Marshall, Kenneth 2020 History Thesis

Title: Fighting the Jihad of the Muslims: al-Sulami's Kitab al-Jihad and continuity in Islamic thought during the "counter-crusade" Advisor: Magnús Bernhardsson Advisor is Co-author/Adviser Restricted Data Used: None of the above Second Advisor: Release: release now Authenticated User Access (does not apply to released theses): Contains Copyrighted Material: No

FIGHTING THE JIHAD OF THE MUSLIMS al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad and continuity in Islamic thought during the “counter- crusade”

By KENNETH THOMAS MARSHALL

Professor Magnús T. Bernhardsson, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, MA

April 27, 2020

Contents

Acknowledgments i

Map of the ‘Abbasid c. 750 iii

Introduction 1

Chapter I: Jihad: A Dynamic Inheritance 17

Chapter II: The Enemy 41

Chapter III: Jihad Against the Muslims 69

Epilogue: “Are these not the Rum?” 97

Bibliography 102

i

Acknowledgments

Completing this thesis marks the culmination of what I see as a continuous period of growth as a student of history. I am finding it bittersweet to say farewell to this time in my life, at least for the time being, but I think my reticence to move on indicates how fortunate I am to have encountered such thoughtful and inspiring people along the way.

I would first like to thank my advisor and professor Magnús T. Bernhardsson, who graciously stepped out of his period of expertise to guide me in this project about a medieval

Islamic manuscript. I am indebted to Professor Bernhardsson for his counsel and his appreciation of my historical interests, not to mention his regular reassurance that I would reach this day with a full thesis in hand.

I also would like to thank my advisors, both student and faculty, from the history thesis seminar. I am grateful for the thoughtful guidance and edits from Professor Dubow, Professor

DeLucia, and Professor Garabarini as well as the camaraderie, collaboration and support provided by my peers, Kevin Silverman, Kees Humes and Hannah Tager. I would also like to thank my student and faculty readers.

This thesis could not have been possible without the education I received from every single one of my professors. In particular, I want to thank Professor Lama Nassif, Professor

Kirten Beck and Professor Brahim El Guabli from the Williams College Studies department. I have you all to thank for my ability to access these sources in their original Arabic, as well as my ability to connect with speakers of such a beautiful language. I would also like to thank Professor Saadia Yacoob for introducing me to Islamic History and the Qur’an, and

Professor Eric Knibbs for teaching me how to read and write about medieval texts. I am also

ii grateful to Dr. Catherine Holmes for listening to my proposal for this thesis and encouraging me to pursue it.

I am grateful to my family and friends for their encouragement. My mother and father always enabled my passion for history, and I could not have reached the end of this project without their support of my interests. I am grateful for my brother Kevin and sister Kaylin and their tolerance for my preoccupation with boring things like the Crusades. If it were not for my cousin Daniel McNamara blazing a trail for me to follow in the study of Islamic History, I do not believe I would have chosen to pursue such a satisfying topic.

I want to thank my friends and teammates at Williams College. I am especially thankful for the support and friendship of Robert Delfeld, who travelled with me every step of the way,

Charlie Ide, who always found the time to read my drafts and was always ready with an out-of- doors distraction, and for Omar Kawam, with whom I spent many long evenings discussing history and religion. I am also very grateful for my brilliant, tenacious teammates, who pushed me to my breaking point on and off of the track, especially Sam Wischnewsky, Ryan Cox,

William McGovern, Tristan Collaizi, Jenks Hehmeyer, Ben Hearon, Peter Kirgis, Nick Gannon,

Zeke Cohen, Lucas Estrada, Mitch Morris, Walker Knauss, Chris Avila, Will Young, Aidan

Ryan, and Matthew Peacock.

Finally, I am forever grateful to my earliest mentor, Medha Kirtane of Ridgewood High

School. Ms. Kirtane was the first to set me on this journey through higher education; she taught me how to think, write, and work hard. Most importantly, she made sure that I was aware of my abilities, and that I should expect nothing less than my best from myself. Ms. Kirtane, you set all of this into motion. Thank you.

iii

Introduction

“East and west of God’s earth will be mine, [and] Christianity will triumph under my ,”1 reads a tenth century Arabic poem attributed to the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II

Phokas. It arrived in , at the court of the Caliph al-Muti‘a, between 963 and 969 AD during the Byzantine reconquests that Nikephoros II led into Syria. In his poem, Nikephoros II promised to bring his army against Baghdad, and that his next target would be , the

“dwelling of [his] ancestors.”2 Throughout the following years, he succeeded in capturing

Tarsus, Mar‘ash, Edessa, and , destroying the mosques in each city as he went.3 But according to a relieved Syrian preacher named Ibn Nubata al-Fariqi, Nikephoros II was “killed

4 through his supporters in his homeland” before he could reach either Muslim capital.

The Muslims of the Levant had been spared total defeat at the hands of the Byzantines, but further, more notorious attempts were to be made to subdue them beneath Christian rule by another enemy. In 1105, almost a century and a half after the assasination of Nikephoros II, a

Damascene legal scholar named ‘Ali ibn Tahir ibn Ja’far al-Sulami wrote that another

“congregation” of Christians had “come down upon the island of Sicily,” and conquered one city after another in al-Andalus, the part of Iberia ruled by the Umayyad Caliphate throughout the medieval period.5 According to al-Sulami, these Christian conquerors realized after achieving success in Sicily and Spain that the Muslims of the Levant were too busy fighting amongst

1 Nikephoros II Phokas, trans. Nizar F. Hermes, The [European] Other in Medieval and Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) 148. 2 Nikephoros II Phokas, trans. Nadia Maria El Cheikh in Byzantium Viewed by the (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 173. 3 El Cheikh, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, 172. 4 Ibn Nubata al-Fariqi, trans. Niall Christie in The Kitab al-Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) (New York: Routledge, 2015), 380. 5 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad trans. Niall Christie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 206.

1 themselves to mount an effective defense. They seized their opportunity and snatched the holy city of Jerusalem, their most coveted objective, from Muslim control.

Al-Sulami was referring to the Frankish expedition of 1097-1099 to the Levant, commonly known as the First Crusade. Although al-Sulami demonstrates no awareness of the western forces behind the arrival of the First Crusade, Western scholars believe that these

Christian knights were in large part inspired by Pope Urban II’s promise, made at the Council of

Clermont in 1095, that those who trekked to the holy land to liberate Jerusalem from the

Muslims would be absolved of their sins.6 Historians estimate that as many as 70,000 European knights and foot-soldiers set out for the east after the Council of Clermont. Sources in several languages report that these divinely-inspired warriors all wore the sign of the cross into battle.7

Those Franks who made it to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople were supplied and ferried across the Bosphorus Strait in 1097 by the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Comnenus, and pressed south, capturing Nicaea, Antioch, and Edessa from the Muslim Seljuqs before finally conquering

Jerusalem in 1099.8

Many westerners may not be aware that there were several crusades that took place between the late eleventh and late thirteenth centuries. Crusading has become distinguished in our memory not by its history per se as much as by its ideological essence. It is almost second nature for English-speakers to refer to a value-laden movement as a crusade and to call its leaders and constituents crusaders in the struggle for their cause. For a colloquialism, the use of the term crusading to describe contemporary activism is, according to the western historical

6 Tyerman, Christopher, The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11-13. 7 Ibid, 13. 8 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 18-19.

2 narrative, rather fair.9 During a time when, at least in Europe, warfare was an arbitrary performance ingrained in a feudal society ruled by a military aristocracy, Pope Urban II’s promise of heavenly reward in exchange for selfless military service in the holy land revolutionized the rationale for fighting among Christian knights.10 The historical campaigns that westerners collectively refer to as the Crusades were distinguished by the religious fervor of their participants, just as crusaders in our own times display a commitment to their beliefs, religious or otherwise, above all else.

Westerners preserve certain historical specifics of these campaigns in their popular culture as well. Deus vult, first chanted at the Council of Clermont in 1095, remains a recognizable Latin phrase in the west. Video games and films likewise perpetuate the memory of crusading among westerners, and these mediums of entertainment have been uniquely successful in re-popularizing the character of Richard I’s noble nemesis Salah al-Din al-Ayubbi, or Saladin.

Saladin’s highly lionized character, however, is generally the extent of popular western knowledge of the role played by the Muslims throughout the crusades of the middle ages, and perhaps also knowledge of pre-modern Islamic civilization more broadly.11

Crusading holds a similar, albeit polarized position in the memory of modern Arabs.

Speakers of Arabic will often use their archaic word for Frank, ifranj, as a pejorative for modern

Europeans, and Arab intellectuals have drawn links between the European imperialist ventures of

9 Chevedden, Paul E., ‘The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,’ Oriens 39 (2011) 257-329, 306-307: Paul Chevedden and other historians of the crusades have questioned the consensus among historians like Christopher Tyerman, Marcus Bull and Jonathan Riley-Smith that western Crusading was primarily motivated by religious sentiment. Chevedden does not dispute, however, that religious ideology played a role in inspiring these expeditions. 10 Tyerman, Christopher, The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction, 11-13. 11 Phillips, Jonathan, ‘The Sultan Saladin Fan Club: Tracing the path of the Crusades as it traveled through European History,’ Lapham’s Quarterly (August, 2019), https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/sultan- saladin-fan-club. Many thanks to Kirsten Beck for bringing this article to my attention.

3 the 19th and 20th centuries and the Frankish invasions of the medieval period.12 In an eerily similar exhortation of jihad to al-Sulami’s own, Usama bin Laden wrote in 1996 that every individual Muslim was obliged to help liberate the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in , from the Israeli and American “Zionist-Crusader alliance.”13

In both the West and the East, then, the Crusades maintain a significant presence in collective memory. Westerners and Arabs continue to evoke crusading, whether in academic, political or military contexts. The field of Crusades scholarship continues to burgeon, and among

European scholars, has generated a subculture around its historiography.14 That subculture made its way into Arab circles shortly after Europeans revived their interest in the Crusades during the

19th Century. The concept reentered Arabic thought, ironically, via Monrond’s French term les

Croisades that would be translated into Arabic as “the Cross-Wars” [ al-hurub al-salibiyya] in

1865.15 While Arabs and westerners alike remain obsessed with the topic of the Crusades, the historical narrative understood by the majority in both groups tends to be rooted in traditional

European interpretations. This thesis will contribute to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to interpret the Crusades from outside this historiographical tradition centered around

Frankish accounts. Crusading might have been a revolutionary concept for the Franks, but as

Nikephoros II’s poem suggests, the jihad against the Christians was already well-established in

Islamic society, and it is therefore misleading to approach Crusading from an Islamic perspective with the assumption that the counter-crusade would demand similar intellectual innovation.

12 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 590. The Crusades are sometimes referred to in Arabic as “early imperialism” [al-isti‘amar al-mubakkir]. 13 Usama bin Laden, ‘Text of Fatwa Urging Jihad Against Americans,’ in Islam in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. 14 Dickson, Gary, ‘What are the Crusades?’ in Boas, Adrian J. (ed.) The Crusader World (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 688-689. 15 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 592.

4 Approaching the history of the Crusading period from an Islamic cultural and historiographical context, as well as focussing on how these contexts manifested themselves in al-Sulami’s manuscript will enable historians to understand how these events appeared to Near Easterners in the middle ages rather than how they appeared to historians with a foundation in Frankish accounts.

Although the Franks were not the only witnesses of the First Crusade, their texts are far more widely translated and studied than those that Muslim authors have left to us. Only recently have English-speaking scholars become interested in what these Arabic manuscripts have to say.16 Despite the increasing number of scholars with access to the original language of these texts, their incorporation into mainstream understandings of the Crusades tends to be limited to those texts that have been translated into English and French. Two of the most prolific of these

Arabic works in translation are Ibn al-Qalanisi’s History of Damascus [tarikh dimashq] and Ibn al-Athir’s Complete History [al-kamil fi'l-ta'rikh]. While both of these works provide us with yearly entries covering the period of the First Crusade that corroborate much of the information in contemporaneous Latin sources, both were completed decades after the events of the First

Crusade transpired.17 Aside from a few poems, the earliest Arabic source mentioning, let alone exhorting jihad against the Franks is the Kitab al-Jihad, or the Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn

Tahir al-Sulami.18

In her pioneering work, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand offered what would become the standard interpretation of al-Sulami’s contribution to our understanding

16 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 2-5. 17 We believe that Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh was completed in 1231, whereas Ibn al-Qalanisi’s Tarikh Dimashq dates to 540 AH or around 1146 AD. 18 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 69-72 & Cobb, Paul, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38.

5 of Muslim reactions to the First Crusade: “Waves of shock, fear and incomprehension spread from the areas most affected across the Islamic world,” according to Hilenbrand, yet al-Sulami maintained “a clear idea of the difference between Frank and Byzantine,” and correctly identified the Franks’ military objectives.19 Al-Sulami is therefore typically portrayed as a sort of historical clairvoyant. His work betrays that some Muslims knew exactly who the Crusaders were and what kind of war they were fighting.

Thanks to al-Sulami’s alleged awareness of the historiographical moment through which he was living, the Kitab al-Jihad has become the earliest piece of evidence for what historians refer to as the Muslim counter-crusade. Several historians agree that the sultans and amirs whom al-Sulami directly addresses in the Kitab al-Jihad seem to have ignored his opinions, although it appears al-Sulami’s arguments as well as his style may have inspired later Muslim rulers and writers.20 Regardless of whether the Kitab al-Jihad had an impact upon the Muslims who resisted subsequent crusades, it is an undervalued piece of evidence in our reconstruction of the initial Muslim understanding of the arrival of the Franks in the Levant. As Paul Chevedden has argued, al-Sulami’s reporting of the events leading up to the First Crusade, namely the Norman invasion of Sicily and the eleventh century Reconquista in Spain, challenges the conventional dating of the Crusading period from Pope Urban II’s Council of Clermont in 1095.21 In light of al-Sulami’s testimony, Chevedden argues, the beginning of the crusading phenomenon should be moved back to encompass these earlier military encounters between Christians and Muslims. But the Kitab al-Jihad is filled with allusions and direct references to encounters between Christians and Muslims from centuries before the invasion of Sicily, and the style of the book’s

19 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 71-72. 20 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders, 25. 21 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,” 305.

6 composition as well as its focus on the merits and history of the Levant are steeped in much older

Islamic tradition.

While Niall Christie, Paul Chevedden, Paul Cobb and Carole Hillenbrand have all acknowledged the importance of al-Sulami’s text in understanding initial Muslim reactions to the

First Crusade, we are without a comprehensive examination of the traditional orientation of the

Kitab al-Jihad. An appreciation for the text’s Islamic historical and cultural milieu might further reveal Muslim attitudes about the Crusaders and about their own response to them. The objective of this thesis will be to synthesize the components of al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad that have received insufficient attention among Crusades scholars. It will specifically address the genre and intellectual tradition in which Islamic legal scholars like al-Sulami operated, his portrayal of his enemy’s identity and origins, and his invocation of nostalgia for the long history of Islamic jihad against the Christians in his own country of Syria. Through shedding light on al-Sulami’s intellectual predecessors as well as the Levant’s longer history as the Islamic world’s preeminent military frontier, this thesis will situate al-Sulami and his interpretations of the First Crusade within a continuous intellectual tradition that predates the Crusades by centuries. With a deeper understanding of the Islamic frontier society into which the crusaders marched in 1097, historians can further appreciate the temporal horizons and magnitude of the events of the First

Crusade as they were understood from a Muslim perspective.

7 Historiographical Approach

Those who study the medieval phenomenon of crusading come from a variety of academic backgrounds.22 I likewise have brought my own interest in Islamic history with me into my study of crusading.

To my surprise, my approach to early Islamic history with a crusading focal point revealed a much more interesting world of characters and events than I had initially expected.

Studying the crusades from an Islamic perspective requires a familiarity with medieval jihad, but one quickly comes to realize that the idea of jihad was, more often than not, the driving force behind developments in Islamic history.23 Moreover, by its very nature, the invention, reinvention, and performance of jihad was usually contingent upon the Caliphate’s political relationship with both its own Muslim constituents as well as its non-Muslim neighbors. Paying close attention to the development of the classical idea of jihad requires an understanding of the omnipresence of the Byzantines, or, as the Arabs called them, the Rum, in Muslim efforts to legitimize their own empire through conquest and theological supremacy. The Byzantines were known to the Arabs before Islam, and they continued to evade Muslim conquest by weathering the jihad campaigns of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphs on their southern border. Before the arrival of the Franks from western Europe, the Rum were the essential target for the jihad, and both offensive and defensive jihads had been called for and fought against them.24

Since the Byzantines loomed so large in the memory of al-Sulami and those of his coreligionists all the way back to Muhammad, an understanding of the history of interaction between the Islamic and Byzantine empires is necessary to our approach to al-Sulami’s Kitab al-

22 My own introduction to the history of the Crusades came from two very different scholars: Christopher Tyerman, a western medievalist, and Catherine Holmes, a byzantinist. 23 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 89-108. 24 El Cheikh, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, 1-3.

8 Jihad. The Byzantines appear throughout this thesis from the perspective of Greek as well as

Arabic sources, and I am indebted to Catherine Holmes for guiding me towards Byzantine works relevant to my study of the Kitab al-Jihad.

Naturally, I have relied heavily upon historians of the Islamic world throughout this project. Al-Sulami’s text cannot be properly contextualized without an appreciation for the civilization that produced him. I have especially relied upon the work of Marshall Hodgson,

Patricia Crone, Michael Bonner, Carole Hillenbrand, Paul Cobb, and Niall Christie in my attempts to frame the Kitab al-Jihad as an exponent of Islamic intellectual history.25 Through studying medieval sources from both the Muslims and the Byzantines, I hope to shed light on the long history of interactions between Muslims and Christians who cohabitated in Southern

Anatolia and the Levant for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Crusaders. When framed together, these Greek and Arabic sources help the modern historian assess the weight that al-

Sulami’s rhetoric may have had upon his audience, but moreover, this evidence demonstrates the breadth of political disruption and cultural-clash between the mosaic of religions and cultures living in the medieval Levant according to which Crusading was merely another drop in the bucket.

