including Richard I (aka Richard the Lionheart) of England. After years of relentless campaigning, though, the crusaders left for home without accomplishing their primary aim. Despite suffering a number of serious defeats, Saladin held onto Jerusalem. He died on 4 March 1193, exhausted by the struggle. Over 800 years later, the sultan commands an extraordinarily enduring reputation across the Muslim world. His story is woven into the political, religious and cultural landscape as the man who defeated invading westerners and fought for his faith and his people. Though the victory at Jerusalem is at the heart of his renown, Saladin’s character – or the image formed around his character – is also immensely important. Over the course of his lifetime, Saladin became famous for his generosity, piety, justice and mercy. And though he undoubtedly benefitted from a cadre of eloquent and persuasive literary admirers, the evidence from those beyond his inner circle – even the writings of his enemies – indicates the prominence of these personality traits, and demonstrates that they were central to his success as the leader of the jihad against the Franks, and as a dynastic empire-builder. Even today, the range of people who call upon Saladin’s legacy is astonishing. An ethnic Kurd, he is a hero to many of his people; he appears on the coinage of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the university in Irbil is named for him. President Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey periodically invokes the sultan to signal his opposition to the west; at the inauguration of a new airport in south-east Turkey in 2015, he stated: “We are naming this airport Selahaddin Eyyubi [Saladin Ayyub] to send a message of solidarity and brotherhood, and to say that Jerusalem belongs to Kurds, Turks, Arabs and Muslims forever.” A yet more incendiary invocation of the sultan’s memory was made by Osama bin Laden, former leader of the Islamist terror group al-Qaeda. In verse, a common form of communication in Middle Eastern cultures, he wrote: “I envision you all as [Saladin] himself, wielding his all-conquering sword dripping with the blood of infidels. / I envision [Saladin] coming out of the clouds, and in our hearts and minds is created the remembrance of the battles [of the Prophet Muhammad].” Textbook example Saladin also appears in school books across the Middle East and in Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Malaysia. Recently, however, in the aftermath of the brief rule of President Mursi of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (2012–13), the regime of General Sisi removed the sultan’s story from the curriculum on the basis that it could inspire jihad – a backhanded compliment reflecting Saladin’s ability to encourage action. His life and career feature in many less-provocative cultural forms including film, dance, theatre, television drama and documentaries. In a cartoon series produced for Malaysian television in 2010, aimed at 10- to 15-year-olds, a figure based on Saladin appeared as “the ultimate hero: courageous in the face of danger, never willing to admit defeat and funny when he needs to be. In a world of danger there’s only one man you will want in your corner – Saladin.” His legacy is not confined to politics and religion, yet his story is inextricably bound to the memory and legacy of the crusades. This is particularly true in the Middle East, where tensions connected with the idea of the crusades, and associations with bloody western conquests of Islamic lands, continue to fester. Though the crusaders were driven from the Holy Land in 1291, the threat of subsequent invasions and other struggles launched by forces of Christian Europe against the Ottoman empire during the 15th and 16th centuries meant that the prospect of a repeat of the crusades remained genuinely alive for the region’s people. It’s unsurprising, then, that Saladin’s defeat of the Franks continued to loom large in the collective memory of that era – but so, too, did his abilities as a ruler. Naima, an important Ottoman administrator in the early 18th century, wrote of the sultan: “It is the truth that he served religion and the state in a way that has been granted to few other kings. Books of history are overflowing with honour and praise for that noble individual.” Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the return of large-scale western influence in the Middle East and north Africa, encouraged by the slow decline of the Ottoman empire. Manifestations of this western presence included Christian patriarchates and consulates reappearing in the Holy Land, the British taking control of Egypt in 1882 and then, after the First World War, the establishment of the French mandate in Syria and the British mandate in Palestine. What was the French mandate? In the aftermath of the First World War, the Ottoman empire disintegrated. In 1920, political and historical interests in the region led France to take control of Syria. Two years later, the League of Nations confirmed the mandate stating that the French would be responsible, as trustees or caretakers, for helping prepare Syria for self-government. People and leaders often invoke heroes from the past to promote their own current causes. So it was that, after the British took power in Egypt, the parallels of past conflicts with the crusaders were all too inviting for those who opposed this new alien presence. In conjunction with cultural developments such as the emergence of Arab newspapers and theatre groups, as well as a growing sense of identity that coalesced under the idea of Arab nationalism, the achievements of Saladin proved a highly alluring subject for those who resented British rule in Egypt. The