Muslim Views of the Crusades

As I have had too-frequent occasion to lament on here, the Crusades today remain arguably the most deliberately and often maliciously misunderstood of any of the myriad conflicts of the later Middle Ages and early modern period. We are still struggling to correct wild misunderstandings about the Christian participation in them, but only recently have we started to see scholarship on how Islamic sources viewed the Crusades. A new book from Routledge will aid in this task: Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (Routledge, 2014), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Muslims and Crusaders supplements and counterbalances the numerous books that tell the story of the crusading period from the European point of view, enabling readers to achieve a broader and more complete perspective on the period. It presents the Crusades from the perspective of those against whom they were waged, the Muslim peoples of the Levant. The book introduces the reader to the most significant issues that affected their responses to the European crusaders, and their descendants who would go on to live in the Latin Christian states that were created in the region.
This book combines chronological narrative, discussion of important areas of scholarly enquiry and evidence from primary sources to give a well-rounded survey of the period. It considers not only the military meetings between Muslims and the Crusaders, but also the personal, political, diplomatic and trade interactions that took place between Muslims and Franks away from the battlefield. Through the use of a wide range of translated primary source documents, including chronicles, dynastic histories, religious and legal texts and poetry, the people of the time are able to speak to us in their own voices.