My historiographical approach is modelled after the source criticism used by the aforementioned historians, but the evidence interpreted in this thesis comes primarily from medieval Islamic sources. Like most sources from this time and place, those that I have included were originally recorded by hand in Arabic, and have since been transcribed and, in some cases,

25 Especially: Bonner, Michael D., Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Crone, Patricia, Slaves on Horses: the evolution of the Islamic polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Hodgson, Marshall G.S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, ‘Volume Two: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods,’ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974).

9 translated from their original language into English. Rather than undertake my own translations of the original language of sources like al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad, I have chosen in most cases to use primary source material that has been translated into English. Unfortunately, a comprehensive translation of a source like the Kitab al-Jihad would have consumed far more time than is typically allocated for a senior thesis. Nonetheless, my ability to access the original

Arabic has proven useful at several critical points in this work, and while the reader should assume any original quotation to be the work of the translator I have cited, I occasionally cite my own translations to draw distinctions between existing translations and my own interpretation of an Arabic text. In most cases, my own translations are of the Kitab al-Jihad itself, and I am indebted to Niall Christie not only for his complete translation of the Kitab al-Jihad, but also for his transcription of the original Arabic.26

When necessary, I have transliterated the original Arabic and italicized it within brackets immediately after using the translated word or phrase within the thesis. I have chosen, however, not to italicize Arabic words that occur regularly in English. Jihad is the outstanding example of this choice; this word will not usually appear in italics throughout my writing, and neither will names, common adjectives like ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shi‘a’, or the titles ‘sultan’ and ‘amir.’ Finally, I have occasionally chosen to include the transcribed Arabic text of the Kitab al-Jihad in the footnote corresponding to a quote from al-Sulami.

Historical Background

The medieval Islamic world is uncharted territory for many contemporary westerners, but in order to approach the Kitab al-Jihad, we must become more familiar with the place and time that

26 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) trans. Niall Christie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).

10 al-Sulami inhabited. This is an especially challenging exercise in historical empathy because of the dramatic shifts in world order that have occurred between al-Sulami’s period and our own.

While al-Sulami was alive, the Muslims maintained the world’s most formidable civilization, and although the European invasions of the Middle East in the late eleventh century might resemble modern western intervention in the region, we must be careful not to endow these medieval Crusaders with the same cultural, economic, and political hegemony as their descendants in the modern West.

By all measures, the Muslims were stewards of a more impressive society than that of western Europe in the middle ages. At the beginning of the eleventh century, the Islamic world stretched from eastern Khurasan in modern , westward across the Jazira – now northern Iraq

– the Levant, Egypt and parts of Spain [al-Andalus] and the Maghrib. Though they were taken from the Muslims by the Christians in the late eleventh century, the islands of Crete and Sicily had likewise long been under Islamic governance. This reversed territorial hegemony has led the

Islamicist Paul Cobb to liken medieval Europe to the modern Middle East, and the ‘ to the modern west.27 The Muslims controlled over ten times more territory than the

Europeans, and their cities were more numerous, larger, and more ethnically and religiously diverse.28 The mosaic cultural complexion of the Islamic world was a consequence of the Near

East’s history of political fluidity and religious competition. After the Arab Conquests of the seventh century, many Eastern Christians and Jews submitted to Muslim rule, but elected to maintain their original confessional identity.

27 Cobb, Paul, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 19. 28 Ibid, 19-22.

11 Islamic civilization throughout the middle ages conjures the image of the mighty, authoritative caliphate, but the political influence of the ‘Abbasid caliph, who still occupied his symbolic position as the Islamic sovereign in Baghdad, had been in decline since at least the beginning of the 10th century.29 The former ‘Abbasid strongholds of Iraq and Khurasan had been governed by Turkic converts to Islam from the Asian Steppe since 1055, when Toghril Beg entered Baghdad with his army and was proclaimed Sultan by the Caliph al-Qa’im.30 The Turkic sultans spread westward, and established themselves as a notoriously independent and competitive warrior aristocracy across Iraq and the Levant.31 In North Africa and the western

Mediterranean, the Shi‘a Fatimid Caliphate had grown to become a powerful challenge to the

Sunni ‘Abbasids, and had captured the city of Jerusalem from its Seljuq-Turkish amir in 1098.

With the Christians marching South through Anatolia and into Syria, what remained of the

‘Abbasid state was helpless to provide any military aid to besieged Muslims, the Seljuq sultans seemed quite content to fight amongst themselves for position in Eastern Iraq, and the Fatimids were far too busy expanding into the Levant to cooperate with their Sunni enemies against the

Franks. The Islamic world, therefore, was not the administrative or even the religious bloc that the word “caliphate” might imply in this historical moment, and this left the Muslims especially vulnerable to the cooperative attacks of the Franks.

Although greater dar al-Islam had become politically fractured by the eleventh century, the Levant had long been a region on the precipice of the Caliphate’s sphere of influence. In the late eighth century, the Caliph Harun al-Rashid divided Syria south of the Taurus mountains

29 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 15. Local dynasties increasingly governed affairs internally, and the Caliph was often too weak to offer any military support to his governors in the provinces. 30 Morgan, David, Medieval Persia: 1040-1797 (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 30. 31 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 38-41.

12 from the main province, and named this band the thughur, or the frontier of Syria. It was intended to serve as Islam’s first line of defense, as well as a base of operations for the annual jihad campaigns that the Muslims undertook into southern Anatolia.32 Syria’s close proximity to the military threat and cultural influence of Byzantium meant that it was a zone of constant cultural exchange, and one that operated semi-autonomously, both before and throughout

‘Abbasid decline. While Levantine administrators and aristocrats were overwhelmingly

Arabized-Muslims, the peasant and merchant classes were a mixture of Coptic, Armenian and

Maronite Christians, as well as Sunni Muslims, Shi’a Muslims and Jews.33 The Levant was a hierarchical, yet diverse frontier society upon the arrival of the First Crusade, but moreover, it was a region acquainted with rapid political change and warfare against the Byzantines, the oldest and most familiar enemy of Islam.34

It was into this ever-contested and culturally complex region that the Christian armies marched, eventually capturing the holy city of Jerusalem in 1099, and where al-Sulami composed and preached his Kitab al-Jihad around the year 1105.35 Al-Sulami was by no means a sultan – literally meaning someone with power in Arabic – but he was what Muslims refer to as an ‘alim, or a thiqa.36 Both of these words are used to refer to the Muslim scholars who interpret

32 Bonner, Michael, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War: Studies in the Jihad and the Arab-Byzantine Frontier (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1996), 85-86. 33 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 48. 34 El Cheikh, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, 1-3. 35 Christie, Niall, ‘Introductory Study,’ in The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d.1106), 10. .corresponding to the idea of knowledge or knowing ”, ع ل م “ Alim is derived from the Arabic three-letter root‘ 36 This form is called “esm fa’‘il” in Arabic, meaning “the do-er” of a given verb. An ‘alim is thus, very simply, a person who possesses knowledge. The fact that this term predominantly is used for Islamic legal scholars is indicative of the value placed on this type of knowledge and those who studied and preserved it in pre-modern Islamic society.

13 Fig. 1. The Mihrab and pulpit of the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus. http://www.manar-al- athar.ox.ac.uk/dams/pages/view.php?ref=21795&search=%21collection541&offset=0&order_by =field8&sort=ASC&archive=0&k=&.

The Modern Mihrab and pulpit in the Great Mosque in Damascus. This is likely where Part Two of al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad was read aloud as a khutba, or sermon at the Friday prayer meeting in June of 1113. Al-Sulami read this section aloud himself as a khutba at the mosque in the town of Bayt-Lihya before his death in 1106.37

37 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 203.

14 the sources of Islamic law (i.e. the shari‘a) and offer their opinions as legal advice to the community. Together, this class of elite legal scholars were referred to as the ‘ulama’, and they held cultural and religious prestige within the Islamic social hierarchy. The Islamic historian

Alex Mallett calls the ‘ulama’ one arm of the Muslim elite, and he identifies the sultans and their amirs, or commanders, as the other branch of that elite class. Therefore, while al-Sulami could not have effectively led a jihad against the Crusaders himself, his opinion certainly held the potential to influence the decisions of the military aristocracy as well as the sentiments of the mainstream population.38

The Kitab al-Jihad and similar compilations of hadith, or stories of the Prophet’s example, were the domain of al-Sulami and his counterparts among the ‘ulama’. These treatises were how these legal scholars broadcast their beliefs about how the rest of their communities should behave, and in a society held together by common belief in Islam, these opinions were treated seriously. It is therefore unsurprising that al-Sulami composed a text like the Kitab al-

Jihad, and furthermore, it is unsurprising that he openly addresses and criticizes the “community of sultans” for their lack of urgency to “go out and fight the jihad” in his text.39 Although his admonishment of the Muslim ruling class may have been unusually harsh, it was by no means rebellious or revolutionary. Al-Sulami wrote the Kitab al-Jihad unaware that his text would survive to become one of our most precious sources for the Muslim response to the First

Crusade, as well as our first supposed piece of evidence for the emergence of a “counter- crusade.”40 He did not intend for this book to revolutionize jihad for the specific purpose of defeating the Franks, and he composed it with a palpable reverence for tradition and the

38 Mallett, Alex, Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant, 1097-1291 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 4. 39 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 211. 40 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders, 25.

15 responsibility of his position. Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad does not suggest a complete disruption of Islamic society in response to the First Crusade, but instead suggests a reaction undertaken in continuity with longstanding Islamic tradition. As far as al-Sulami was concerned, the calamity of the First Crusade was “only a warning from God,” who had “imposed tests several times with various of His vengeful measures.”41 The solution was of course nothing new, but instead “a return to God,” and the revival of the jihad the Muslims had always been commanded to fight.42

41 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 219. 42 Ibid, 220.

16

I

Al-Jihad: A Dynamic Inheritance “What makes courage more beautiful in words and deeds, and is the most beautiful of them, is that which is used in waging jihad against the enemies of the religion” – Part Twelve, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali Ibn Tahir al-Sulami

Writing almost a century after ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami compiled his Kitab al-Jihad, the renowned Arab historian Ibn al-Athir (d. 1233) left us with a disturbing account of the Frankish conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Ibn al-Athir, who had grown up in the shadow of the Franks, wrote that they had “slaughtered more than 70,000” and gave no quarter to the women and children around the al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam.1 His exaggerations of the bodycount notwithstanding, Ibn al-Athir’s description of such apocalyptic Frankish brutality appears to have been the common Muslim understanding of the conquest of cities like Jerusalem,

Antioch, and Edessa. When reading al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad, written nearly contemporaneously with the First Crusade, we can imagine Muslims were even more terrified, shocked, and humiliated in 1099. This overwhelming fear and confusion appears to have been compounded by the Muslims’ perception that their leaders neglected to unite and mount a coordinated military response to the conquest of eastern Syria:

The most astonishment is what one feels at a sultan who takes pleasure in life or remains where he is despite the appearance of this calamity, of which the outcome is conquest by the blasphemers, expulsion from the country by force and subjugation, or staying with them in degradation and servility, with the killing, capture, torture and torment by night and day that this involves.2

1 Ibn al-Athir, Arab Historians of the Crusades trans. Francesco Gabrieli (New York: Routledge, 2009), 6-7. 2 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) trans. Niall Christie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 211.

17 Al-Sulami demonstrates a potent combination of anger at the inaction of Muslim rulers and humiliation at the hands of a religiously inferior enemy. From notations left on one of the surviving copies of the Kitab al-Jihad, we know that this section was read aloud to a public congregation in Damascus’ Great Mosque.3 To publicly preach such bold criticism against the ruling class, al-Sulami must have felt confident that his audience would commiserate with his humiliation and anger at the condition of the Levant. The Kitab al-Jihad captures what must have been a significant vein of fear, anger, and confusion among the Muslims of the Levant in the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade.

Crises like the one the Muslims faced in Syria at the beginning of the twelfth century often lead to urgent and pragmatic responses. Often, however, these responses require the neglect of the traditional laws and norms in the society in which they are brought forth. The Islamic historian Carole Hillenbrand argues that al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad is an example of a similar response during a time of crisis for the Muslims. She calls al-Sulami’s text “extraordinarily far- sighted,” but concedes that his warnings “were to remain unheard [by Muslim rulers for over half a century.”4 Al-Sulami, according to Hillenbrand, preached a plan of action that strongly resembled the jihad campaigns undertaken by Nur al-Din and Saladin later in the latter half of the twelfth century. Niall Christie judges his Kitab al-Jihad the earliest evidence of the developing theory behind the counter-crusade – cooperative Muslim resistance to the Crusaders.5

Implicit in the notion of the counter-crusade is its peculiarity: jihad against the Crusaders was, in most cases, how it was manifested, but the counter-crusade itself presents a narrative of a truncated, historicized response specific to Frankish Crusading. The concept of a ‘counter-

3 Christie, Niall, ‘Introductory Study,’ in The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), 10. 4 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 71-74. 5 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (New York & London: Routledge, 2014), 24-25.

18 crusade,’ however, was conceived of by modern historians revisiting the medieval sources that speak about these Frankish invasions and Muslim resistance thereof. To treat the ‘counter- crusade’ as a classification of resistance that existed for medieval Muslims like al-Sulami and

Saladin is therefore anachronistic. These Muslims could not have envisioned the long and repetitive phenomenon of their resistance against the Franks because they were living through it.

Nonetheless, the modern concept of the counter-crusade causes modern scholars to read the

Kitab al-Jihad as a premature indicator of the military jihad that would be undertaken by Muslim rulers like Nur al-Din and Salah-al-Din (i.e. Saladin) near the end of the twelfth century.

Although Hillenbrand and Christie make a compelling case that al-Sulami was particularly well informed about the origins and objectives of the Crusaders, their suggestion that his Kitab al-Jihad was a revolutionary commentary on jihad obscures the traditional qualities of his text. His treatise is more a compilation of hadith – vignettes providing legal precedent from

Muhammad – than a work of history. Similar to existing early Islamic sources from the crusading period, al-Sulami offers no praise for any potential patrons from the administrative elite.6 Al-Sulami’s title, Kitab al-Jihad, is certainly conspicuous, given that it was only the latest in a series of similar compilations of hadith like the respective books of the jihad of Muslims like

Ibn al-Mubarak (d. 797) and Abu Ishaq al-Fazari (d. 804). Furthermore, although he occasionally interrupts his hadith with admonishments against the ruling class or comments on recent events, for the most part, al-Sulami operated within the literary tradition inherited from the legal experts who came before him. Modern historians associate al-Sulami’s text almost exclusively with the

6 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 211. See note 2.

19 study of Crusading, but in reality, his Kitab al-Jihad was foremost a regular piece of legal hadith literature.7

On the other hand, Al-Sulami’s arrangements and analysis seem, at times, antithetical to his text’s remarkable adherence to the conventions of hadith literature. Niall Christie, who translated al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad in 2015, points out that al-Sulami includes hadith that can be traced to the founders of the Maliki and Hanbali madhhabs, or legal schools, while al-Sulami himself was almost certainly an adherent to the Shafi’i school of law.8 As demonstrated in his digressions, al-Sulami hoped to see the unification of the Muslim community through jihad against this invading enemy, and while the practice of mixing opinions from different legal schools was not necessarily revolutionary in al-Sulami’s work, it is clearly meant to complement his own political commentary.

Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad has been identified by scholars like Christie and Hillenbrand as the first piece of intellectual evidence of a counter-crusade, but truncating the Kitab al-Jihad within the superimposed limits of the counter-crusade endows al-Sulami with an intellectually- rebellious quality that his work largely fails to demonstrate. To be sure, al-Sulami’s Kitab al-

Jihad brings to life the idea of ousting the Christians from the country of the Muslims. However it seems to do so by deploying modified, but nonetheless inherited notions of jihad and who ought to be responsible for fighting it. To appreciate al-Sulami’s reverence for the traditional doctrine of jihad, and his position as an inheritor of tradition rather than a creator of it, his

7 What remains of the Kitab al-Jihad is predominantly dedicated to chapters discussing the proper prosecution of the jihad according to the shari‘a. The historical events that al-Sulami mentions, and that Crusades historians are so interested in, only appear in one of his four extant chapters. 8 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,” in The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) trans. Niall Christie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 26.

20 sources and his arguments for how the jihad should be undertaken must be traced back to the earliest iterations of fighting in the path of God.9

Muhajirun to Mujahidun: A Condensed History of Jihad

The Islamic concept of armed struggle against an external enemy has existed from the earliest recorded battles of the followers of Muhammad in the early seventh century.10 Even before the death of Muhammad, Arab warriors who we consider the first Muslims were rapidly seizing control of Byzantine and Sassanid-Persian territory to the north and east of the Arabian

Penninsula. Several seventh and early eighth century sources attributed to non-Muslim authors record that these Arab conquerors self-identified as muhajirun, or those who go out to fight.11

This use of a word so closely associated with the conquests as a reflexive monicker gives us the impression that the early Islamic community and its identity revolved around its military campaigns.

The Islamicist R. Stephen Humphreys calls military expansion the proto-Islamic community’s raison d'être, but because of the lack of distinction between being a Muslim and being a soldier in the time of Muhammad, military jihad as a discrete concept and point of doctrine had yet to develop into a corpus of legal, and eventually literary tradition.12 Perhaps one of the greatest indicators of this incongruity between later jihad doctrine and the campaigns of the early community of believers is the record of the early conquest itself. David Cook argues

9 The Qur’an, 9:111. 10 Cook, David, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 6. 11 Webb, Peter, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 142. Webb cites the first appearance of these referents ca.640 AD to the Arab Conquerors as Mhaggrāyē in Syriac and Magaritai in Greek. 12 Humphreys, R. Stephen, Mu’awiya ibn abi Sufyan: from Arabia to Empire (Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 2012), 106-108.

21 that early hadith preserve an impression of apocalyptic urgency that Muhammad imparted on the community.13 However it seems more human concerns like ensuring the safety of their families from counter-conquest motivated the muhajirun to allow certain non-believing populations to contribute forces to Muslim campaigns, and initially, Islamic law went unenforced in conquered areas beyond the walls of the Arab garrisons.14 The result of this early jihad was not always the immediate conversion of the conquered.