Balfour Declaration and the growing tensions between Zionists (who were promoting Jewish nationhood with the intention of creating a territorial state in their historic homeland) and Palestinians, along with the French mandate in Syria, prompted political and cultural outpourings invoking Saladin. Poetry, which has played a central part in Arab culture down the centuries – many of Saladin’s contemporary admirers expressed themselves in complex verses – flourished during the 1920s and 1930s with powerful political appeals using the sultan’s story. More direct links with the crusades were made on numerous occasions in the region. In the 1930s, for example, Palestine celebrated Hattin Day, commemorating Saladin’s defeat of the Franks. Similarly, Zionists were increasingly painted as latter-day crusaders and, after the foundation of Israel in 1948, that country was characterised by Arab nationalists as a successor to the Crusader States, reinforcing such historical associations. Arab nationalists continued to embrace Saladin’s legacy through the 1950s and beyond. During his conflicts with the west over the 1956 Suez Crisis and thereafter, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who headed the short-lived United Arab Republic (1958–61), made much of Saladin’s defeat of the crusaders. More recently, Saddam Hussein regularly invoked the memory of the medieval victor over the west. The Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat aspired to emulate the sultan’s capture of Jerusalem; during the First Intifada, in confrontations between the Israeli troops and the Palestinians, protestors chanted against the Israeli leaders: “Tell Shamir, tell Rabin – we are sons of Saladin!” And the Assad regime in Syria has drawn upon the presence of Saladin’s tomb in Damascus, as well as his historical successes and love of the Syrian capital city, in validating its rule. What was the First Intifada? This Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule erupted in Gaza in 1987 and soon spread into the West Bank territories. Demonstrations frequently became violent: protestors threw objects at Israeli troops, who responded with gunfire; Palestinians later also used guns. Multiple forms of resistance emerged, including strikes and boycotts. The First Intifada ended in 1993. Conflict with co-religionists It is, though, important to recognise that not all Muslims revere, or have revered, Saladin. In the course of his career, the sultan spent many years in conflict with his Sunni Muslim co-religionists. Saladin was undoubtedly set upon liberating Jerusalem for Islam, but inextricably linked to this was his determination to create a powerful dynastic empire. Though the former aim was certainly endorsed by all Muslims, he attracted a lot of criticism for usurping the Zengid dynasty in Syria. In addition, military defeats at the battles of Montgisard (1177), Acre (1189), Arsuf (1191) and Jaffa (1192) also attracted periodic criticism from Muslims, but such were his diplomatic skills – bolstered by the largely unwavering loyalty of his own family – that these setbacks did not terminally damage his cause. As a leader of Sunni Islam, Saladin was also determined to assert Sunni dominance over Shia Islam, the rival doctrine headed at that time by the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo. When the Fatimids fell into decline, Saladin’s uncle Shirkuh led a conquest of Egypt, joined by his nephew. Saladin emerged as his clan’s dynastic figurehead, and in 1171, when the young Shia caliph died, Saladin assumed full control of Egypt and imposed adherence to the Sunni branch of Islam. Curiously, this provoked relatively little opposition, perhaps because the Fatimids had become apathetic upholders of the Shia cause. Down the centuries, however, Shia Muslims – the minority group in Islam, comprising around 10 per cent of the faith – certainly recall Saladin’s termination of their caliphate. As Sunni and Shia Muslims have intermittently fought one another during the modern era, the sultan has been denounced by the latter as a friend of the crusaders and a traitor to Islam. Who were the Fatimids and what is a caliphate? The leader of the Fatimid dynasty, which emerged in north Africa at the start of the 10th century, was regarded by Shia Muslims as the successor to the Prophet, and rightful spiritual leader of the Muslim community. In 969, the Fatimids took control of Egypt and founded Cairo. At its greatest extent, the Fatimid caliphate spanned Syria and the Holy Land but by the 12th century it was in decline, and was ousted by Saladin in 1171. A caliphate is an Islamic state ruled by a caliph – literally a ‘successor’ of the Prophet Muhammad – the religious and legal leader of the community of believers. Sunni Muslims believe that such a leader should be chosen by election; Shia adherents believe that the Muslim leader should be a descendant of the Prophet’s cousin Ali. The caliphate was controlled by various dynasties until its abolition in 1924. Meanwhile, in the west, there is an entirely different cultural memory of the crusades – highlighted by US President George W Bush when, after the 9/11 attack, he described the American-launched military campaign dubbed the ‘war on terror’ as “a crusade”. In doing so, he echoed Osama bin Laden’s characterisation of the west, sparking immense controversy. Chainmail-clad past The then-president’s ignorance of the cultural sensitivity of the word in the Muslim world can perhaps be partly ascribed to the fact that, in the west, crusades are seen as events from the distant, chainmail-clad past. Yet, though crusaders were dismissed by Enlightenment thinkers as credulous zealots, from the 19th century literature and art offered