Although the performance of jihad retained elements of these early conquests up until the eve of the First Crusade in 1097, the legal concept of how jihad should be fought would develop to define the “greater” individual struggle to engage with the religion [ jihad al-akbar] in addition to the lesser military jihad [jihad al-asghar]. Later Muslim legal scholars like al-Sulami, often referred to collectively as the ‘ulama’, or the learned class in Islamic society, would even debate obscurities like who exactly was obligated to participate, how the prescriptions of jihad differed between offensive and defensive campaigns, and even the question of who Muslims were allowed to kill among the non-believers. An especially important legal question for al-

Sulami and his peers among the ‘ulama’ was deciding the qualifications of when jihad went from an obligation of sufficiency [fard al-kifayya], meaning the society only needed to provide a sufficient number of troops to defeat the enenmy in order to fulfill its duty, to an individual obligation incumbent upon every able-bodied Muslim [fard al-‘ayn].15

After the territorial expansion of the generation that succeeded Muhammad in the 630s and 640s, the non-combatant Arabs who came with the soldiery to the garrisons in conquered

13 Cook, David, Understanding Jihad, 24. 14 Donner, Fred McGraw, Muhammad and the Believers: at the origin of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 137-138. 15 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,” in The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d.1106) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 13-14.

22 territory settled in their new country, and military expeditions began to slow as new domestic and religious roots took hold. It was as a result of this increasing stasis that jihad would undergo its first in a series of reimaginings after the first intra-Islamic civil war, or fitnah. The apparent victor and successor to the caliphate Mu’awiya ibn abi Sufyan (r. 661-680) revived relentless annual expeditions into Anatolia and promoted naval campaigns against the Byzantines in the

Aegean Sea. Importantly, these annual raids never resulted in Arab settlement of Anatolian territory, but instead seem to have been fought seasonally from summer to summer.16 This appears to have been a strategic decision on Mu’awiya’s part to provide a military distraction for the Arabs who had just recently endured their first fitnah. For a group that had initially galvanized around expansion, settlement and domesticity in new regions as well as the politicking between these outposts and the hubs of Mecca and Medina had sown discord among what had been a small and relatively localized community only decades earlier. After emerging as the new caliph, Mu’awiya institutionalized the earlier Islamic practice of military expansion as a means to reorient the Islamic community away from these intra-Islamic civil disputes and towards defeating its external imperial enemies.

It appears that for Mu’awiya and the Umayyads, jihad on the frontier with Byzantium became a caliphal performance of piety, but additionally, it seems that the Umayyad hyperfocus on the Byzantines was colored with Islamic imperial aspirations. Mu’awiya engaged in serious attempts to dislodge the Byzantines from their seat of power in Constantinople, and proclaimed himself Roman Emperor after he was named Commander of the Faithful [amir al-mu’minin] during a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.17

16 Humphreys, R. Stephen, Mu’awiya ibn abi Sufyan: from Arabia to empire, 107-108. 17 Ibid, 84.

23 Mu’awiya’s successor, ‘Abd al-Malik, carried on his project, and built the Dome of the

Rock in Jerusalem as a symbol of Islamic imperial preeminence and also as polemical testimony to the inferiority of Christian monotheism.18 An unintended consequence of ‘Abd al-Malik’s public subordination of Christianity to Islam, however, was the need to subordinate the sitting caliph’s religious authority to the example of Muhammad. This meant the ‘ulama’, the class of

Islamic legal scholars like al-Sulami, increasingly referenced the hadith literature that recorded precedential stories of the Prophet’s life in their interpretations of the shari‘a. Up until the reign of ‘Abd al-Malik, the sitting Caliphs upheld their role as the Commander of the Faithful, and had been the ultimate authorities commanding the jihad as well as other religious matters. However, the increasing popularity of legal interpretation from the example of Muhammad rather than the opinion of the Caliph led some religious scholars from the ranks of the ‘ulama’ to make their own way to the frontiers of Islamic civilization so that they could replicate the jihad fought by the Prophet and his companions. There, these like-minded ascetic warriors gathered in ribats, or outposts along the borders of Dar al-Islam.

It seems the most appealing of these ribats were situated in the Taurus mountains that stretch east to west between Anatolia and Syria. Since the reign of Mu’awiya (r. 644-656), jihad had become less an engine of Islamic conquest and more an expression of Islamic imperial legitimacy.19 During the Umayyad period, the jihad was thus directed primarily toward

Constantinople and Byzantine-Anatolia because of these regions’ symbolic imperial status.

Asma Afsaruddin argues that this practice of jihad against the Byzantines crystallized itself in some of the earliest hadith literature. For instance, the hadith that allege Muhammad’s preference for jihad at sea rather than on land in a ribat are probably Umayyad recruiting

18 Robinson, Chase F., ‘Abd al-Malik, (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 115. 19 Humphreys, R. Stephen, Mu’awiya ibn abi Sufyan: from Arabia to Empire, 84.

24 attempts for the Arab navies that attempted to destroy Constantinople in 655.20 Since these

Umayyad-era hadith revolved so heavily around anti-Byzantine jihad, some members of the

‘ulama’, who increasingly invoked the idea of jihad as voluntary and independent of caliphal direction, began to migrate to the Byzantine frontier to fight.

This growing group of learned, individual soldiers often refused to fight the jihad under the auspices of the Caliphate. Later ‘Abbasid caliphs beginning with al-Mahdi (r. 775-785) and

Harun al-Rashid (r. 786-809), would take a more direct approach to reestablishing their religious and military authority over the jihad. Al-Mahdi launched the first caliphal campaign on the

Byzantine frontier since the fall of the Umayyads, and Harun al-Rashid would become known in the non-legal Arabic literary tradition [al-adab] as the first of an emerging class of ghazi, or warrior, caliphs.21 The poets and court authors writing in this literary as opposed to legal vein were more closely-associated with the ‘Abbasid Caliphs who patronized them than the adversarial ‘ulama’, who had been averse to acknowledging the Caliph’s inherent religious authority since the death of ‘Abd al-Malik. It is therefore important to approach the literary jihad texts from the ‘Abbasid period with an understanding of their panegyrical tendencies toward

Muslim rulers.22 The historian Michael Bonner interpreted much of the early jihad poetry, especially that from the court of Harun al-Rashid, as an ‘Abbasid attempt to recruit more

Muslims from areas loyal to the central caliphate. Bonner sees this as a revival of the “levee en masse” of the Arab conquests, wherein each male Muslim was expected to contribute to the military campaigns that expanded Islam’s territory. In doing so, al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid

20 Afsaruddin, Asma, Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 143-144. 21 Bonner, Michael, Jihad in Islamic History:Doctrines and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 129. 22 Hermes, Nizar F., The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 138.

25 appear to have hoped to check the growing military clout of local warlords and scholar-soldiers on the Syrian frontier with Byzantium.23 Jihad thus became a literary as well as legal idea around the late eighth century.

This revival of jihad beneath caliphal leadership may have been recorded in the Arabic adab of the time, but al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid’s seasonal campaigns into Byzantine territory seem to have been a political project. The court-poetry celebrating the caliph as a ghazi certainly seems to indicate that these caliphs were interested in winning the loyalty of the ascetic scholar-soldiers who manned the ribats along the Byzantine frontier. Instead of setting out to subdue Byzantium, these ‘Abbasid armies accepted Byzantine diplomacy in even the most auspicious situations. In the campaign of 782-783, Harun al-Rashid, at the time al-Mahdi’s heir- apparent, brought his army as far North as the Bosphorus straight directly across from

Constantinople before accepting Byzantine payment of the poll-tax and turning back for Syria.24

Anecdotes like this combined with the fact that no Byzantine territory beyond the perpetually- contested thughur region in the Taurus mountains was ever permanently settled, leads us to believe that these were symbolic rather than urgent millenarian performances of jihad like those prosecuted during the Arab conquests.25 On the one hand, the reassumption of caliphal leadership on annual jihad campaigns was a method of checking provincial military strength.

But, on the other, it was also an overture to the ‘ulama’, and an attempt to win back some of the religious legitimacy the caliphate had been losing since the reign of ‘Abd al-Malik when doubts began to circulate among jurists about the legitimacy of any ruler’s religious authority.

23 Bonner, Michael, Jihad in Islamic History, 130. 24 Bonner, Michael, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War: Studies in the jihad and the Arab-Byzantine frontier (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1996), 74. 25 Kennedy, Hugh, The Prophet and the Age of the : the Islamic Near East from the sixth to the eleventh century (Essex, UK: Longman, 1986), 144-145.

26 According to Bonner, some of these scholars indeed were won over by the ‘Abbasid caliphs through this sort of performative jihad.26

Among the scholar-soldiers who the ‘Abbasids were courting through these military campaigns was a conspicuous legist named ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak (d. 797), who composed several legal treatises and fought the Byzantines with other ascetics and ‘Abbasid soldiers on the thughur “frequently.”27 Perhaps his most famous scholarly contribution was his own Kitab al-

Jihad, the first of such books written about the obligation of fighting the non-believers. Several later Muslim legists, including al-Sulami, would go on to contribute their own treatises in similar fashion, using Ibn al-Mubarak’s text to bolster theirs.28 Ibn al-Mubarak’s text is an early example of hadith literature, meaning simply that his book was, like al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad, a compilation of transmitted stories about Muhammad’s life and the sayings of his companions and other respected religious authorities throughout Islamic history. Reflecting the authoritative juxtaposition between the ‘ulama’ and the caliphate in the days of Harun al-Rashid and the early

‘Abbasids, Ibn al-Mubarak conspicuously includes hadith like the following from Sa’id ibn al-

Musayyab that demonstrate the importance of correct intention in the pursuit of jihad:

During the caliphate of Abu Bakr, Bilal prepared himself to set out for Syria. Upon this, Abu Bakr said, “I do not like to see you leave us in this way. If only you would stay with us and assist us.” Bilal responded, “If you freed me for the sake of God, then allow me to set out for the sake of God. But if you freed me for yourself then keep me imprisoned by your side.29

26 Kennedy, Hugh, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 131. 27 Salam, Feryal, The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism: ‘Abdallah b. al-Mubarak and the formation of Sunni Identity in the Second Islamic Century (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 33. Salam cites on p. 33 Ibn Kathir’s description of ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak in the latter’s work al-bidaya wa al- nihaya [The Beginning and the End], 10:177, “he was known for participating in battles and performing the hajj frequently.” 28 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,’ in The Kitab al-Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d.1106),” 8-9. 29 ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak, Kitab al-Jihad, trans. Feryal Salam, in Salam, Feryal, The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism: ‘Abdallah b. al-Mubarak and the formation of Sunni Identity in the Second Islamic Century (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 100.

27 As Feryal Salam, a translator and historian of Ibn al-Mubarak points out, this hadith demonstrates the value of martyrdom among legal scholars during the early ‘Abbasid period, but it also could be read as a critique from Ibn al-Mubarak of ‘Abbasid attempts to administer the jihad themselves. The moral of this hadith is that the Muslim ought to be able to go freely as an individual and perform the jihad, without the hinderance of the Caliph.

Jihad on the frontier in these relatively auspicious times before the Crusades could afford the level of spiritual rigor and individual engagement that Ibn al-Mubarak professed throughout his Kitab al-Jihad. But the Byzantine reconquests of the tenth century and the waning of

‘Abbasid central power further modified the popular doctrines and practice of jihad, as well as the subset of the population deemed suitable to preach about it. In the late tenth century,

Byzantine armies captured and held several cities throughout the thughur while the ‘Abbasids were helpless to repulse them. Thus, resistance to the onslaught of the Byzantines, or the Rum as

Muslim authors referred to them, fell on the shoulders of the amir of Aleppo, Saif al-Daula al-

Hamdani (d. 967).30 The otherwise helpless ‘ulama’ of the ‘awasim, the Syrian governorate just

South of the thughur, had little choice but to accept and celebrate the mantle of the ghazi sultan that he undertook.

Two centuries prior to Nikephoros II’s reconquest, scholars like Ibn al-Mubarak would have insisted that jihad was a duty that was best assigned to the pious Muslim individual as opposed to the caliph or the sultan and his military retinue. But as Bonner has argued, the idea of the ghazi caliph who held the authority to prosecute jihad had been gaining currency among

Syrians since the reign of Harun al-Rashid. In some locales throughout the thughur this image of the ghazi ruler had clearly been accepted by the tenth century. The Friday before Tarsus fell to

30Bosworth, C. Edmund, “The City of Tarsus and the Arab-Byzantine Frontiers in Early and Middle ‘Abbasid Times,” Oriens 33, no. 1 (1992): 268-286, 278.

28 the Nikephoros II in 965, a native of the city offered the khutba prayer in the central mosque to the deceased ghazi and ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mu‘tadid (d. 902) in a rather desperate gesture of hope that a similar leader, perhaps his contemporary Saif al-Daula, might come to the city’s aid.31 But perhaps the most striking evidence of this intellectual revival of the celebrated ghazi sultan is the jihad poetry that survives from the tenth century. Saif al-Daula patronized the renowned poet al-Mutanabbi, who wrote that his amir’s “bounty never departed” him.32 Al-

Mutannabi celebrated the sultan’s revival of defensive jihad against the Byzantines through his poetry:

One day with horsemen you [Saif al-Daula] drive the Byzantines from [al-thughur]...your expeditions [sarayak] are continuous...33

Here, al-Mutannabi portrays Saif al-Daula as the defender of the Muslims of the frontier, but also as the principle commander of the saraya, the seasonal jihad campaigns that the early ‘Abbasid caliphs led into Byzantine territory. The panegyrical purposes of such poetry suggest that the goal of poets like al-Mutannabi was to portray their patrons in a favorable light, and therefore it seems that the archetype of the warrior sultan had reappeared in Syria a century and a half before al-Sulami wrote his Kitab al-Jihad. Jihad, therefore, had become the intellectual claim of the literary as well as legal class of learned Muslims in response to the aggressive campaigns of

Nikephoros II, and perhaps by nature of this expansion of the deed to jihad as intellectual property, agency and responsibility in the prosecution of jihad were returned to Muslim rulers.

It is against this background of the development of the doctrine of jihad, as well as the changing consensus of who could lay claim to it as both an idea and as an act, that we must

31 Bonner, Michael, Jihad in Islamic History, 133. 32 Abu al-Tayyib Ahmed ibn al-Husayn al-Mutannabi, Poems of al-Mutannabi trans. A.J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 124. 33 Ibid, 66.

29 consider al-Sulami’s own remanufacturing of this essential Islamic idea. Jihad, which during the beginning of Islamic history was the faith’s lodestar, quickly adopted cultural pretensions after the initial urgency of Muslim apocalypticism dissipated, and from the reign of Mu’awiya was considered an indicator of the spiritual and imperial health of the Caliphate. However the question of who could legitimately perform jihad and who it was who had the authority to provide an answer to that former question developed alongside other intellectual trends. Further developments in the understanding of who could lay claim to the authority to prosecute jihad, like the tenth century Byzantine reconquest, demonstrate that external as well as internal forces could instigate reimaginings of the concept. The onslaught of the new Christian enemy in the late eleventh century would provide another such external, influential force in the development of jihad.

Writing in Damascus, al-Sulami was in close proximity to the Hamdanid seat of power in

Aleppo, where Nikephoros II had launched his famous raids into Byzantine-Anatolia in the late tenth century. As we have seen, Nikephoros II’s campaigns of reconquest demanded that the

Muslims find a way to justify a ruling dynasty’s leadership and participation in jihad, which had up until that point been considered an individual duty undertaken by ascetic scholars in an offensive capacity. Whatever success Saif al-Daula enjoyed can be attributed at least in part to the effectiveness of his image as a ghazi ruler among the ‘ulama’. In addition to professional

Syrian soldiers, numerous ascetic volunteers flooded into Syria from northern Iraq and Iran to join Saif al-Daula in his raids.34 Clearly the praise of court poets like al-Mutanabbi for the ghazi ruler had gained religious as well as popular credence by the end of the ‘Abbasid period, even if the ‘ulama’ maintained their historical claim to deciding the legal provisions and proscriptions of

34 Bosworth, C. Edmund, “The City of Tarsus and the Arab-Byzantine Frontiers in Early and Middle ‘Abbasid Times,” 284.

30 conducting jihad. Al-Sulami does not seem to have argued against these older doctrines and norms of the jihad, but then again, his own historical moment profoundly resembled that of his countrymen a century and half before the First Crusade and he thus inherited what his predecessors had practiced and preached when faced with the prospect of conquest by the

Byzantines.

Al-Sulami’s Revival of Jihad:

Given the little we know about his life, al-Sulami seems a strange candidate to have compiled what scholars treat as such an innovative treatise on jihad, or any treatise on jihad for that matter.

From the Tarikh Dimashq of Ibn ‘Asakir (d. 1176), we know that al-Sulami was a recognized and reputable transmitter of hadith among the Syrian ‘ulama’, and that, as his linguistic analyses throughout the Kitab al-Jihad would suggest, philology was his major intellectual interest.

Neither Ibn ‘Asakir or Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 1505) who later summarized Ibn ‘Asakir’s spare biography of al-Sulami mention his work on jihad. The impression from the scanty biographical information about al-Sulami is that he was a quiet scholar who instructed and transmitted hadith to his students. He had little evident contact with broader Syrian society, and we have no evidence that he had any direct contact with the ruling class. It is clear in his favoring of Shafi’i hadith throughout the Kitab al-Jihad, as well as the fact that al-Sulami was born into a Shafi’i family, that he was almost definitely an adherent to the Shafi’i school himself.35 It is ironic, therefore, that contemporary historians of the Crusades and Classical Islamic history consider this otherwise conventional scholar’s most famous surviving work on jihad as a sea-change in

Islamic thought. But al-Sulami as a character, as well as his reimagining of jihad is less puzzling

35 Christie, Niall, ‘Introductory Study’ in The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), 4-5.

31 if we choose to consider this work as a continuation rather than an interruption of the first four centuries of jihad’s history and the history of jihad on the Islamic-Byzantine frontier more specifically.