a more positive view. Coupled with the rising western presence in the Middle East, some – especially the French – chose to recall their own crusading heritage in glowing terms. ‘Crusade’ also came to be more generally used as a metaphor, meaning a fight for a morally just cause. This metaphor has been deployed in a military context, such as during the First World War, and for other entirely secular uses: we might talk of a crusade against smallpox, for example, or for better education. In such ways, the word is still frequently used across all aspects of life. So in the west a ‘crusade’ is either an event in distant history or a word with positive moral connotations, uncoupled from the medieval holy wars. In the Middle East, though, it represents a memory and a metaphor so deep-rooted that it cannot be shifted, particularly in the minds of those Muslims engaged in conflict with the west. Where does Saladin fit in to this? His status in the west is something of a paradox. As the man who took Jerusalem, he was immediately branded as the son of Satan, a harbinger of the apocalypse and a mortal enemy of all Christians. Yet in achieving that victory he had created an enduring example of estimable behaviour. In contrast with the actions of the crusaders when they took Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099 during the First Crusade, Saladin did not slaughter the city’s inhabitants but instead ransomed them. Diplomacy took a prominent role during the Third Crusade and, perhaps to their surprise, the Franks found in Saladin and his chief negotiator, his younger brother Saphadin, men whose behaviour and values they admired and, in many respects, that represented their own aspirations. This was an age in which chivalry was emerging, and the crusaders admired men of faith, of courtesy towards women, of generosity, and with interests in hunting, poetry and music. They also had to come to terms with the fact that they were dealing with an opponent who had, in taking and holding Jerusalem, defeated and then resisted them. He must, therefore, be a worthy opponent. Saladin was soon cited as a benchmark for generosity, mentioned in guides to chivalric behaviour. He was presented in literature as a gallant suitor of western women, a master of disguise who could visit Europe incognito, and even as a secret convert to Christianity. All of this was nonsensical, of course, but was a sign of how the west came to assimilate this great figure into its culture, and how his image could evolve and endure. Saladin’s story, then, is a complicated one that does not fit a simple ‘clash of civilisations’ binary of east versus west, Islam versus Christianity. He fought fellow Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, as well as the Frankish crusaders. Periodically, crusaders established alliances with Muslim states, and expended energy in conflict with one another rather than simply struggling against Saladin and his successors. Saladin himself occupies a unique middle ground. It is almost impossible to think of another figure who dealt a people and a faith (Christianity) such a huge blow (the capture of Jerusalem), yet who has been so admired by those people. The process by which his image evolved is a fascinating journey embracing literary fantasy as well as historical fact. Yet far more important still today is his legacy in the Middle East, where his past achievements and character are familiar to all, and where he continues to be revered as a focus of admiration and hope. Saladin: modest, wise, prodigious Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub was born in c1137 in Takrit, a town about 120 miles north of Baghdad. His family were Kurdish warlords serving under Nur al-Din, ruler of what’s now northern Iraq and Syria, who fomented Muslim jihad (holy war) against the Franks. Over time, Saladin challenged and finally usurped Nur al-Din’s authority, creating an empire that stretched north from Egypt and Yemen to Mosul, Damascus and Aleppo. This power enabled him to defeat the Franks at the battle of Hattin and conquer most of the kingdom of Jerusalem, including the holy city itself. Saladin surrounded himself with a corps of skilled and trusted advisors and administrators who transmitted news of his successes across the Muslim near east, proclaiming that his victory was a sign of God’s approval, and of huge benefit to Islam. Outside formal court life, Saladin was an enthusiastic huntsman and an expert polo player. In contrast with many European contemporaries, he consistently fathered male children. It’s been claimed that he had 17 sons, many of whom were born to concubines, though it’s known that he held his wife, Ismat al-Din, in special affection, writing to her daily during his serious illness from 1185. In his final years, the strain of constantly fighting crusaders and running the huge family empire took an immense physical and mental toll on the sultan, who suffered from violent stomach pains that sometimes prevented him from fighting. Saladin was known for his modesty in dress and demeanour. When he died in 1193, so great had been his generosity that his treasury was almost empty, and it was said that money had to be borrowed to buy the bricks to line his tomb. Want to learn more about the era of the Crusades? Here are some of our most popular articles... The crusades: were they also a time of of collaboration and respect between Muslims and Christians? The rise and fall of the Knights Templar Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? Does Richard I deserve his reputation as a martial genius? Jonathan Phillips is professor of crusading history at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Bodley Head, 2019) This content first appeared in issue 16 of BBC World Histories magazine