To be clear, al-Sulami does not always behave as we would expect an ‘alim would in this period. He names his compilation the Kitab al-Jihad in clear reference to the genre of religious literature founded upon the Kitab al-Jihad of ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak in the eighth century, but he breaks from this tradition stylistically, addressing the ruling class directly throughout his four extant chapters and editorializing about their inaction against the Crusaders.36 Ibn al-Mubarak, writing in the eighth century, ordered his hadith chronologically; the book begins with hadith attributed to Muhammad, then continues with hadith attributed to his companions and then finally hadith attributed to prominent religious scholars or caliphs.37 Al-Sulami on the other hand begins Part Two of his Kitab al-Jihad with a saying attributed to the Prophet, but afterwards includes a hadith attributed to Ma’mar ibn Rashid (born c.714, over eighty years after

Muhammad’s death) before returning to a hadith which discusses the four rightly-guided caliphs.38

Another of al-Sulami’s departures from the example of ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak is his direct admonishment of Muslim rulers:

The most astonishment is [what one feels] at a sultan who takes pleasure in life or remains where he is despite the appearance of this calamity, of which the outcome is conquest by these blasphemers.39

Although elsewhere in his book al-Sulami veils his critique and commentary on the events of the day with the words of those whom he reports, here he uses his own voice to make it clear that it

36 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 206 & 211. 37 Salam, Feryal, The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism, 95. 38 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 203-206. 39 Ibid, 211.

32 is the legal obligation of the sultan to wage defensive war on behalf of his subjects. Like al-

Sulami, Ibn al-Mubarak demonstrates his own agenda in his use of the hadith about Abu Bakr allowing a servant to go and fight the jihad in Syria, but Ibn al-Mubarak abstained from recording it in his own voice and elected to frame his legal opinions with hadith rather than his own prose.40 Al-Sulami appears to have been more comfortable handing his own name over to the ruling class along with his advice to them than some of his own intellectual inspirations.

These differences, however, are insignificant compared with the similarities between al-

Sulami’s work on those of his predecessors. Ibn al-Mubarak devoted the beginning of his Kitab al-Jihad to hadith that discuss the importance of righteous intent when fighting the non- believers.41 Despite the desperate circumstances of his time, al-Sulami is sure to include a hadith that similarly establishes the importance of selflessness in fighting the jihad:

The first ones to be called [to God on Judgment Day] will be a man who memorized the Qur’an, a man who was killed for the cause of God and a rich man...The man who was killed for the cause of God, be He exalted and honored, will be brought forward, and it will be said to him, “For what were you killed?” The man will say “I was ordered to fight the jihad for Your cause, and I fought until I was killed.” God will say “You have lied...on the contrary, you desired that it would be said about you, ‘So and so is a jari’un [courageous man],’”42

Here, al-Sulami attempts to demonstrate the importance of proper intention among the mujahidin, and argues that jihad with the goal of anything more than the love of God is hypocrisy. Even though al-Sulami clearly meant to instigate a Muslim response from a broad

40 ‘Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak, Kitab al-Jihad trans. Feryal Salam in The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism, 92. 41 Salam, Feryal, The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism, 96. 42 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 221. In the isnad that al-Sulami provides for this hadith, the fifth transmitter is listed as ‘Abdallah Ibn al-Mubarak, author of the first kitab al-jihad. This, along with other credits to Ibn al-Mubarak throughout al-Sulami’s work suggest that he had been exposed to many of the hadith in Ibn al-Mubarak’s own compilation and may have even consulted a copy while writing his Kitab al-Jihad.

33 swath of the population with his text, he was careful not to abrogate the necessity of proper spiritual preparation for the jihad in doing so.

Al-Sulami’s word of caution to the impious mujahid is not the only instance of his reverence for the doctrinal purity of the jihad. Christie points out that al-Sulami relied upon an unusually high volume of hadith to make his case, and while he may have used hadith that he traced to the founders of other madhhabs, for example ibn Hanbal (d. 855), this was neither an unusual phenomenon in late-‘Abbasid legal texts, nor was it a difficult task to synthesize the opinions of the various legal schools on the subject of jihad.43 According to

Hillenbrand, the legal doctrines associated with jihad in each of the four main Sunni madhhabs on the eve of the First Crusade demonstrated “remarkable uniformity.”44 If we consider his text to be foremost a book of hadith, then it appears al-Sulami’s volume of hadith as well as the diversity of his sources are rather consistent with the traditional nature that Ibn ‘Asakir assigned him.

While most of al-Sulami’s ostensibly rebellious decisions in his compilation of the Kitab al-Jihad can be reconciled with earlier tradition, this is not to say that al-Sulami’s text is intellectually unremarkable. As we have seen, al-Sulami’s text imitates earlier compilations on the doctrine of jihad, but as Niall Christie has shown, also imitates the jihad khutbas, or sermons, of the Syrian scholar Ibn Nubata al-Fariqi (d. 984 or 985) who preached in Aleppo during the reign of Saif al-Daula and the Byzantine reconquests.45 Additionally, part twelve of al-Sulami’s

Kitab al-Jihad includes a chapter made up of jihad poetry, and he includes several lines from near-contemporary poetic anthology of Abu ‘Ali Ahmed al-Marzuki (d. 1030).46 Al-Sulami

43 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,” in The Book of the Jihad of Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), 24-25. 44 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 98. 45 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study” in The Book of the Jihad of Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), 26. 46 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 327.

34 appears to have thought that some of these lines, especially those commenting on holding one’s ground, would inspire courage in his audience:

I [al-Sulami] also studied...the following from Shabib ibn al-Barsa:

I hesitated so that I might save my life, and I did not find for myself a similar life to lead. It is not on our heels that our wounds are bleeding, but the blood drips on our feet.47

Al-Sulami follows this quotation with an explanation that the blood dripping onto the poet’s feet comes from wounds he receives as he moves toward the enemy, and does not flinch in the face of such grave circumstances.48 As is the case in most poetry, these two lines that al-Sulami quotes rhyme with each other and follow a rhythmic meter that would have helped this pre-Islamic poet to memorize and recite the verse from memory.49 In al-Sulami’s society, poetry was a popular method of communication that did not require literacy, and it seems that by including these lines in their classical style, al-Sulami was hoping to spread his exhortations to an audience that would have especially appreciated this kind of poetry.

Christie argues that al-Sulami’s use of poetry in an otherwise legal text comprised of hadith might not have been surprising for a Muslim intellectual during this period, but al-Sulami seems particularly aware that his use of poetry might still have been somewhat a taboo in interpreting the shari‘a.50 Most of the poems al-Sulami quotes were recorded in the seventh and early eighth centuries in closer temporal proximity to the Prophet. For an ‘alim like al-Sulami who transmitted hadith, the closer a piece of knowledge could be accurately located to

Muhammad, the more authoratative and precedential it was understood to be.

47 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 321. 48 Ibid, 321. 49 Ibid, 153: ﺗﺄ ّﺧﺮت اﺳﺘﺒﻘﻲ اﻟﺤﯿﺎة ﻓﻠﻢ اﺟﺪ ﻟﻨﻔﺴﻲ ﺣﯿﺎةً ﻣﺜﻞ ان اﺗﻘﺪّﻣﺎ ﻓﻠﺴﻨﺎ ﻋﻠﻰ اﻻﻋﻘﺎب ﺗﺪﻣﻰ ﻛﻠﻮ ُﻣﻨﺎ وﻟﻜﻦ ﻋﻠﻰ اﻗﺪاﻣﻨﺎ ﺗﻘﻄﺮ اﻟﺪﻣﺎ 50 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study” in The Book of the Jihad of Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), 33.

35 But perhaps more curious than al-Sulami’s reliance upon early-Islamic poetry is his failure to mention the prolific and relevant poetry of figures like al-Mutanabbi (d. 955) who had written extensively about fighting the jihad against the Byzantines less than a century and a half earlier. It is difficult to imagine that al-Sulami was ignorant of these literary movements, especially since he seems to have been inspired by the sermons of Ibn Nubata during the campaigns of Saif al-Daula in the mid-tenth century and clearly had access to a copy of al-

Marzuki’s anthology.51 The absence of these tenth century poets thus appears to be a tacit acknowledgement on al-Sulami’s part that while poetry may have been an effective means of exhortation in twelfth century Syria, it needed to be treated carefully in the hands of a member of the ‘ulama’, and especially one who was a respected transmitter of hadith.

After reporting several lines of early-Islamic jihad poetry, al-Sulami returns to his own voice in an attempt to further justify his use of literary sources as opposed to legal hadith reports.

He argues:

What makes courage more beautiful in words and deeds, and is the most beautiful of them, is that which is used in waging jihad against the enemies of the religion...its origin is conforming to fate and destiny, in their conclusion and decree; wishing to follow the order of God, be He exalted; fear of disobedience to Him; and desire for the abundance of His reward and eternal life in His Paradises.52

Al-Sulami seems to be arguing here that the beauty of the poetry he reports comes in its superlative form when it is written about the deeds of the mujahid who fights the way God commands. In other words, according to al-Sulami it is not the poetry on its own that can comment on the performance of jihad, but instead it is the subject of the poetry that endows it with its evident beauty and exhortatory potential. Furthermore, al-Sulami appears to be signalling that he selected these lines with the knowledge that they represented virtues of the proper, legal

51 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 327. 52 Ibid, 326.

36 performance of holy war, and that therefore they only complement his discourse on points of doctrine, like the illegality of flinching or turning one’s back in the face of the enemy.

Throughout his discussion of poetry in part twelve, al-Sulami treats these literary sources almost as legal texts, while he further claims that adherence to God’s commands (i.e. the shari’a) in the poems themselves is the source of their potential to arouse an emotive response among their audience. In including this poetry, however, al-Sulami reveals the socio-intellectual risk he might have felt he was taking by analyzing such non-conventional literature in an otherwise conventional text. It appears then that beyond his gestures to the sultans and amirs in part two of his Kitab al-Jihad, al-Sulami may have attempted to make overtures to a much broader Muslim audience, and especially one in Syria, an area which could lay claim to more than its fair share of jihad poets. It should be noted, however, that instead of including poems from more recent writers in the adab canon, al-Sulami chose to cite poets who lived in much closer temporal proximity to the Prophet, and who were thus emulating ideas and sentiments that the Prophet himself conceivably could have harbored.

As we have seen, al-Sulami’s text demonstrates that he believed the Muslim ruling class was obligated to lead the jihad in the face of an invading army. For a member of the ‘ulama’, this might seem an unusual stance to take given the widely held opinion that jihad was, at least in offensive cases, the duty of some, but not all Muslims.53 But al-Sulami argues that this is only true in offensive campaigns:

[Abu Ishaq al-Firuzabadhi’s] stating ‘and the duty of jihad became an individual obligation [i.e. a duty of every able-Muslim]’ proves that it would become an individual obligation when the enemy surrounded [them].54

53 See the above discussion on p. 31 of Ibn al-Mubarak’s Kitab al-Jihad and his use of a hadith that suggests Ibn al- Mubarak believed the ‘Abbasid caliphs had no authority over the mujahidin on the Byzantine frontier. 54 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 210.

37 Here al-Sulami is referring to a report from Abu Ishaq al-Firuzabadhi that makes jihad for a minor without parental permission legal in defensive situations. Importantly, al-Firuzabadhi’s report only grants permission for the youth to go and contribute to a defensive jihad and does not make any specific comment on the obligation of a sultan to lead the campaign. Still, al-Sulami states his opinion that the sultan is obligated to prosecute jihad in defensive cases and supports his interpretation with the following Prophetic hadith:

[‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Samura, companion to the Prophet] heard the Prophet, may God bless him, say, “To whomever looks after a group of his subjects and does not treat them honestly, God has forbidden Paradise.”55

In lieu of a report that clearly demonstrates legal precedent for the obligation of the sultan to prosecute defensive jihad, al-Sulami combines two better-established precedents, the individual obligation of jihad in defensive circumstances and the obligation of a leader to “look after” his subjects, to imply that it is clearly the sultan’s obligation as an individual Muslim as well as a ruler to lead the jihad against the invading enemy. Like a good thiqa, al-Sulami did not allow his personal admonition of the ruling class to stand alone without hadith to maintain its credibility.

Nonetheless, by arguing that the sultan was legally obliged to lead a defensive jihad without citing an explicit tradition that demonstrated this was precedent, al-Sulami appears to have been taking a certain liberty in his insistence that rulers were required to go out and fight the non-

Muslims.

Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad is a text bound by tradition in its construction as well as its assumptions about authority. Despite its conservative inclinations, however, it manages to accomplish the rather ambitious task of incorporating poetry into an otherwise legal text and establishes a traditional argument that the sultan, a political but not necessarily religious

55 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 234.

38 authority, was responsible for prosecuting the jihad. It seems accurate, then, for scholars to assign a degree of intellectual nonconformity and instigative agency to al-Sulami. As Christie puts it, al-Sulami was clearly trying to “provoke a reaction from his listeners.”56 But as we have seen, earlier writers like Ibn Nubata al-Fariqi and al-Mutanabbi successfully invoked the doctrine of jihad during the Byzantine reconquests of the tenth century to motivate Muslims from as far

East as Khurasan to travel across dar al-Islam to fight with the armies of Saif al-Daula.

Furthermore, we have evidence that a broader subsect of the Syrian population would have been receptive to the sort of admonitions and requests al-Sulami made towards the ruling class. The idea of the ghazi caliph was highly revered in thughur cities like Tarsus until they submitted to

Nikephoros, and as early as the fall of Jerusalem, Syrian religious leaders thought the Caliph in

Baghdad was their best recourse for support in resisting the Christians.57 Legal literature’s potential to arouse a military response was nothing new in Islamic society when al-Sulami was writing.

Conclusion

Although al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad is considered an important milestone among Crusades historians, his work was nothing incredibly startling or new in twelfth century Syria. While al-

Sulami seems to have been urgent in his admonition of Muslim rulers and his call to action to every able-Muslim, he mostly did so within well established legal, literary and historical trends.

His treatment of jihad as a defensive obligation incumbent on all Muslims and especially all

Muslim rulers, while not universally held, would certainly have been compelling in Syria, where only a century earlier the Muslims had endured the devastating campaigns of Nikephoros II. His

56 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,” in The Book of the Jihad of Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), 16. 57 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 104.

39 use and discussion of poetry likewise should be seen as typical for a learned Syrian in the milieu of some of the most renowned poets in Islamic history, especially since these poets visited jihad more than most legal subjects in their verse.

Once we reconcile al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad with the history of the idea of jihad, along with the history of its uninterrupted practice on the Syrian frontier up through the arrival of the

Crusaders, it becomes clear that we can use his text as one of the earliest measurements of the initial Muslim reaction to the arrival of the Europeans. Al-Sulami’s text reminds us that Muslims in the Western Mediterannean had long needed to fight defensive wars against fanatical Christian conquerors, and that they had come to endow Muslim rulers with the religious legitimacy of leading the jihad against these invasions, and indeed the instances when these rulers invaded non-Muslim lands.

If anything, al-Sulami’s invocation of jihad should be understood as an expression of incredulity that a sultan resembling Saif al-Daula had yet to come forward. His opinion that, in the future, it ought to be Muslim rulers who should be responsible for defending the dignity of the religion and its civilization had not been pulled from thin air. The notion that jihad was a great method of conferring imperial legitimacy and that the ghazi sultan was the most suitable prosecutor of holy war were well established in 1099 when Jerusalem fell into Christian hands, and al-Sulami seems merely to have been shaking off the rust that had accrued on a set of much older ideas and practices.

40

II

The Enemy

‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami wrote near the beginning of his Kitab al-Jihad that he was in his native city of Damascus in 1098, listening to a Shafi’i imam [ahad a’ima ashab al-shafi’i] preach at the Great Mosque.1 This imam related to al-Sulami that defensive jihad was a duty of sufficiency [fard al-kifayya] only if the Muslim locality under attack could muster enough troops to ensure success over the enemy; if the region could not gather enough troops, the jihad then became the duty of the Muslims in the surrounding countries to come to the aid of those under siege.2 After communicating this legal opinion, al-Sulami was sure to note that at around the same time, the Franks were laying siege to the city of Antioch in Northwestern Syria [‘and nuzul al-ifranj…‘ala antakya].3 Antioch surrendered within that same year to the Crusaders, referred to by al-Sulami and most subsequent Muslim writers as ifranj or ifranja, and the Muslims ultimately failed to orchestrate a defensive jihad like the one prescribed by al-Sulami’s counterpart in Damascus.4

1 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d.1106), trans. Christie, Niall (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 208. 2 Ibid, 208. 3 Ibid, 208; original Arabic 45: " .ﻚﻟذو . ﻨھﺎھ. ﺎ ﺘﻛ ﺒ ﮫﺘ ﻦﻣ ﻟ ﻆﻔ ﺪﺣا ا ﺔﻤﺋ بﺎﺤﺻا ﻲﻌﻓﺎﺸﻟا ﺑ ﻖﺸﻣﺪ ﻨﻋ ﺪ ﻧﺰول اﻻﻓﺮﻧﺞ اھﻠﻜﮭﻢ ﷲ ﻋﻠﻰ اﻧﻄﺎﻛﯿّﺔ وﻣﺜّﻞ ﻟﻲ ﺣﯿﻨﺌﺬ ﺑﮭﺎ ﺑﺪﻣﺸﻖ" “And I wrote that [hadith] from the saying of one of the imams who was a companion of al-Shafi’i [founder of the Shafi’i madhhab of which al-Sulami was most likely a follower] in Damascus when the Franks, God destroy them, came down upon Antioch and he related it to me at that time in Damascus,” my translation. 4 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 31.