Muslim-Crusader interactions: a clash of civilisations?
Yes, the crusades were marked by fanaticism and savagery. But, argues Suleiman A Mourad, they were also a time of collaboration and respect between Muslims and Christians
Lying in his own blood on the battlefield near Mansoura, his standard covering his grievously wounded body, Emir Fakhr al-Din departed this world on 8 February 1250. He had left his encampment with a handful of guards to assess the army of King Louis IX and devise a plan to defend Egypt from the onslaught of what became known as the Seventh Crusade. But before he could make it back to safety, he was cut down in an ambush. This was a sad ending for someone who only a few months earlier had become the de facto ruler of the Ayyubid sultanate. Luck as well as talent had destined Fakhr al-Din for greatness. His mother had nursed the future Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil, which strengthened the bond between the two families. So when al-Kamil became sovereign in 1218, Fakhr al-Din was his closest confidant, and never left his side except on important missions. One of these missions was an embassy to Sicily to negotiate an alliance with Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Fakhr al-Din achieved much more than that. In the short time he stayed in Palermo, he profoundly impressed the emperor. The two conversed about science, falconry and poetry, and before sailing back to Egypt, Frederick held a ceremony to knight his Muslim friend. Read more: Crusader queens: the formidable female rulers of Jerusalem The two agendas The story of Fakhr al-Din sums up the history of Muslim-crusader interactions during the period. There were times for war a lot of it. There were other times for diplomacy, alliances, friendships, commerce and the exchange of science and knowledge. There were also times when war and peace coincided. This complex legacy of the crusader period in the Middle East is little known. The reason is simple: many modern histories of the crusades have focussed on the violence of the period – and, in doing so, have blurred our ability to see the other side. This was no honest mishap. We have inadvertently allowed modern agendas – one Eurocentric, the other Islamocentric – to determine the way we have reconstructed crusader history. Indeed, since the 18th century, the Eurocentric and Islamocentric agendas have imposed themselves on the historiography of the crusades. They have shaped its narrative as a clash of civilisations. In the process, all the evidence to the contrary has been silenced or ignored; if acknowledged at all, it has only been seen as inconsequential marginalia. When crusader history is treated as ‘European’ history, it becomes easy to think of it as a past extension of modern Europe, tied to the national narratives of modern European countries (Italy, France and Germany, to name a few – none of which existed as such in the Middle Ages). This also tempts scholars and readers to reassess and evaluate the crusades in terms of the values they personally cherish. The Eurocentric agenda led some to imagine the crusaders as predecessors of those later colonialists whose duty was to ‘civilise’ the world – as in the French scholar Joseph-François Michaud’s 1840 Histoire des Croisades (‘The History of the Crusades’), a book that still exerts tremendous impact in Europe in general, and France in particular. Other Europeans, influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment or enraptured by oriental romanticism, were critical of the crusades and treated them as an ugly mix of religious fanaticism and savagery – the Europe they wanted condemned. Two examples of this trend are Sir Walter Scott’s 1825 novel The Talisman and the 1935 movie The Crusades by the great American film-maker Cecil B DeMille. The Eurocentric reading of crusader history also gave medieval European sources a place of dominance in writing the modern narrative of the crusades. As such, non-European medieval sources, which document the experiences of Greek-Byzantines, Armenians, Muslims and Arab-Christians, are read according to the European sources. I do not mean to say that these other sources furnish a more accurate history, but they are indispensable for a proper understanding of the complexity of crusader history, and must be given a central place in the rewriting of the narrative, rather than a secondary role. A humiliating fate Similarly, the Islamocentric reading of crusader history was shaped during the years of colonial subjugation of most Muslim-inhabited lands, starting in the 19th century. Modern Muslim scholars have both imagined and used the crusades as a predecessor of European colonialism; they forewarn of the colonialists’ evil schemes and augur that they will assuredly meet the same humiliating fate as their medieval ancestors. A great example of this trend is found in the popular survey Al-Haraka al-Salibiyya (‘The Crusader Movement’) by the Egyptian Said Ashour, which was first published in 1963. These Islamocentric readings selectively employ Arab sources from the period, and champion specific figures such as Saladin and Baybars by exaggerating their anti-crusader accomplishments, and ignoring their friendly interactions with certain groups among the crusaders. In more recent decades, the Eurocentric reading has been nuanced but never completely challenged, while the Islamocentric reading has not changed at all, thanks to the political situation in the Muslim world. Read more: Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades? “Christian pigs and filth” The crusades was not a clash of civilisations. Only a fool would say that the Muslims and crusaders