41 Al-Sulami’s brief reference to the ifranj at Antioch, found at the tail-end of a technical legal discussion about jihad as an individual versus collective Islamic duty, is the oldest surviving instance of a Muslim correctly identifying the geographic origins of the Crusaders after their arrival in 1097.5 Naturally, al-Sulami’s early knowledge of the Franks makes his text an object of curiosity as well as an invaluable piece of evidence among Crusades scholars. Perhaps to al-Sulami’s chagrin then, contemporary historians tend to be less interested in what he had to say about jihad and more interested in who he believed it ought to be directed towards. Paul

Cobb, for instance, claims that al-Sulami “explicitly identifies [the Crusaders] as part and parcel of earlier Frankish activity elsewhere in the Mediterannean,” specifically the Norman conquest of Sicily from 1061-1091 and the Reconquista in al-Andalus.6 Before discussing al-Sulami’s conditions for jihad or his legal opinions about when Muslims are obliged to pursue it, Cobb thinks it more important to demonstrate al-Sulami’s awareness that the invading Christians were, in fact, Frankish. In doing so, Cobb is inserting himself into a hard-fought debate among

Islamicists and Western Crusades historians over whether al-Sulami, and Levantine Muslims at large, initially understood the difference between the new Frankish invaders and their Byzantine coreligionists when the former departed from Constantinople in 1097.

Although he receives modern praise for his pioneering account of the Crusaders’ geographic origins, al-Sulami only uses the Arabic word that later Muslim writers like Ibn al-

Athir and Ibn al-Qalanisi would use to refer to the Franks, al-ifranj, once in what survives of his

Kitab al-Jihad.7 Though al-Sulami correctly identifies the Franks as those who conquered

Antioch during the First Crusade, he curiously only uses the moniker al-ifranj in a passage that

5 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 71. 6 Cobb, Paul M., The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38. 7 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 45. Here, I am referring to the example I provide on p. 42.

42 amounts to historical record-keeping, perhaps even for the sake of admonishing the lethargy of the Muslims during the siege of Antioch, and he does not discuss at length where they came from. While al-Sulami’s reference to the Crusaders as ifranj might suggest an awareness among his Muslim audience in 1105 that the Franks were those who had invaded the Levant, the word ifranj is conspicuously absent from the passages wherein al-Sulami describes his own interpretation of the events of the First Crusade as a “warning from God,” and his belief in the necessity of the jihad to retake formerly Muslim-territory from the much more nebulous

“enemy” [‘adu].8

Al-Sulami’s invocation of such an indistinct enemy, combined with his prolific mention of the Byzantines [al-Rum] has led some scholars to argue that al-Sulami may have confused the

Franks with the Byzantines, who had become the symbolic and eternal enemy of Islam after the first fitnah.9 More recently, Nadia Dajani-Shakeel, Paul Chevedden and Niall Christie have argued that al-Sulami’s confusion as well as the purported ignorance among sources that preceded his Kitab al-Jihad may have been deliberate attempts to obscure the distinctions between Byzantines and their Latin Christian counterparts. Earlier scholars like al-Mas’udi (d.

956) displayed significant knowledge of the locations of the Frank’s cities, their allegiance to the

8 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 219. “May God destroy them” [ahlakahum Allah]. 9 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (New York: Routledge, 2014), 18. Christie writes that there is a case to be made for Muslim misperceptions of the Christian enemy during the First Crusade. The Peasant Crusade was mistaken among the Seljuqs of Rum for a Byzantine raid because its constituents were so easily defeated and the Byzantines were regarded as non-bellicose people. It is also possible, according to Christie, that the Seljuqs confused these Franks with the Frankish mercenaries who had fought in the Byzantine armies. Several Western European ethnicities were represented among these mercenary legions, notable the Anglo- Saxon immigrants serving in the Varangian Guard; see: Alvarez, Sandra, “English Refugees in the Byzantine Armed Forces: The Varangian Guard and Anglo-Saxon Ethnic Consciousness,” De Re Militari (23 June 2014). http://deremilitari.org/2014/06/english-refugees-in-the-byzantine- armed-forces-the-varangian-guard-and-anglo-saxon-ethnic-consciousness/.

43 Pope, and even their lines of succession.10 Elsewhere medieval Muslims characterized the Franks as brutish and dim-witted because of their remoteness from the sun in the outer climes of the

Earth.11 Therefore, without even considering al-Sulami’s particular invocation of the terms

‘Frank,’ ‘Byzantine,’ and ‘enemy,’ it is possible that any medieval Muslim author would have been aware of the Franks, but in a multivalent and perhaps more fantastical than realistic sense.

The Muslim sources that mention the ifranj and their lands that were written before the Crusades, as well as the non-Muslim sources that mention Frankish mercenaries in medieval Byzantine armies, could all offer explanations to the sort of awareness a scholar like al-Sulami would have had of the peoples of Western Europe.

The scope of the debate over how Muslims first perceived the Christians who invaded the

Levant in the late eleventh century goes well beyond al-Sulami. In her revisionist work The

Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand argued that the unpreparedness of the

Muslim world for the arrival of the First Crusade had not been sufficiently considered among

Crusades historians. The Muslims’ lack of political unification after the tenth century decline of central ‘Abbasid power, combined with the death of every significant Muslim ruler from before

1092, she argued, left the Muslims with almost no chance of mounting a successful resistance against the Christians in 1097.12 Muslim reactions ranged from apathetic to hysterical depending on the locale. The Damascene historian Ibn al-Qalanisi (d. 1160) suggested that, to amirs and their soldiers in Syria, the Franks had a particularly frightening quality which compelled the

10 Christie, Niall, “An Illusion of Ignorance? The Muslims of the Middle East and the Franks before the Crusades,” in Boas, Adrian J. (ed.), The Crusader World (London & New York: Routledge, 2016), 312-316. 11 Ibid, 312-316. Ptolemaic climes were a popular mode of distinction among races for medieval Muslims. The closer a people was located to the center of the map (for them, the Arabian Peninsula), the more intelligent, and less bellicose they would be. 12 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 33.

44 Muslims to retreat before engaging much smaller bands of Christian knights.13 The dearth of the term al-ifranj in Muslim sources contemporaneous with the First Crusade, combined with al-

Sulami’s alleged confusion between the Franks and their Byzantine coreligionists have led some scholars to conclude that Muslims were largely unaware that the Crusaders were a different enemy from their familiar Greek nemeses. If proven, this misconception would suggest further

Muslim fear and confusion than that which they were already experiencing regarding their political situation, and therefore an even weaker ability to resist the Christian advance.

A complete understanding of how exactly twelfth century Syrians understood the identity of the new Christian invaders – and perhaps even how the Crusaders understood their own national or ethnic identities – will never be reached. This is not to say, however, that al-Sulami’s

Kitab al-Jihad has nothing more besides one spare invocation of the Franks to demonstrate to us the sort of enemy to whom he hoped to encourage a response. Al-Sulami made several references to the enemy against whom the Muslims needed to unify, and he sometimes used the ethnic terms Frank (faranj) and Byzantine (rum) to refer to them. However, he simultaneously made it clear that he was aware of some distinction between the two Christian groups. But, to condense the debate about Muslim knowledge of the identity of the Crusaders to this simple observation that al-Sulami, a solitary Muslim, seems to have acknowledged a difference between the

Byzantines and the Franks would be to ignore the texture his text offers to our modern understanding of Muslim perceptions of the enemy in the early eleventh century. Scholars have exchanged volleys over whether al-Sulami exhibited confusion over the identity of his enemies in his text, but have overlooked his invocation of much older historical events, hadith, and

13 Ibn al-Qalanisi, trans. Francesco Gabrieli in Gabrieli, Francesco (ed.), Arab Historians of the Crusades (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), 27.

45 literary traditions that indicate what ideas might have aroused Islamic unity and willingness to fight the jihad against the Crusaders. Al-Sulami appears to have believed that the best way to encourage Muslims to “go out, lightly or heavily armored, and fight the jihad” was to invoke the memory of Islam’s oldest enemy rather than its newest.14

The Marvelous Ifranj Before the Crusades

During the height of the ‘Abbasid period, Muslims exhibited a proclivity for travel as well as writing about it. Initially, Muslim authors demonstrated a remarkable balance of fact alongside the fantastical tales they told about far-away places like India and Africa, especially when measured against the standard of medieval ethnographies throughout the world written contemporaneously.15 As writers began to travel less than they wrote, fantastical accounts began to overshadow the factual, and passages like the following rather accurate account of the society of the ifranj from ‘Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Mas’udi (d. 956) could be eclipsed by more marvelous

[‘ajibi] accounts of the far off places Muslim authors chose to write about:

The first of the kings of ifranja was Clovis. He was a Zoroastrian, but his wife converted him to Christianity. Her name was Clotild.16

Although he admits that he copied the above passage from a book written by a Frankish bishop for the Umayyad caliph in al-Andalus, al-Mas’udi demonstrates his knowledge of Clovis, the first king of the Franks, as well as their history and religious culture. In other texts, this relatively unmuddied information about the lands of the ifranj was substituted for more fantastical accounts, like that of Ibn al-Faqih (fl. 902):

14 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 211. 15 Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in the 12th-15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature (New York: Routledge, 2017), 40. 16 ‘Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Mas’udi, Muruj al-Dhahab wa Ma’adin al-Jawhar, trans. Niall Christie in Christie, Niall, “An Illusion of Ignorance?” 313.

46 The sixth climate consists of the Firanja and other countries. In it are women who cut off their breasts and cauterise them while they are small, so that they will not grow large.17

Here, Ibn al-Faqih has the classical Greek Amazons confused with the Western European ifranj.

His inspiration was probably a Greek text translated into Arabic during or after the reign of the

‘Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun (d. 833).18 Given the range of accounts provided by Muslim authors like al-Mas’udi and Ibn al-Faqih, it is difficult to prescript a unified medieval-Islamic perception of the ifranj prior to the First Crusade. Some information was accurate, but importantly, that information needed to be accessed from Frankish, and not Muslim sources. By and large, however, and with the exception of al-Mas’udi’s account of the kings of the Franks, when the ifranj were mentioned in pre-Crusades Islamic literature, they tended to adopt a semi-mythical quality.

Perhaps more important than how Muslims thought of the ifranj prior to the First

Crusade, is how much attention they were given relative to other foreign groups. The Franks, who al-Sulami positively identified as the perpetrators of the “calamity” [nazila] of the First

Crusade, were among the last of the peoples with whom the Muslim geographers were concerned.19 In the few accounts that we do have from medieval Muslims concerning the Franks, the earliest tend to describe them as the people who lived within the territory of the Carolingian

Empire during the reign of Charlemagne, but even then, they often confused Paris, the

Carolingian capital, with Rome.20 Even when al-Tabari, perhaps the Classical Islamic World’s most well-known historian, wrote in the tenth century that the Franks [ifranja] were in Spain

17 Ibn al Faqih, Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, trans. Niall Christie in “An Illusion of Ignorance?,” p. 314. 18 Gutas, Dimitri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and early- ‘Abbasid Society (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012). .” ﺔﻟزﺎﻨﻟا “ Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 234; Arabic, 71‘ 19 20 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders, 14.

47 when the Arab conquest arrived there in 647-648 (27AH), he seems to have them confused with another group:

[‘Abdallah ibn Nafi ibn al-Husayn and ‘Abdallah ibn Nafi ibn al-Qays] set out [from Africa] accompanied by the Berbers. They came (to Spain) by land and sea, and God bestowed it upon the Muslims and the Ifranjah. They [al-ifranjah] flourished under Muslim rule as did Ifriqiyah.21

At no time did the Franks assent to living peacefully beneath Umayyad rule in al-Andalus as al-

Tabari suggests, and they played no part in assisting the Umayyad conquest in Spain. Humphreys notes that al-Tabari most likely mistook the Visigoths for “Ifranjah,” because the real Franks were never there.22 The Carolingian Franks, however, did defeat an Umayyad army led by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi much further north about a century later in 732 at the Battle of Poitiers.23

Earlier Muslim authors like Harun ibn Yahya and al-Tabari’s own contemporary, al-Mas’udi (d.

956) both left us much more accurate accounts of the Franks and their civilization, so it seems that while al-Tabari was well-informed enough to know of the Franks, he applies their moniker to a group that was known to be different even among some Muslims. Perhaps more interestingly, al-Tabari failed to mention any of the events of the mid-730s in Western Europe in his Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk. In his entry for the year 732, al-Tabari makes no mention of

Poitiers, but instead turns his attention toward the mistreatment of ‘Abbasid missionaries from the Khurasan, and poems about the exoticism of India [al-Hind].24 However, it seems al-Tabari’s neglect to mention the Battle of Poitiers in 732 is not necessarily a manifestation of his pro-

21 Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839-923), Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, trans. R. Stephen Humphreys (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 22. 22 Ibid, see Humphreys’ n37 on p. 22 of his translation. The Visigoths ruled Spain from the fifth century until the arrival of the Muslims. 23 García Sanjuán, Alejandro, “Al-Andalus, Political History,” in Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, , Accessed January 19, 2020. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_30661. 24 Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839-923), Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, trans. Khalid Yahya Blankinship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 90-91. A good example of the Muslim literary obsession with the ‘aja’ib [marvels] of places like India and Persia, though al-Tabari’s history is not expressly a geography.

48 ‘Abbasid sympathies exhibited elsewhere in his Tarikh, which one could argue may have dampened his enthusiasm for reporting the martyrdom of an Umayyad general.25 According to

Niall Christie, the Battle of Poitiers is merely alluded to in the Muslim sources if it is discussed at all, and is usually degraded to a small encounter rather than a decisive battle.26 He cites an outstanding account from Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam (d. 871) that offers an example of such an allusion:

‘Abd al-Rahman raided the Ifranja...then he also went out to raid [the Franks] and was martyred along with all his companions. His death...was in the year 115 [733].27

Even though he is writing about Poitiers, al-Hakam neglects to record the correct year of al-

Ghafiqi’s death (114 AH/732 AD), and moreover, demotes the engagement to a raid. Al-Tabari’s silence on this engagement with the Franks had no clear political motivations, and the dearth of other Muslim accounts of Poitiers, – especially accurate ones – suggest that the Franks and their realms occupied little space in the historical, sociological and geographical interests of medieval

Muslims. A map drawn by the Morrocan scholar Muhammad al-Idrisi who was patronized by

Roger II of Sicily illustrates the periphery occupied by the ifranj in the Muslim worldview:

25 Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839-923), Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, trans. Khalid Yahya Blankinship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), See al-Tabari’s entry entitled “Punishment of ‘Abbasid Missionaries in Khurasan,” 123-124. 26 Christie, Niall, “An Illusion of Ignorance?” 316. 27 Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam, ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Abd Allah, CC Torey (ed.), Futuh Misr (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), accessed in Christie, Niall, “An Illusion of Ignorance?” 316.

49

Fig. 2. Muhammad al-Idrisi’s World Map, c. 12th Century. https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy2.williams.edu/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822000329654.

Al-Idrisi, a Morrocan geographer employed by Roger II of Sicily, drew the above map of the world in the twelfth century. If it looks unfamiliar, that is because you may be used to seeing the world map oriented with North at the top. Al-Idrisi, like other Muslim cartographers, placed South at the top of his map.The way that al-Idrisi saw the world, Arabia was at its center, and western Europe was a speck of land near the bottom-right corner.

50 Niall Christie has observed, however, that the mistakes in Muslim accounts of the Franks prior to the First Crusade sometimes appear to be made deliberately.28 Al-Mas’udi (d. 956), who left us some of the most detailed information about the Franks before their arrival in the Levant in 1097, wrote in his Meadows of and Mines of Gems [Muruj al-Dhahab wa al-Ma’adin al-

Jawhar] a list of the kings of the Ifranj [Carolingians] from Clovis to Louis IV.29 He also recounts Clovis’ conversion from Paganism to Christianity and the peaceful relations enjoyed between the Umayyads and the ifranj during the reign of Charlemagne’s son, Ludrick.30 Despite al-Mas’udi’s impressive political and historical knowledge of the Franks in the Muruj, his later text, according to Christie, obscures his earlier understanding of the Franks and their rulers:

As for those peoples of the Northern regions...like the Slavs and the Franks and those nations next to them, the sun shines weakly upon them because of their distance from it...They have little warm temperament in them...Their beliefs have no solidity...The ones who are from further north have been overcome with ignorance, dryness of humor, and brutishness.31

Christie qualifies this excerpt from al-Mas’udi’s later work as an inaccurate depiction of the

Franks in light of his earlier accurate reports about the kings of the ifranj in the Muruj.32 Aman

Nadhiri, however, does not think these two passages necessarily contradict one another.

According to Nadhiri, this passage from the Kitab al-Tanbih is merely concerned with the anthropological character of the ifranj as opposed to their history. Additionally, Nadhiri argues that the Kitab al-Tanbih, “condenses much of the information of the Muruj.”33 Al-Mas’udi’s portrayals of the ifranj are approached differently in each of his texts; his inclusion of the list of

28 Christie, Niall, ‘An Illusion of Ignorance? The Muslims of the Middle East and The Franks before the Crusades,’ 320. 29 Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in the 12th-15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature, 44. 30 Ibid, 45. 31 ‘Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Mas’udi, Kitab al-Tanbih wa al-Ishraf, trans. Niall Christie, in Christie, Niall, ‘An Illusion of Ignorance? The Muslims of the Middle East and The Franks before the Crusades,’ 312. 32 Christie, Niall, ‘An Illusion of Ignorance? The Muslims of the Middle East and The Franks before the Crusades,’ 314. 33 Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in the 12th-15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature, 46.

51 Carolingian kings in the Muruj is historical knowledge, while his description of the character and appearance of the ifranj in his Kitab al-Tanbih is geographical. While authors like al-Mas’udi may not have always exhaustively revealed their knowledge of the ifranj, we should not necessarily interpret their omissions as attempts to conceal their familiarity with this group. As

Christie himself admits, and Nadhiri confirms, remarkably little has survived that was written about the Franks by Muslim authors prior to the First Crusade, and thus the scant evidence we have for pre-Crusades perceptions of the ifranj is circumstantial.34

The dearth of Frankish appearances in the Arabic canon becomes less circumstantial when we consider the evident popularity of travel literature and ‘aja’ib [marvels] of foreign lands in ‘Abbasid Arabic literature. We are left with hundreds of medieval accounts of geography and ‘aja’ib from Muslim writers who either themselves travelled, like Ibn Fadlan in his expedition to the (c. 960) and al-Mas’udi in his journey to India, or simply rehashed fossilized narratives of far-away places and peoples from whatever locale in which they happened to be writing.35 Nadhiri acknowledges the paucity of references to the bilad al-ifranj

[lands of the Franks] in the corpus of Muslim travel literature prior to the Crusades compared to their more abundant references to places like India, Africa and the East more generally.36 It does not seem, therefore, as if Muslim writers were uninterested in the lands beyond their own frontiers before the First Crusade, but it does appear that they were particularly uninterested in western Europe. Though he argues medieval Muslim writers were relatively more familiar with the geography of Europe than that of China or Africa, Paul Cobb agrees that these authors considered the people who lived in Western Europe antipodean barbarians, not dissimilar to the

34 Christie, Niall, “An Illusion of Ignorance?” 321. 35 See: Ahmad ibn Fadlan, Mission to the Volga, trans. James E. Montgomery (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 36 Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in the 12th-15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature, 40.

52 Turks of the Asian Steppe.37 As we have seen, al-Mas’udi was sure to frame the character of the ifranj with their proximity to the sun, either a Ptolemaic geographic convention inherited from the ancient Greeks or the kishwar system inherited from the Sassanid-, in his Kitab al-

Tanbih.38 Unlike Africans or Indians then, the ifranj inhabited a climatic realm unconducive to civilization. Although these sorts of essential characteristics tended to be ripe ground for fantastical enamorment with far-off places in the ‘aja’ib literature, it appears al-Mas’udi did not attempt any sort of extraordinary caricature of the Franks in the passage from his Kitab al-

Tanbih on page 9, but instead dryly dismissed them as an irredeemable race. This treatment of the ifranj as barbarians, combined with the scarcity of references to them in Muslim geographic and travel literature suggests medieval Muslims simply were not bothered enough by the ifranj to pursue more information about them.

Al-Sulami, as we have mentioned earlier in this chapter, had even less to say about the ifranj in his Kitab al-Jihad than the earlier sources we have seen from al-Mas‘udi and al-Tabari.

However, this does not stop experts like Carole Hillenbrand from eulogizing al-Sulami’s text as evidence that al-Sulami “[had] a clear idea of the difference between Frank and Byzantine.”39

Al-Sulami in fact only writes ifranj once in the entirety of what survives of his manuscript in

Part Two of the Kitab al-Jihad:

...the lands of al-Sham [Syria and Palestine] are like one town...As for the case of a single town, if it were besieged, like Damascus and its territories [al-Sham], the duty of jihad likewise would become an individual obligation on all who were there no matter what happened...By this town I mean Damascus. [End of Christie, beginning of my own translation] And I wrote that from the

37 Cobb, Paul M., The Race for Paradise, 15. With the help of al-Idrisi’s map of the world (c. 1154), Cobb argues that Muslims prior to the First Crusade would have placed the lands of the Franks [bilad al-ifranj] in the sixth of seven Ptolemaic climes, or the second outermost of the concentric circles that made up the world. Thus, the ifranj were marginalized anthropologically as well as geographically in the medieval Muslim mind. It is important to note, however, that Cobb’s inclusion of al-Idrisi’s map probably does more to suggest Muslim familiarity with the geography of Europe prior to the First Crusade than it should. Al-Idrisi lived and wrote decades after the Franks arrived and settled in the Levant. 38 Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in the 12th-15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature, 43. 39 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 71.

53 saying of one of the imams who was a companion of al-Shafi’i in Damascus when the Franks, God destroy them, came down upon Antioch and he related it to me at that time in Damascus.40

While al-Sulami may allude to his knowledge that there is a distinction between the ifranj and the Byzantines in later passages of the Kitab al-Jihad, the above is the only instance wherein he uses ifranj as a referent to a group of “the enemy” [al-‘adu]. In the passage above, al-Sulami simply reports that the ifranj descended upon Antioch in the North of Syria while he was in

Damascus visiting a Shafi’i imam to learn about jihad as an obligation of sufficiency versus an individual duty.41 He reports that defensive jihad is an individual duty, and thus the duty of every able-bodied Muslim in the locale under attack by the non-believers, but moreover that the

Muslims from the greater region are obliged to send sufficient troops to defeat the enemy.42

Curiously, it is after explaining this legal opinion about who is obliged to prosecute defensive jihad that al-Sulami mentions the Frankish presence in Antioch. He also makes sure to mention that he was in Damascus, the de-facto capital of the region he refers to as the Levant [bilad al- sham], which roughly corresponds to modern , Syria, and Palestine. Antioch and

Damascus thus are associated with one another like the figurative towns that al-Sulami uses in his explanation of the individual duty of jihad. In other words, if al-Sulami’s own legal opinion that nearby Muslims are obliged to fight the jihad with the Muslims from a locale under attack by non-Muslims is applied to his own reality in the Levant, the Damascenes, in his opinion, were obliged by the shari’a to come to Antioch’s aid during the siege of 1098.

40 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 208 [original Arabic, 45]. 41 See the Discussion of duty of sufficiency and individual duty in Chapter I of this thesis, p. 21. An individual duty [fard al-‘ayn] is a religious obligation incumbent upon each individual Muslim, whereas a duty of sufficiency [fard al-kifaya] is a religious obligation incumbent upon the community as a whole. 42 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 208.

54 Al-Sulami’s invocation of the term ifranj does very little to characterize or distinguish the

Franks beyond establishing his hope that God will “destroy them.”43 Instead, al-Sulami uses the

Franks and their attack on Antioch as an example of an occasion when Damascenes and

Levantine Muslims in general were obliged to come to the aid of their coreligionists in the face of an invading non-Muslim enemy. But al-Sulami, who was writing well after Antioch fell into

Frankish hands in 1098, appears to have invoked this memory of the Frankish siege not merely to offer a historical example of the obligation of nearby Muslims to come to the aid of a town that cannot defend itself, but to admonish the inhabitants of al-Sham for not doing so in the case of the siege of Antioch.44 Al-Sulami explicitly rebukes the sultans and warriors of the region throughout the first surviving section of his manuscript:

The most astonishment is [what one feels] at a sultan who takes pleasure in life or remains where he is despite the appearance of this calamity, of which the outcome is conquest by these blasphemers.45

Al-Sulami clearly disapproved of the reactions of the sultans in the Levant to this “calamity,” but perhaps more importantly, he believed the failure of the caliph to wage annual jihad campaigns against the non-believers precipitated the conquest of Jerusalem:

[the Caliph’s] stopping [the jihad expeditions]...made it necessary that God dispersed their unity, split up their togetherness...and tempted their enemies to snatch their country from their grasp.46

Interestingly, al-Sulami uses God as the agent who brought the “enemies” [‘awda’] to the

Levant, and prior to that, the agent who sowed discord among the Muslims. From al-Sulami’s perspective, it seemed that regardless of who arrived in the Levant in the early twelfth century,

43 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 208. 44 Eddé, Anne-Marie, ‘Antakya,’ In Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. 45 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 211. 46 Ibid, 206.

55 they were a well-deserved “warning from God,” so that He would see if the Muslims would,

“refrain from disobeying Him.”47

Since al-Sulami believed that the conquering Christians were a test from God to encourage the Muslims to revive the jihad campaigns prosecuted by Harun al-Rashid and the ghazis of the high-caliphate, where the conquerors came from seems to have been of little importance. Al-Sulami, unlike al-Mas’udi and Harun ibn Yahya, was not interested in understanding the Franks; he was interested in defeating them. We should not be surprised, then, that he invokes their ethnicity so infrequently, and that in passages wherein he is exhorting the

Muslims to action, he refers to the ifranj with the universal term ‘enemy’ [al-‘adu]. But if al-

Sulami’s objective was indeed the transcendent spurring-on of the Muslims to renew the annual campaigns against the non-believers and retake their lost territory, then why would he have used the term ifranj at all?

Paul Chevedden, like Hillenbrand and Cobb, argues that al-Sulami clearly identified the events of the First Crusade as continuations of a grander Frankish offensive, starting with the

Norman conquest of Sicily and the revival of anti-Muslim campaigns in al-Andalus.48 All three writers use the following passage from Part II of the Kitab al-Jihad to demonstrate this:

A number [ta’ifa] of the enemy pounced on the island of Sicily while the Muslims disputed and competed, and they conquered one city after another in al-Andalus. When the reports confirmed for them that this country suffered from the disagreement of its masters and its rulers’ meddling...they confirmed their resolution to set out for it, and Jerusalem was their dearest wish.49

These scholars are correct, then, that al-Sulami connects the fall of Jerusalem with the eleventh century Norman conquest of Sicily and the reconquista campaigns in Spain that happened

47 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 219. 48 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,” Oriens 39 (2011) 257-329, 290. 49 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 206.

56 around the same time. But their insistence that al-Sulami views this as a Frankish offensive is both speculative and distracting. Christie does not include the word ‘Frank’ in his translation of this passage, but Chevedden and Hillenbrand both insert the moniker next to “A number” in their respective texts.50 What makes this abrogation of the translation more misleading, however, is the fact that the original text does not refer to an enemy at all in the entirety of the passage. Thus, while Christie does not go so far as to translate this passage as Chevedden and Hillenbrand suggest it ought to be, he still editorializes al-Sulami’s text by including “of the enemy.” The sentence literally reads: “A congregation [ta’ifa] came down on the island of Sicily.”51

Without a clear indication in the text that al-Sulami thought these conquests were perpetrated by the same group of people, it can perhaps be speculated that al-Sulami saw the events of the late eleventh century and early twelfth century as a Frankish offensive, but speculating about al-Sulami’s intent here distracts us from what we can more definitively say about this passage. The Crusades scholarship has drawn our attention towards the actions of the

Franks reported in this section of the Kitab al-Jihad, but in doing so, it has obscured al-Sulami’s testimony that the “disputing and competition” among Muslims as well as their “rulers’ meddling” is what made the conquest of Muslim territory possible in the first place. It seems al-

Sulami considered intra-Islamic discord and disunity a more fundamental issue than the invasion and conquest that this atomization invited from non-Muslims. This might explain why al-Sulami, who clearly knew something about the ifranj and therefore perhaps knew that the Normans who invaded Sicily were from the same region, chose not to comment on the ethnicity of the congregation [ta’ifa] that conquered so much Muslim territory. For al-Sulami, it appears it was

50 Chevedden uses: “A host [of Franks]...,” 290. 51 The Arabic reads: ﺛﻮﻓ ﺖﺒ ﺎط ﺋ ﺔﻔ ﻰﻠﻋ ةﺮﯾﺰﺟ ﻠﻘﺻ ﺔﯿ

57 not important where the enemies of Islam were coming from, otherwise he would have, and demonstrably could have spoken about it. Al-Sulami’s objective was to inspire the Muslims to fight the jihad and retake their territory, and it seems that invoking the place of origin of the main body of Crusaders would have had little effect. The Muslims simply did not care enough about the ifranj yet for it to have been worth al-Sulami’s while to discuss them, and his stated objective and pressing concern was retaking what the Muslims had lost and reminding them how to properly adhere to the obligations of the religion.

Inclusion Instead of Confusion

It is often difficult to determine when al-Sulami is specifically referring to the ifranj as the enemy [al-‘adu] who conquered Muslim territory throughout his Kitab al-Jihad. While he mentions the group by name when he discusses the siege of Antioch, he also appears to reference the ifranj as a group distinct from the Byzantines [al-rum] later in Part II:

They [the Muslims] will perform their jihad many times what people did in their military expeditions to their lands and the lands of the rum, to drive them there and efface their traces.52

Al-Sulami does not mention the ifranj overtly in this passage, although he does carefully distinguish between the territory of the Byzantines [Rum] and that, ostensibly, of the other conquerors in the Levant who the Muslims were supposed to be fighting. Al-Sulami mentioned the ifranj specifically earlier in Part II of the Kitab al-Jihad, and he connects the siege of Antioch and the other earlier conquests of the First Crusade with the Crusaders’ “dearest wish,”

Jerusalem, so it appears he is referencing the ifranj here as well, albeit allusively.53 While in his earlier and more direct reference to the ifranj al-Sulami does not concern himself with their

52 ‘Ali Ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 235. 53 Ibid, 206.

58 geographic origins, here he betrays an awareness that they did not inhabit what he considered to be the “lands of the Rum” [bilad al-Rum].54 It seems strange, then, that al-Sulami does not refer specifically to the countries of the ifranj when he predicts that the Muslims will fight the jihad there along with their jihad in the countries of the Rum if he knows the ifranj well enough to mention them earlier in the same part of his book.

This is not the only instance in the Kitab al-Jihad when al-Sulami appears to have known more than he chose to say about the enemy facing the Muslims; elsewhere in his Kitab al-Jihad, al-Sulami seems to deliberately obscure the identity of the Crusaders. To encourage the Muslims in their jihad against the Crusaders, he reports two versions of the same hadith to demonstrate that Muslims are fated to resist the Banu al-Asfar:

The Prophet, may God bless him, informed the Muslims that the Banu al-Asfar would fight them, then whoever came after them would fight them [and then another version]...the Messenger of God said, “Know that you will fight the Balasfar, and those believers who come after you will fight them”.55

The Banu al-Asfar translates to ‘the yellow tribe,’ and is a common literary reference to

Christians, and more specifically Byzantines in the classical Arabic literary corpus, and it probably invokes the pre-Islamic Arab understanding that the Christians were descended from

Esau ‘the Yellow.’56 However, al-Sulami’s first hadith mentions that “whoever came after” the

Banu al-Asfar would also fight the Muslims, which seems to suggest the Crusaders were the next iteration of these incessant Byzantine adversaries. Although al-Sulami’s qualifier of “whoever came after them” is intriguing, it should not overshadow his invocation of the traditional term

Banu al-Asfar and that term’s association within the Arabic literary tradition with Christendom, which more often than not, the Muslims saw the Byzantines as ruling. This is also not the only

54 ‘Ali Ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 235. 55 Ibid, 216-217. 56 Fierro, Maribel, ‘Al-Asfar,’ Study Islamica, No. 77 (1993), 175-176.

59 instance wherein al-Sulami seems to deliberately invoke the Byzantines when discussing the ifranj. He includes another hadith in Part II prophesying the eventual Muslim conquest of

Constantinople:

The Rum will conquer Jerusalem for a set period of time, and the Muslims will gather against them, drive them out of it, kill all except a few of them, then pursue their scattered remnants to Constantinople, descend on it, and conquer it...If this situation is occurring during that time, and if those who fight the jihad are from this conquering group, among them are those who will succeed in driving them out of Jerusalem and other parts of this country.57

By including this hadith, al-Sulami is clearly suggesting that members of the “conquering group,” which he earlier establishes to mean the people of al-Sham through various hadith attributed to Muhammad, will drive the conquerors of Jerusalem back to Constantinople and regain their lost territory. In doing so, however, he appears to confuse the ifranj, who conquered

Jerusalem in 1099, with the Rum from the prophecy. But earlier in the Kitab al-Jihad during his discussion of defensive jihad, al-Sulami was certain that the force that conquered Antioch was

Frankish; he does not mention any Byzantine presence at the siege in 1098.58 It is unlikely, then, that al-Sulami could have confused the identity of the Crusaders who captured Jerusalem only a year after the fall of Antioch with a separate Byzantine force. Al-Sulami must have known which group between the ifranj and the rum had captured Jerusalem, and so it appears he deliberately omitted the specific origins of the ifranj in his own analogy between the hadith that he cites and the contemporaneous situation in the Levant.

Given al-Sulami’s demonstrated knowledge that the ifranj and the Rum came from distinct lands [bilad], his confusion around the identity of the Crusaders in his allegory between the First Crusade and this hadith seems to have been dishonest. On the other hand, it is difficult to say precisely how a Muslim like al-Sulami might have classified the ifranj as a group. Niall

57 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 218. 58 Ibid, 208.

60 Christie argues that most pre-Crusades mentions of the ifranj, including those made by al-

Mas‘udi, refer to military encounters between them and the Muslims.59 Furthermore, from non-

Muslim accounts of the period leading up to and including the First Crusade, there is substantial evidence that Muslim soldiers and amirs had encountered Frankish mercenaries attached to

Byzantine battalions well before the Crusaders crossed the Bosphorus in 1097. The principally military nature of Muslim interactions with the ifranj might suggest that the Muslims had developed an understanding that the ifranj were a type of Christian soldier who served the Rum, not dissimilar to the foreign slaves who served as soldiers in the armies of Arab amirs throughout the ‘Abbasid period.60

One such non-Muslim chronicler, an Armenian monk called Matthew of Edessa (d.

1144), frequently talks about the Franks in his Chronicle. In his account of the Battle of

Manzikert (1071), for example, Matthew writes that a Frank volunteered to ride out of the besieged city to burn down a Muslim catapult with Greek fire. Matthew writes that after the

Frank succeeded, the Byzantine Emperor, “sent for him and elevated him to a high rank,” while

“Even the Sultan...asked to see this person...so that he might give him gifts.”61 Although we cannot know whether the Muslim Sultan was aware that this knight was a Frank, this is hardly the only encounter between Frankish mercenaries and Muslim soldiers that Matthew recorded prior to the First Crusade. He also gives an account of the Frankish defense of a fort near Edessa called Sevaverak against a Muslim force, when a Frankish detachment “consisting of two hundred horsemen...went forth against the Turks and at first slaughtered them and turned them in

59 Christie, Niall, Levantine Attitudes Towards the Franks During the Early Crusades (490/1096 - 564/1169) (PhD Diss., University of St. Andrews, June, 1999), 20. 60 Crone, Patricia, “The Early Islamic World,” in Raaflaub & Rosenstein (eds.), War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 319. 61 Matthew of Edessa, The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa trans. Ara Edmond Dostourian (Armenian Heritage Press, 2013), 88.

61 flight” before being repulsed themselves by a second wave of Muslims.62 In the same year,

Matthew writes, the Byzantine army was turned in flight near Gulab by another Turkish force, but a Frank heroically covered the Christian retreat:

A Frank turned around to face the Turks, and, roaring like a lion, wounded and killed many, thus stopping them until the [Byzantines] could escape. But, his horse having been crippled by many wounds, the Frank was cut down and perished bravely on the spot.63

Throughout these three episodes involving Frankish mercenaries in the Byzantine army,

Matthew consistently reports that the Franks fought very well, and that they fought on horseback.