loved each other, but this does not justify going to the other extreme – for the contemporary sources (especially the Islamic ones) draw a mosaic picture of the period, featuring wars and alliances, boycott and exchange, hatred and amicability and myriad shades in between. In other words, there were never two camps. There were, however, many actors, with different agendas and varying schemes to achieve them. A window into this complex reality is provided in The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. A Muslim secretary from medieval Iberia (Spain), Ibn Jubayr, who died in 1217, sojourned in the eastern Mediterranean and saw things not always palatable to his taste. One observation he made was that, despite occasional wars between the Muslims and crusaders, merchants and commerce continued to move freely between the two realms as if everything was normal. For him, this was a sign of the corruption of rulers on both sides. In one instance, in 1184 he crossed the plain from the Sea of Galilee to Acre, where he discovered countless farming villages inhabited by Muslims who seemed to him to live in complete harmony with the crusaders. What shocked Ibn Jubayr the most was not only that the crusaders were not harming the Muslims. He bemoaned the fact that these Muslims did not seem bothered by their mingling with – to use his words – “Christian pigs and filth”. As such, in Ibn Jubayr’s eyes, these Muslims could not have been good Muslims. The complexity of the crusader period is apparent in the contemporary Muslim sources. For instance, the physician and chronicler Ibn Abi Usaibia (died 1270) recounts the story of an envoy from Emperor Frederick II arriving sometime in the 1220s at the court of the Muslim ruler of Mosul bearing a list of questions on astronomy for a specific scholar, Kamal al-Din Ibn Yunus. The emperor knew from his court philosopher, Theodore of Antioch, that only Ibn Yunus could solve them. Ibn Yunus obliged and provided the answers to the envoy, who carried them back to Sicily. On a different occasion, another envoy was sent to Cairo to seek answers for mathematical problems, and Sultan al-Kamil instructed his court’s math em aticians to write down their solution and send them back to Frederick. Courts and embassies The scholarly cooperation between Frederick II and the Ayyubids was sustained for several years. Al-Kamil’s son, Sultan al-Salih Ayyub, delegated the logician and jurist Siraj al-Din al-Urmawi to the court of Frederick in Palermo, and while there al-Urmawi authored a book on logic for the emperor. A few years after that, in 1261, the jurist and logician Ibn Wasil travelled to Apulia in southern Italy on an embassy from the Mamluk sultan Baybars to Frederick’s son King Manfred. He stayed for two years in Manfred’s court in Barletta, and like al-Urmawi before him, Ibn Wasil wrote a book on logic that he dedicated to his host, which he titled The Imperial Treatise. There is also the example of the scholar al-Harawi, who, almost a century before, took up residency in Jerusalem for several weeks in 1173, during which time he frequently visited and prayed in the Islamic shrine known as the Dome of the Rock. The crusaders had transformed the building into a church, which they called ‘Templum Domini’, or the Temple of the Lord. Al-Harawi, who was fanatical about alchemy, was a regular feature in the royal court of Jerusalem’s King Amalric. More importantly, in his A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage, al-Harawi criticised and deconstructed many of the popular customs of making pilgrimage to part icular shrines and religious sanctuaries in Palestine and the surrounding regions as reflective of popular Muslim superstitions and false associations. Yet his observations attest to numerous cases of Muslims, Christians and Jews converging on the same spots to worship. Some of these locations were under crusader rule; others were under Muslim rule. It must be made clear that what I am talking about here is not a convivencia – the disputed ‘golden age’ of tolerance that supposedly existed between faith groups in medieval Andalusia – but instead a complex web of interactions between crusaders and Muslims that cannot and must not be reduced to one thing only: violence. Avenues of knowledge In the history of the transmission of knowledge between the Islamic civilisation, which featured a burgeoning scientific culture, and medieval Europe, two main avenues have been identified. One was through medieval Spain, which has received most of the modern scholarly attention. The other is via the Byzantine empire. There is also Sicily, but attention to this possibility has largely been limited to Frederick’s reign in the 1200s. Another location that witnessed the direct exchange of knowledge was crusader Antioch. Pisans, in particular, benefited from the fact that they had developed a commercial base in the city, picking up a lot of Arabic scientific books which they brought home and translated into Latin. It was in Antioch in the 1120s that Stephen of Pisa (see box, below) came across Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi’s 10th-century Kitab al-Malaki (‘The Complete Book on the Craft of Medicine’), translated it into Latin and then brought it home to Italy. For several centuries, the book became a must-read on the practice and theory of the medical profession. Also, more complete manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Almagest, the infamous mathematical-astronomical masterpiece, were brought from Antioch and retranslated into Latin, infusing new energy into both areas of study. The mightiest battle During the winter of 2016, the Al Jazeera network aired the first episode of its documentary on the