Moreover, they suggest that Muslim soldiers had some contact with the Franks in battle, and perhaps some idea of who the Franks were relative to their Byzantine employers, since the

Byzantines were renowned for their martial inferiority.64

There are no Muslim accounts that mention the ifranj in eleventh century Muslim military engagements with the Byzantines, but nonetheless it seems the Franks were renowned among the soldiers of the Near East, Muslim and Christian alike, for their ferocity. The leader of a Greek rebellion, Matthew writes, was “most apprehensive” of the Franks among the Byzantine force opposing him, and made sure that he personally led the assault against their section of the battalion.65 Although Muslim authors neglected to record any eleventh century military encounters with Frankish mercenaries, some Muslim texts give the impression that the ifranj were still understood to be subservient to the Rum. Interestingly, al-Idrisi, who was born just around the end of the First Crusade, referred to the ifranj as the “Franks of the Byzantines”

[ifranj al-rum] decades after al-Sulami finished his Kitab al-Jihad.66 This genitive construction implies a servile bond between that ifranj and Rum echoed in much earlier sources from before

62 Matthew of Edessa, Chronicle, 107-108. 63 Ibid, 109. 64 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders, 18. 65 Matthew of Edessa, Chronicle, 138. 66 Christie, Niall, Levantine Attitudes Towards the Franks During the Early Crusades (490/1096 - 564/1169), 64.

62 widespread Frankish service among the Byzantine armies, however, al-Idrisi’s testimony here is especially compelling since he lived and wrote beneath Norman rule in Sicily.67 Someone with such access to Frankish sources ought to have understood that, especially in the mid-twelfth century, the Franks did not understand themselves to be subservient in any way to the

Byzantines.68

Muslim and Christian authors living around the time of the First Crusade write about the

Franks in association with the Byzantines, and it is possible that al-Sulami’s command for the

Muslims to perform jihad by going out to fight in the countries of both the ifranj and the rum reflects a wider Near Eastern belief that the presence of Frankish mercenaries in the Byzantine armies was a manifestation of the Byzantines’ political suzerainty over the Franks. This would also explain al-Sulami’s choice to more blatantly associate the ifranj with the rum in his invocation of the two hadith about the Banu al-Asfar and those non-believers who would come after them; if indeed the ifranj were the servants of the Rum, then Muslims would be acting within the bounds of Muhammad’s foretelling of conflicts with Christians of any variation.

If al-Sulami understood the ifranj to be military clients of the Rum, then it is also possible to read his invocation of the hadith wherein he reports the Rum will conquer Jerusalem as an acknowledgement that, though the ifranj may have been directly responsible for taking

Jerusalem, the Rum were still the ultimate orchestrators of the First Crusade. However, similar hadith to those found in al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad which establish the preeminence of the

Muslims in al-Sham were also invoked in the cities affected by the tenth century Byzantine conquests led by Nikephoros II Phokas. After the Byzantines captured the city of Tarsus, north

67 Christie, Niall, Levantine Attitudes Towards the Franks During the Early Crusades (490/1096 - 564/1169), 64. 68 Holt, P.M., The Age of the Crusades: The Near East From the Eleventh Century to 1517 (New York: Longman, 1986), 20.

63 of Aleppo, a local ‘alim named, conveniently, al-Tarsusi wrote that the Muslims of his native city were chosen by God to fight the jihad:

A martyr from that group [of Tarsusans] will be equal in merit to the martyrs of Badr...God will certainly raise up from that town on the Resurrection Day 170,000 martyrs who will enter Paradise without having to undergo the testing process [of non-martyrs]...God will grant forgiveness to the people of that town every day at sunrise and sunset alike. They will continue to enjoy the state of righteousness, and it will stay permanently with them, until the end of time.69

Al-Tarsusi invoked a genre of hadith here which propagates the merits [fada’il] of a particular group or locale within Islam. This was, no doubt, an attempt to establish the notion that God guaranteed his own favor and forgiveness to the people of Tarsus to encourage them to pursue martyrdom in the face of the conquering Byzantine force. Al-Sulami invokes a remarkably similar hadith about the Muslims who are preferred to fight the non-believers until the Judgment

Day:

A group of my community of Muslims will not cease to conquer the enemy of God, conquering for the truth. Whoever opposed them will not harm them...until the time of God’s power comes [sic.]...it was said, ‘O Messenger of God, where are they?’ He said, ‘They are in Jerusalem and its surroundings.’70

In a very similar hadith to the one referenced above, al-Sulami expands this group of Muslims from “Jerusalem and its surroundings” to include all of the Muslims from al-Sham.71 Like al-

Tarsusi’s invocation of Muhammad’s report that God preferred a group of Muslims from a particular area, al-Sulami presents reports that guarantee the blessings of the Muslims in their conquest against the “enemy of God” until the apocalypse. Al-Sulami’s use of fada’il hadith to spur the Muslims in his region to fight and conquer in light of his earlier reports that the Muslims were predestined to conquer Constantinople suggest a continuity in literary strategy between earlier writers like al-Tarsusi and Ibn Nubata (who Niall Christie identifies as a potential

69 al-Tarsusi trans. Nadia Maria El Cheikh, in Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 171. 70 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 214. 71 Ibid, 214.

64 inspiration for al-Sulami’s literary style) and himself.72 Christie suggests that al-Sulami’s invocation of earlier literary styles from the period of the Byzantine conquests (c. mid-tenth century) might indicate that, “al-Sulami expected his immediate audience to imitate these figures in their own involvement in the jihad against the Franks.”73 The Byzantine conquests, and the strategies invoked by Muslim writers in response to them, were merely examples for al-Sulami; they were dead historical events instead of living traditions that could be perpetually re- depoloyed for Muslim audiences.

Al-Sulami, who clearly knew about the ifranj and their role in the First Crusade, would most likely have directed the Muslims towards fighting jihad against the Franks first and foremost if his intention was indeed to borrow the strategies of exhortation from earlier scholars during the Byzantine conquests of the tenth century. He deliberately does not single out the ifranj, however, even when it seems it was possible for him to do so. In addition to the hadith he provides about the Muslims’ apocalyptic conquest of Constantinople after the Byzantine conquest of Jerusalem, al-Sulami verifies the Eastern Roman capital’s eshcatological significance:

In another hadith it is said that the Muslims will conquer Rome and Constantinople…Yahya ibn Ayyub reported...on the authority of Abu Qabil, saying: ‘We were with ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Amr and were discussing the conquest of Constantinople and Rome and which conquest would be achieved before the other…[ibn ‘Amr] said, “We were with the Messenger of God, may God bless him, writing down what he was saying, and we asked, ‘O Messenger of God, which of the two cities will be conquered before the other?’ He said, ‘The city of Heraclius,’ which means Constantinople.’”74

Including this hadith sets up an ostensibly inconsequential preference for the Muslims to conquer

Constantinople before Rome. This cannot be a matter of confusion on al-Sulami’s part. Any mention of the city of Rome in pre-Crusades Arabic literature connects the city to the ifranj, and

72 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,” The Book of the Jihad, 25-26. 73 Ibid, 25. 74 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 218.

65 on occasion to both the ifranj and the rum. Al-Sulami’s knowledge of the ifranj and his invocation of Rome in the same section of his Kitab al-Jihad would therefore be a remarkable coincidence if he believed that Rome was strictly a Byzantine city. After inserting his main hadith about the imminent Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem and finally their conquest of

Constantinople, al-Sulami includes a rather revealing bit of his own analysis:

[The Muslims of al-Sham] are the ones who will conquer Constantinople, as was said in the hadith...Fight hard, God have mercy on you, in this jihad. You may be the ones who will gain the merit of this great conquest, having been kept for this noble rank.75

At this point, it seems al-Sulami has shown his hand. He suggests he knows that the ifranj and the Rum are from different places, and that their lands are somehow separated. He also knows about the city of Rome. Finally, he identifies the perpetrators of the First Crusade, and specifically the siege of Antioch, as ifranj. Nevertheless, he was adamant that the Muslims of al-

Sham were destined, if they go out and fight the jihad, to conquer Constantinople. Al-Sulami did not attempt to merely copy the compelling literary style of Muslim scholars who came two hundred years before him; al-Sulami was instead invoking the idea that Constantinople was the elusive and supreme prize coveted by all Muslims, and the idea that the people from the city were their eternal enemies. Constantinople, the “unattainable pearl” in the eyes of medieval

Muslims according to Nadia El Cheikh, was being offered by al-Sulami to the preferred Muslims from al-Sham; these Muslims might have been “the ones who [would] gain the merits of [that] great conquest.”76

75 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 218. 76 El Cheikh, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, 141.

66 Conclusion:

It is somewhat remarkable that the earliest Muslim source mentioning the deeds of the ifranj in the Levant was written by an obscure ‘alim from Damascus. Al-Sulami probably never encountered a Crusader on the field of battle, and Damascus, though its population was enraged by the conquest of so many of their neighboring cities, remained untouched by the ifranj until

1148.77 Despite his profession and his location, al-Sulami actually seems to know more about the geographic origins of the Crusaders and their political relationship with the Byzantines than some scholars who lived and wrote after him, and thus should demonstrate better knowledge of them. The most noteworthy example is al-Idrisi, who may have been able to accurately locate the lands of the Franks [bilad al-ifranj] on a map, but was apparently unaware that the Crusaders were far from loyal to the Byzantine Emperor.78 Al-Sulami understood that the ifranj had their own land and their own central city independent from Constantinople and the Rum, and he commanded his audience to go out and fight the jihad in both places.79

Perhaps more impressive than al-Sulami’s demonstrated knowledge of the origins of the ifranj and their relationship to the Rum is how little he chooses to say about them. The only time he mentions the ifranj by name, al-Sulami uses them to more accurately reference an event that he expected his contemporaneous audience to be familiar with. Beyond indicating that the wider

Muslim population of the Levant was aware of the geographic origins of the Crusaders by 1105, al-Sulami’s reference to the ifranj demonstrates al-Sulami’s subtlety; the ifranj and their siege of

Antioch are merely points which al-Sulami uses to triangulate a failure, fresh in the minds of his

77 Holt, P.M., The Age of the Crusades, 43-44. 78 Ibid, 20. 79 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 235.

67 audience, of the Muslims and their rulers to righteously come to the aid of their coreligionists and gain victory over the non-believers.

When the ifranj and their incursions against Islam are front and center in the Kitab al-

Jihad, and not a vehicle for al-Sulami’s legal argument, he only alludes to their identity.

Elsewhere in his text, al-Sulami almost seems confused between the ifranj and the Rum. His confusion is, of course, an example of what Niall Christie has called “an illusion of ignorance,” wherein Muslim authors seem to betray better knowledge of the ifranj in some of their texts than they demonstrate in others.80 But upon closer inspection, al-Sulami assumes his audience, like himself, understands who conquered Jerusalem, and does not seem to be creating an illusion at all. Al-Sulami’s text is exhortatory, and he hoped it would goad the Muslims into reviving the jihad to evict the Crusaders, but towards this end al-Sulami portrayed the ifranj as the equivalents to the Rum. His inclusion of the Crusaders within the eschatological and cultural tradition occupied by the Byzantines, he seemed to have believed, would have opened

Constantinople, the great imagined prize of Muslims since the reign of Mu’awiya, as an objective for the jihad.81

The Believers, al-Sulami suggests, were still incentivized by the pressing weight of tradition in the face of a decidedly non-traditional enemy. The shame al-Sulami levels at the

Muslims and their rulers, and his demand for a return to the jihad tradition were, it seems, not enough on their own to make fighting the Crusaders more palatable. To do this, al-Sulami had to make the Franks into the Byzantines who the Muslims needed them to be.

80 Christie, Niall, “An Illusion of Ignorance?” 314-315. 81 El Cheikh, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, 141-149.

68

III

Jihad Against the Muslims

The events that comprised the First Crusade, according to al-Sulami, were explicitly linked to earlier campaigns undertaken by the enemy [al-’adu]. Before the Crusaders made for

Jerusalem, they “came down upon the island of Sicily...and they conquered in the same way one city after another in al-andalus.”1 The Franks had begun their surge against the Muslims far from the Levant, and much closer to their own homeland. The Norman conquest of Sicily had taken years to succeed, in which time al-Sulami and the Muslims evidently learned of their territorial aggression against their coreligionists throughout the Mediterranean. According to al-Sulami, then, what is known among western historians as the First Crusade was not the first offensive of its kind.2 As far as al-Sulami was concerned, the conquest of Jerusalem was only the latest in a series of Christian campaigns that wrestled Sicily, Spain, and the cities of Northern Syria from

Muslim control. Furthermore, al-Sulami’s preoccupation with the history of jihad on the

Byzantine frontier throughout his Kitab al-Jihad suggests he may have believed Crusading to be another iteration of the religiously-charged campaigns that battered the Levant from the tenth century onward.

Paul Chevedden, a Crusades historian, has pioneered the argument that al-Sulami’s text stands as testimony that modern scholars ought to reconsider the dominant Crusading narrative, which originated in the 19th Century. As commonly known, it holds that Crusading began with

1 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami trans. Niall Christie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 206; for Arabic see 43: ﻛو ﺎ ﺖﻧ ا ﻟ ﻘ سﺪ ﮭﻣ ﺎ ﺮﺋ ﻢﮭﯿﻧﺎﻣا 2 Chevedden, Paul E., “The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade: A New (Old) Paradigm for Understanding the Crusades,” Islam-Zeitschrift Fur Geschichte Und Kultur Des Islamischen Orients 83, no. 1 (2006): 90-136, 110.

69 Pope Urban II’s Council of Clermont in 1095, even though the earliest Muslim source, the Kitab al-Jihad, maintains that similar campaigns had come earlier. According to Chevedden, al-Sulami submits that Western Crusading was a much older phenomenon, and that in order to truly appreciate how Muslims viewed these events, we must pay closer attention to the chronology that al-Sulami presents us with in his text. The Kitab al-Jihad, which frequently brings the memory of the Byzantines to the fore while recording the Christian offensives of the late eleventh century, forces us to remeasure the historical scope of Muslim-Christian military encounters. From al-Sulami’s perspective, it appeared as though these new campaigns throughout the Levant were a reiteration of at least a century and a half of military conquest and political disruption in al-Sham.

Al-Sulami’s association of the campaigns in Sicily and al-Andalus with the events that

Crusades scholars collectively refer to as the First Crusade (c. 1097-1099) is even more compelling when his following remarks are considered:

They looked out on al-Sham on separated kingdoms, disunited hearts and differing views laced with hidden resentment, and with that their desires became stronger and extended to whatever their outstretched arms could desire. They did not stop, tireless in fighting the jihad against the Muslims.3

Chevedden, Christie and Hillenbrand fixate upon the final remark in the above passage. These scholars think it curious that al-Sulami chose to refer to the Crusades as a “jihad.” Although these scholars offer slightly different interpretations of al-Sulami’s identification of the First

Crusade as a jihad, they all agree that it must indicate al-Sulami’s awareness that these Christian invasions were somehow inspired by religion. After all, jihad in the twelfth century was a particularly religious term, freighted with centuries of legal debate and military action.4 Al-

Sulami, a respected ‘alim, would never have used this term frivolously. We therefore must pay

3 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 207. 4 See Chapter I, Muhajirun to Mujahidun.

70 close attention to descriptive and analytical implications of his choice to collectively classify these campaigns as a jihad.

At first glance, al-Sulami’s deliberate use of the term jihad in relation to the First Crusade and earlier Christian offensives around the Mediterranean world seems to suggest he was keenly aware of the true nature of his enemies as well as their motivations. Conveniently, he offers two widely recognized examples of proto-Crusading in Sicily and Spain.5 Like his prescient use of the word ifranj to describe his enemies, his description of their actions as jihad seems to indicate a profound, yet premature understanding of his adversaries’ religious ideology. However, his deliberate invocation of the Rum in addition to his inclusion of hadith concerning the Byzantines and Constantinople caution against such a hasty reading of al-Sulami’s description of the

Crusades as a jihad. To assume post hoc that al-Sulami viewed these campaigns from Spain to

Syria in the same frame that modern historians view them forces us to write the history of the

Crusades “backwards” instead of incorporating al-Sulami’s narrative as it stands into our holistic understanding of these Muslim-Christian encounters.6 It is impossible that al-Sulami anticipated the categorization of these campaigns ranging from the Reconquista to the First Crusade beneath the same historiographical umbrella as the Crusades that would arrive in the Levant long after his own death. Instead, it is probable that al-Sulami’s knowledge of the religious essence of these

Christian offensives, like most of his legal and cultural knowledge, came from much older regional confrontations between Christian and Muslim armies.

Chevedden has argued that al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad provides evidence that the conventional “1095 Crusades Hypothesis,” which holds that the campaigns following Pope

5 Chevedden, Paul E., “The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade,” 101-110. 6 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,” Oriens 39 (2011) 257-309, 260.

71 Urban II’s Council of Clermont comprised a distinguished Crusading movement, is an anachronism.7 He submits that we should therefore incorporate earlier western European conquests, namely the Norman Conquest of Sicily and the Reconquista campaigns of the eleventh century, into the focus of Crusading scholarship.8 The Kitab al-Jihad, however, suggests that far more than two additional eleventh century events should inform our understanding of holy wars fought between Christians and Muslims during the medieval period.