crusades, which featured a lineup of notable scholars. The narrator opened the episode with these words: “In the history of conflict between east and west, the mightiest battle between Christianity and Islam. A holy war in the name of religion. For the first time: the story of the crusades from an Arab perspective.” It is clear that this new, ‘first time’ story is the same old yarn about violence that has been told and retold since the 18th century. But medieval sources, especially the Muslim chronicles, tell us a different story. Many people today will refuse to listen to it, however, because the one that feeds the clash of civilisation discourse is more captivating, more exploitable. The period was, for some, an opportunity to kill, loot and amass riches and fame. Others saw it as an occasion for commerce, alliances or the exchange of knowledge. There were some who pursued both. This is crusader history as it was, and it is this complexity that we as historians ought to present. We might not be able to free ourselves of our biases, but we should at least be beholden to the intricacy of history. Suleiman A Mourad is professor of religion at Smith College, Massachusetts. His books include The Mosaic of Islam (Verso, 2016) Information exchange: Muslim-crusader collaboration produced innovations in several different areas MEDICINE In the 1110s and 1120s, Stephen of Pisa journeyed to Antioch in search of Arabic knowledge, specifically philosophy. His desire for learning the superior sciences of the Muslims led him into other fields, including medicine and astronomy. In Antioch, he led a team, including a Muslim convert to Christianity, to translate various works into Latin for European scholars. It is thanks to the list Stephen composed as a result of his translation of Ali ibn al-Abbas’s The Complete Book on the Craft of Medicine that many Arabic medical names entered the medieval vocabulary in Europe. Some, such as ‘cornea’ and ‘abdomen’, are still in use today. FALCONRY Emperor Frederick II developed such a passion for falconry that he once decided to author a book on the subject. He first asked some scholars in his court to translate for him the authoritative Arabic book on falconry, Kitab al-Mutawakkili, attributed to the ninth-century Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil, and other Arabic books as well. They showed Frederick how to study falconry as a science, based on observations and tests. Together, they inspired Frederick’s De Arte Venandi cum a Vibus (‘On the Art of Hunting With Birds’), which scholars consider the first ‘scientific’ study on birds of prey. ARCHITECTURE When Saladin took control of Egypt and ended the reign of the Fatimids in the 1170s, he constructed his palace on a promontory beneath the Muqattam hills in medieval Cairo, away from the alien Shia and Christian communities. Many of the artisans who worked there were captive crusaders, and employed techniques unknown to the Muslims and others in the Middle East. Crusader architecture was much stronger and more durable, and allowed for bigger structures than those the locals were used to. The Muslims gradually learned these techniques of building and fortification, often by observing and studying the crusader castles that were spread all over the eastern Mediterranean. JUSTICE During one of his many visits to crusader-occupied Acre, Usama Ibn Munqidh, a nobleman who fought many battles against the Christians, brought a case against the Lord of Banias for seizing a flock of sheep belonging to him. Usama presented his grievance there to the King of Jerusalem, who convened a jury of knights to adjudicate the case. After hearing both sides, the jury retreated to a room to deliberate, and came back to deliver a verdict in favour of Usama. The king had no choice but to accept their verdict. This was how the Muslims came to know about jury justice. This article was first published in the June 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
The 17th-century expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: what happened?
In 1609, Spain initiated the expulsion of 300,000 'Moriscos' - descendants of Muslims converted to Christianity - in what was then among the largest forced depopulations in history. Matt Carr explores divergent experiences of an early exercise in 'ethnic cleansing'
On 4 April 1609, the Habsburg king Philip III of Spain and his corrupt, all-powerful first minister, the Duke of Lerma, authorised the phased expulsion of the entire population of the people known as Moriscos (‘Little Moors’) from Iberian soil. These were all nominal Catholics, their ancestors having been forcibly converted to Christianity in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The king’s order was not made public, in order to preclude flight or rebellion, and stipulated that the expulsion should begin that autumn in the kingdom of Valencia – home to the largest Morisco population in Spain. Throughout the spring and summer, Spanish officials worked in total secrecy to prepare for the expulsion of the Valencian Moriscos. Spanish naval ships and specially commissioned foreign ships from across Europe were brought to designated ports on the Valencian coast. Soldiers and militia forces stockpiled weapons throughout Valencia and also inland in Castile to prevent the Moriscos from retreating into the interior. On 24 September, town criers in the city of Valencia accused the kingdom’s entire Morisco population of apostasy, heresy and “divine and human lese-majesty”, and announced the king’s intention to expel them to Barbary (as the north African coast was then known) to ensure the “conservation and security” of his realms. The persecution of Jews in medieval England Perilous journeys Over the following three days, Morisco families and communities across the kingdom frantically attempted to gather their possessions and sell them to their Christian neighbours before they were escorted by the king’s officers to their designated ports. Not all acquiesced quietly: in October, thousands of Moriscos in the Valencian interior launched a doomed rebellion that was quickly and brutally suppressed. Your guide to the Spanish Inquisition At the coast, some were taken immediately on board the waiting ships and shipped across the Mediterranean to Barbary. Others waited for days and even weeks before their transportation. Many were robbed and even murdered by their escorts or by Christian bandits before they could reach the Spanish coast. Hundreds and perhaps even thousands of Moriscos were attacked by Muslim pirates on the high seas, were killed by their own crews, or were robbed and murdered in north Africa by nomadic Muslim tribesmen who took them for Spaniards and Christians. By the end of 1609, some 130,000 Valencian Moriscos had been expelled. A jubilant Philip and his ministers extended the expulsion to Castile, Andalusia and Aragon. Over the next four years, Moriscos across Spain were escorted to the Mediterranean coast or driven overland across the Pyrenees. By the time the expulsion was called to a halt in August 1614, Spain had sent some 300,000 men, women and children – about 4% of its population – to exile and death, almost eradicating from the Iberian peninsula the last traces of the old Moorish emirate of al-Andalus. The Christian perspective To Spain’s Habsburg rulers and the anti-Morisco lobbyists who had for many years called for the Moriscos to be driven from Spain, the expulsion was a glorious and divinely ordained act of religious purging. In their eyes it removed a seditious and heretical enemy from Spanish soil, and cleansed Spain of the last remnants of its despised Islamic past. During the tumultuous autumn of 1609 in Valencia, supporters of the expulsion – such as the archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera and the Dominican monk Jaime Bleda – praised the king for having finally taken action against an inveterate Muslim “enemy within” that had stubbornly continued to worship “the sect of Muhammad” ever since the initial conversions of the Moriscos around a century before. Bleda witnessed the expulsion in Valencia, and found confirmation of this treachery and dishonesty in the Moriscos who arrived in Valencia singing and dancing, or who waded into the sea to praise Allah for their deliverance. Philip III and his ministers saw the Moriscos in very similar terms. In the many ministerial discussions on the ‘Morisco question’ that had preceded the expulsion, clerics and ministers argued that the Moriscos had been given ample time to become “good and faithful Christians” and had collectively refused to embrace their new faith. Some noted how the Moriscos had failed to take advantage of the periods of grace that had been granted to them at various times since their conversions, and had continued to worship as Muslims despite the attentions of the Spanish Inquisition. Others described the Moriscos as a fifth column whose members were secretly colluding with Spain’s Muslim and Protestant enemies and with Muslim corsairs operating from north Africa. Some cited Inquisition reports of real or imagined Morisco plots. Some expressed fears of another rebellion, like the savage War of the Alpujarras (1568–71) during which the Moriscos of Granada had risen up against Philip II’s decrees prohibiting their language and customs, and committed vicious atrocities against the Christian population in the mountains south and east of Granada with the support of Turkish and north African volunteers. Turkish threat These security fears were exacerbated by the ongoing Turkish threat – Ottoman forces having fought Habsburg empires, including Spain, since 1526 – and also by reports of Morisco banditry emanating from various parts of the country. Proponents of expulsion argued that the Moriscos were religiously incompatible with Christian Spain, and that they were also culturally inferior. Some pointed to the Morisco birth rate, claiming that the ‘New Christian’ Morisco population was inexorably increasing while the ‘Old Christian’ population was decreasing, and that this would result in the collapse of Christian Spain. Elizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics Philip III, in common with many of his Christian subjects, regarded the descendants of Spain’s former Islamic occupiers as an unwanted aberration and a threat to its religious identity. He also saw Catholic Spain’s recent military reverses in its wars against ‘heretics’ (Calvinist Lutheran rebels in Flanders, the English in various naval encounters) as evidence of divine disapproval for having allowed the Moriscos to ‘defile’ the country. During the reign of his father, Philip II, clerics and ministers had considered radical and even genocidal ‘solutions’ to the ‘Morisco question’ that included castration of all Morisco males, or even wholesale massacre. Eventually, Philip II settled on expulsion as the most humane ‘Christian’ option, but the ‘prudent king’ did not implement his own decision. Instead, it was left to his famously lazy son to carry out what the Portuguese Dominican monk Damián Fonseca called “the agreeable holocaust” and settle the ‘Morisco question’ once and for all. By the time Philip decided to implement his father’s expulsion order, the anti-Morisco consensus in the upper echelons of church and state was no longer prepared to listen to Christian landowners who regarded Moriscos as an essential component of their labour force. Nor would it heed the more moderate clerics who insisted that it was un-Christian to expel baptised Morisco children. To the king and his ministers, these children carried in their blood the ‘bad seed’ of their parents’ Islamic faith that would continue to grow if they were not expelled. Faced with criticism from European diplomats and the pope himself regarding the inhumanity of the expulsion, Philip insisted that it had been carried out humanely. He hailed the destruction of Spanish Islam as a great victory for Spain and Christendom that restored Spain to its rightful destiny as a Catholic state. These assumptions continued to echo down through the work of historians of the 19th and 20th centuries who hailed the expulsion of the Moriscos as a painful but essential milestone in Spanish and European history. The Morisco perspective The hagiographic accounts of the expulsion written in the early 17th century tend to ignore the complexities of the Morisco predicament that might have allowed for less radical ‘solutions’. They also ignored the extent to which Christian Spain itself had helped create the problem the expulsion was intended to solve. There is no doubt that some Moriscos saw their expulsion as a form of liberation and deliverance, and relished the opportunity to return to a land of Islam where they could worship openly as Muslims. Certainly, many Moriscos had little reason to feel any affection towards the Catholic church or the Spanish state. This antipathy was partly due to the Inquisition. For the best part of a century, the institution that many Moriscos regarded as the ‘devil’s tribunal’ had tormented and punished them for a range of transgressions that included actual Islamic religious worship as well as ‘Moorish’ cultural practices such as eating couscous, bathing or refusing to eat pork. Exploited by priests Such repression did not endear many Moriscos to Christianity, yet even the most embittered were not allowed to leave Spain but were forced to remain in ‘Morisco lands’ where their parish priests despised and exploited them. Some Morisco parishes rarely saw a priest at all, and had no idea what their new faith even expected of them. As a result, the intermittent ‘periods of grace’ granted to the Moriscos were often fruitless – and, too often, punctuated by repression. When Philip II introduced his draconian prohibitions in Granada in 1566, leading Moriscos and Christians warned the king that they would provoke rebellion. These protestations were ignored, and the result was a bloody rebellion in the Alpujarras. The expulsion and dispersion of the entire Morisco population of Granada across Castile that followed the suppression of the rebellion only added to the bitterness and alienation felt by many Moriscos. Crusading for God and gold: The crusades were driven by religious zeal. But profit was also a powerful motive… Some Moriscos undoubtedly colluded with Spain’s Muslim and Lutheran enemies abroad, and dreamed of an Islamic restoration. Others took to the roads and became bandits in order to take revenge on Christian society. Moriscos near the Mediterranean coast sometimes facilitated the slave-hunting expeditions of the Barbary corsairs – some even became corsairs themselves. But many, perhaps the majority, had no such ambitions – and even fewer opportunities to realise them. Most Moriscos occupied humble positions as artisans, muleteers, labourers, entertainers and shopkeepers, living on the fringes of a Spanish society that feared and despised them – yet which still insisted that they become ‘good and faithful Christians’. Though it was true that some Moriscos never accepted their conversion to Christianity, others eventually came to sincerely embrace their new faith. Philip III discovered this himself, to his astonishment, when he extended the expulsion to Castile and Andalusia, where he found many local bishops and priests who testified to the ardent piety of their Morisco parishioners. Even then, the king and his ministers insisted that both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Moriscos were to be expelled. Spain’s rulers also failed to appreciate that most Moriscos, whatever their religious convictions, regarded Spain as their homeland. Most of them spoke Spanish, not Arabic, and knew little of the world beyond the estates and villages in which they lived. In Valencia in 1609, rebel Morisco women threw themselves and their children off cliffs rather than allow themselves to be escorted to the coast. Aftermath of the expulsion Many expelled Moriscos experienced a profound culture shock on their forced arrival in North Africa. One of the reasons why the expulsion lasted as long as it did was because many Moriscos, like the character Ricote in Don Quixote, returned to their towns and villages after their expulsion. Some expelled Moriscos languished in France, from where they petitioned the king to allow them to return to Spain. Many shared the sentiments of the expelled Morisco Diego Luis Morlem, who wrote to his former lord in Castile that he and his fellow exiles were “crying tears of blood” for their lost country, and were determined to return to it “even if they hang us”. Many returned to Spain, where they were flogged and expelled again, but some succeeded in remaining in their homes after the expulsion process was stopped, and continued to live in Spain. Others found new homes in Algiers, Tunis and Morocco, and eventually managed to integrate and form the distinctively ‘Andalusi’ communities whose traces can still be found across North Africa. Matt Carr is a journalist and writer, author of Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492–1614 (Hurst, new edition 2017) This article was taken from issue 05 of BBC World Histories magazine