Al-Sulami’s text not only demonstrates the strength and momentum of jihad as an ideological weapon when the Crusaders arrived in the front-garden of the Islamic world, but also how these

Crusaders could be portrayed as the preferential target of the jihad: the Rum. If these long-lived intellectual traditions and historical Muslims associations of the Rum with any enemy of Islam assume a prominent role in al-Sulami’s literary treatment of his enemies in his Kitab al-Jihad, then his use of jihad to describe Christian holy war potentially refers to Near Eastern historical memories from long before the loss of Sicily. As Chevedden suggests, Al-Sulami’s text indeed challenges the notion that Crusading was born exclusively from the Council of Clermont, but his strategic obfuscation of the Franks and Byzantines along with his tendency to imitate modes and arguments from much earlier scholars suggests that his invocation of jihad indicates a far older phenomenon of Christian Holy War that preceded Western Crusading. An additional indicator of al-Sulami’s incorporation of earlier events into his understanding of Crusading as a jihad is his manipulation of hadith pertaining to the merits [fada’il] of the Levant, and to understand the significance of his suggestion that the Franks were prosecuting a jihad, the history of the relationship between the Levant and the jihad must be considered. When read alongside one another, al-Sulami’s frequent references to his own region, al-Sham, and his intimation that the

7 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus,” 305. 8 Ibid, 306.

72 Muslims were faced with yet another horde of Byzantines reveals his attempt to invoke nostalgia for the jihad in these older times among his Levantine audience.

Al-Sulami, the Seljuqs, and the Remaking of the Thughur

Al-Sulami, as far as anybody knows, lived his entire life in the city of Damascus, where he had a small khizana, or closet, for an office and abode in the Great Mosque.9 Twelfth century

Damascus is sometimes referred to in modern scholarship as a “town,” but although Baghdad may have dwarfed the Syrian capital with its zenith population of around 800,000, the Damascus that al-Sulami inhabited was still the largest city in Syria and boasted a population about equivalent to that of Jerusalem.10 In 1076, al-Sulami likely witnessed the fall of the Syrian capital to Seljuq-Turkic newcomers from the East, who would proceed to conquer city after city in the Levant until they captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Egyptians in 1098.11 With the

Seljuq warlords came socio-political upheaval in Syria, and it was this new “mutual envy and rivalry” among the Seljuq warrior-aristocracy that al-Sualmi blamed for God’s punishment of the region at the hands of the Crusaders.12 When al-Sulami was writing, there was no formal administrative structure in Syria which established a political or military network throughout the region. Instead, Turkic amirs regularly fought among themselves for suzerainty and taxing privileges throughout Syria and Palestine.

9 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study,” in ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106) trans. Christie, Niall (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 4-5. 10 Cobb, Paul, The Race for Paradise: an Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 21 & Ashtor, E., A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 92. 11 Ashtor, E., A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages, 211. 12 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 234.

73 However, the presence of these new rulers and the political changes they brought with them did not mean that the Arab locals or the Seljuqs themselves abandoned all previous associations between the region and its religion and dominant culture. Damascus was an ancient city, and its cultural and political preeminence in Syria seems to have survived ‘Abbasid decline as well as the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. It was the closest city to which Palestinian Muslims could flee after the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem, and the Damascenes proved powerful allies to these provincial refugees. A combined party of Palestinians and Damascenes journeyed to

Baghdad in 1099, led by a qadi from the Great Mosque where al-Sulami lived and studied named

Abu Sa’ad al-Harawi. Upon their arrival, the congregation wailed performatively through the court of the Caliph and beseeched him to send soldiers to retake Jerusalem from the Christians.13

The Seljuq Sultan was moved by this Damascene-led protest to pledge his military support to the

Muslims of the Levant.14 Even before the Summer of 1099, a letter was sent from Antioch to

Damascus requesting help from the city’s amire, who in turn led an army from the capital and managed to successfully gather forces from smaller Syrian cities as he went.15 The ability of the

Damascene amir to marshal troops from other cities and the religious authority conferred by the imam of the Great Mosque before the Sultan of Baghdad demonstrate the sort of soft religious and political authority that Damascus and Damascenes maintained despite over two centuries of political disruption in Syria.

Al-Sulami was naturally aware of the cultural and religious clout wielded by al-Sham and its capital city, Damascus. In Book Twelve, he considers the meaning of the term Sh’am in a

13 Maalouf, Amin, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), xiii. 14 Ibn al-Qalanisi, Tarikh Dimashq trans. H.A.R. Gibb, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (London: Luzac & Co., 1932), 52. 15 Maalouf, Amin, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 22-24.

74 hadith about the relationship between the mujahidin, or those who fight the jihad, and the

Levant:

Ka’ab said that God, be He blessed and exalted, blessed the mujahidin through the crosses of the country of the Rum, just as he blessed them through the barley of Suriya, which means al-Sha’m.’ I [al-Sulami] said, ‘the one telling the story spoke thus, meaning al-Sham...and it has reached us that Suriya is a name for Damascus in particular.16

Ka’ab’s saying here affords the mujahidin plunder in their raids against the Rum, and likens the precious metal crosses of the Byzantines to the wheat that the mujahidin were entitled to take from Syria to support their raids. While this hadith allows al-Sulami to situate Damascus within the greater region of Suriya, it more importantly allows him to associate the region with the jihad, and with the jihad against the Rum in particular. In a historical and geographic setting wherein the practice of jihad was crucial for Islamic political as well as religious prestige, hadith like this that invoked a cooperative connection between a particular region and the jihad were especially honorific.

This hadith moreover invokes a memory of al-Sham’s regional distinctiveness. Although it is credited to Ka’ab, one of the earliest Jewish converts to Islam, this hadith is most likely the product of the early or middle ‘Abbasid period, when ascetic Muslim scholars and caliphal armies alike sought to demonstrate their piety through seasonal jihad campaigns along the

Byzantine frontier.17 In the late eighth and early ninth centuries, however, the independent ascetic Muslims fighting along the Byzanine border threatened the Caliph’s authority over the jihad, which in turn threatened the Caliph’s administrative authority over far-flung regions like the Jazira and Northern Syria that served as launchpads for jihad campaigns. These ‘Abbasid concerns regarding their authority over these frontier regions were not altogether unfounded; al-

16 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 365. 17 Bonner, Michael, Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 130- 131.

75 Mansur (r. 754-775), the second ‘Abbasid Caliph, quelled pro-Umayyad rebellions organized in

Northern Syria throughout his early reign.18 The Byzantine frontier, supported by its Syrian hinterland, was thus a valuable, albeit contested region in the early ‘Abbasid period that conferred religious as well as political authority to whoever controlled it.

In order to reassert Caliphal authority over this region, al-Mahdi (r. 775-785) reorganized

Northern Syria and the Jazira in modern Iraq into separate governorates. Under Umayyad rule, the Northern frontier regions had been administered as one complete district, but during the reign of al-Mahdi and then on into the reign of his successor, the celebrated ghazi Harun al-Rashid (r.

786-809), this frontier region was divided into four distinct administrative zones: the Thughur, or frontier, of Syria, the Thughur of the Jazira, and then an ‘awasim, or area of refuge immediately behind both of these front-line districts.19 In the days of Harun al-Rashid, these new militarized governorates were often known by their older names. For example, the ‘awasim behind the

Syrian thughur was sometimes called Qinassrin as it had been until the reign of Harun.

However, as the Muslims witnessed Caliph after Caliph lead the jihad into Byzantine-Anatolia from these regions, the districts became increasingly identified with their functional designations as front-line thughur or second tier ‘awasim. Even after ‘Abbasid control over these regions began to wane in the tenth century, authors continued to write about this two-tiered organization of the frontier even if they failed to remember the initial distinction between the frontier of Syria and that of the Jazira. Al- (d. 957) wrote that even if there was a thughur of Syria and a thughur of the Jazira, “both [thughur] belong[ed] to Syria [al-Sham],” since everything West of the Euphrates belonged to Syria.20 Over time, it appears that the territories that could be

18 Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, 128. 19 Bonner, Michael, “The Naming of the Frontier: Awasim, Thughur and the Arab Geographers,” Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London 57 (1994), 17-24 & 19. 20 al-Istakhri trans. Bonner, Michael, “The Naming of the Frontier,” 23.

76 considered thughur, and thus meritorious settings for the jihad, became more associated with

Syria [al-Sham] than the Jazira.

Furthermore, even though the administration of these districts had been shattered by the ascendance of the Hamdanids, the Aleppan dynasty from which Saif al-Daula descended, the regions that had been designated thuguhr and ‘awasim maintained a distinguishing association with the jihad. Throughout the Byzantine conquests of the tenth century, Muslim poets like al-

Mutanabbi composed panegyrics for the rulers who attempted to resist the offensives of

Nikephoros II Phokas into Northern Syria. Aside from their obvious focus on the prowess, piety and virtuousness of Saif al-Daula, al-Mutannabi’s poems reflect this association among Muslim intellectuals between the jihad and al-Sham:

the spear-heads have not dispersed from him out of compassion, neither have the enemies [al- a‘da’] quit Syria [al-sham] out of love for him21

In this customary ode to Saif al-Daula, al-Mutannabi demonstrates the martial ferocity of his ruler and patron, but in doing so reveals his assumption that those Muslims listening to recitations of this poem would understand the significance of the Byzantine flight from Syria.

Forcing the Rum to quit al-Sham was worthy of such praise because of the omnipresence of

Byzantine raids into Syria and Muslim raids into Anatolia. Al-Mutannabi’s poetry also evokes the strategic and symbolic significance that freighted jihad on the Syrian thughur:

How should Iraq and Egypt not be secure, with your expeditions and horsemen protecting them? Were you to withdraw from the enemy’s path, their horses would be tethered to the lote-tree and palm And those whom your defence has exalted there would know that they are contemptible and lowly22

21 Mutanabbi,̄ Abu ̄al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad Ibn Al-Ḥusayn, trans. A. J. Arberry, Poems of Al-Mutanabbi: A Selection with Introduction, Translations and Notes (London; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 68. 22 Ibid, 126.

77 The duty of Saif al-Daula and the Syrians, then, was to defend the remainder of the medieval

Islamic world since they occupied “the enemy’s path.” In addition to its status as the preferred launchpad for offensive jihad against the Rum, the thughur in the eyes of al-Mutannabi needed to be the site of defensive jihad as well. It is also important to note al-Mutanabbi’s implication that were the Syrians to fail to contain the Rum with regular raids, the “contemptible and lowly”

Muslims from other regions would be quickly forced to submit. In elevating the importance of the Syrian thughur, al-Mutannabi simultaneously elevated its people to an exceptional status among all Muslims.

Although al-Sulami certainly felt less reverence for local Muslim leadership in his own times, he shared al-Mutanabbi’s understanding that al-Sham ought to protect the Faith in defensive as well as offensive jihad, and he similarly establishes the preeminence of the region’s inhabitants. In the first extant chapter of his Kitab al-Jihad, al-Sulami includes a series of hadith establishing the notion that God’s chosen Muslims were those who lived in Syria and its surroundings:

Know also, God have mercy on you, that your Prophet, may God bless him, promised a part of his community victory over their enemies. He appointed them from the people of al-Sham, distinguishing them for that [victory] from among the people of al-Sham. Perhaps you are these people specified, rather than others.23

Here, al-Sulami demonstrates how plastic this concept of location is for his exhortatory objective. Clearly, al-Sulami’s inclusion of this hadith is intended to remind his contemporaneous audience, Damascene congregants in sermons at the Great Mosque, that God preordained an eternal relationship between the people of al-Sham and the jihad against the enemies of Islam. However, this hadith suggests that only a subset of Syrians were chosen by

God to fulfill this calling. At the time of its original recording, this hadith likely applied to those

23 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 212.

78 Syrians who were active in the ribat towns like Edessa, Antioch and Tarsus along the old thughur, but here, al-Sulami intimates that perhaps the people from Damascus, which lay hundreds of miles to the south of the thughur, were the people whom God had distinguished. Al-

Sulami further expanded the realm of the thughur for his purposes in a subsequent hadith, wherein Muhammad is to have said:

A group of my community of Muslims will not cease to fight at the gates of Damascus and their surroundings and at the gates of Jerusalem and their surroundings...until the Day of Resurrection24

In this hadith, al-Sham has become re-centered at the “gates of Damascus,” but radiates outward to include the surroundings of the city. Moreover, the chosen group of Muslims now includes

Palestinian Muslims from Jerusalem, who had recently sought assylum and aid from their

Damascene neighbors. In his own analysis of these hadith, al-Sulami draws these two regions even closer together:

It was shown that a group would conquer their enemy and that they were from the people of al- Sham, and it was mentioned in this sufficiently documented hadith that they were from Jerusalem and its surroundings.25

Here, al-Sulami has done away with the distinction between al-Sham and Jerusalem entirely, and instead moves Jerusalem from Palestine to within the realm of the Levant. Jerusalem, the

Crusaders’ “dearest wish,” is thus situated within al-Sulami’s own locale, as well as that of his audience. Therefore, the conquest of Jerusalem was akin to a conquest within the limits of their own homeland. It appears that for al-Sulami’s exhortation to fight the jihad to be most effective, he had to incorporate both Damascus and Jerusalem into the fabled and noble thughur.

Damascus was and always had been the de-facto if not official capital of Syria, and this allowed al-Sulami to reorient Damascus within the deconstructed, administratively nebulous thughur of

24 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 215. 25 Ibid, 215.

79 the twelfth century. Jerusalem, on the other hand, was not typically associated with the

Byzantine frontier in Muslim geography or administration, and thus al-Sulami’s inclusion of

Jerusalem within the thughur region that he imagined for his audience is rather conspicous.

Unfortunately for the Muslims, al-Sulami’s was not the first instance of reorganization of al-Sham after the initial ‘Abbasid separation of the region into four sub-districts. Local dynasties like the Hamdanids of Aleppo had maintained an administrative hold on the region even after the tenth century, when direct ‘Abbasid control in Syria began to erode. The eleventh century, however, witnessed a more significant disruption of Islamic administration in al-Sham. The

Seljuq Turks invaded Dar al-Islam from the east, and by 1055 their leader, Toghril Beg, conquered Baghdad and secured his mandate to rule as Sultan by the sitting ‘Abbasid Caliph.26

By 1076, Damascus had fallen into Seljuq hands as well. The next two decades saw increasing intra-Islamic conflict, especially in Syria and Iraq where Seljuq amirs incessantly fought one another for control of more territory. Hillenbrand and others have noted the consequences of this administrative, and indeed social disruption brought by the Seljuq conquests on the Muslim capacity to reisist the First Crusade.27

These conquests also had the consequence of shattering whatever administrative regime remained from the ‘Abbasid period in Syria. Seljuq amirs may have converted to Islam and diligently sought to advertise their piety through investitures from the ‘Abbasid Caliph, but they maintained an understanding of what Humphrey’s has termed “collective sovereignty” that was foreign among the Arab and Persian Muslims who constituted the Caliphate prior to the Seljuq invasion.28 This Turkic concept of political legitimacy guaranteed the sovereignty of the family,

26 Morgan, David, Medieval Persia 1040-1797 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 30. 27 Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 33. 28 Humprehys, R. Stephen, “Legitimacy and Political Instability in Islam in the Age of the Crusades,” in Hadia Dajani-Shakeel & Ronald A. Messier (eds.) The Jihad and its Times (Ann Arbor: MPublishing, 2011), 9-10.

80 but not necessarily that of the individual local ruler. According to Humphreys, this political logic helps explain the prolific Seljuq “mutual envy and rivalry” for territory throughout the Crusading period that al-Sulami so vehemently condemns.29 Furthermore, the Seljuqs did away with the customary tax code that the ‘Abbasids and their regional successors had maintained in Syria and replaced it with the muksama system, which was exceedingly burdensome to the peasants of al-

Sham.30

However, the confusion brought by the Seljuq conquests and the subsequent atomization of what remained of the ‘awasim and thughur governorates ironically may have made al-

Sulami’s locale into an area resembling the chaos of the eighth century thughur. Beneath Seljuq rule, Syria was once more a region unacted upon by the gravity of any centralized bureaucracy, and according to A. Esa Egar, a historian of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier, borderlands in this period were better defined in the absence of influence from a central power rather than the idea that they demarcated a boundary between binary political entities.31 Furthermore, although al-

Sulami believed it was obligatory for the Caliph to regularly coordinate the jihad, he shared his predecessor Ibn al-Mubarrak’s disdain and incomprehension for the ruling class’ neglect of the obligations of the religion.32 It seems that al-Sulami’s avarice against these rulers took the form of nostalgia for this earlier period wherein individual ascetics manned the ribats on the Muslim-

Byzantine frontier. In Book Twelve of the Kitab al-Jihad, he includes an unusually lengthy hadith about a mujahid named Sa’id on the Syrian thughur. It recounts Sa’id’s dedication to the greater spiritual jihad as well as the lesser military jihad in his prayer and fasting, and his

29 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 234. 30 Ashtor, E., A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages, 222. 31 Egar, A. Esa, The Islamic Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange Among Muslim and Christian Communities (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2015), 10. 32‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 211.

81 courageous fighting against the Rum respectively.33 Sa’id, exhausted from his religious and military duties, lays down for a rest away from the fighting and dreams of the celestial wives that

God will bestow upon him when he achieves martyrdom.34 This hadith was clearly meant to bolster al-Sulami’s legal opinion that the jihad needed to be fought in a condition of spiritual purity if it was to be fought in the path of God. But the care that al-Sulami takes to preserve

Sa’id’s comrades’ eulogy of him after his martyrdom along with the setting of the story in the lands of the Rum indicate al-Sulami’s awareness of the connection of glorious martyrdom and individual ascetic performance of the jihad to the Byzantine frontier. In this story, Sa’id acts as an individual; according to the narrator Hisham and al-Sulami, Sa’id “outdid” his companions on the expedition in his adherence to prayer, fasting, and studying the textual traditions of the faith.35 Furthermore, it was Sa’id’s individual status as a “friend of God” that ensured him these rewards in Paradise.36 This individual asceticism and devotion to the jihad independent of

Caliphal leadership is thus a critical component of what al-Sulami deems the preferable way to fight the enemies of the religion. Furthermore, his selection of this hadith once more invokes the connection that al-Sulami posits elsewhere between the Rum and enemies of Islam in general.

Between this hadith’s focus on the Byzantine frontier its celebration of the deeds of an individual rather than the collective group of mujahidin acting under Caliphal direction, Sa’id’s story is clearly a celebration of the frontier conditions in the days of the early ‘Abbasid Caliphate.

Al-Sulami’s inclusion of the hadith about Sa’id on the Byzantine frontier may be the clearest proof of his nostalgia for the days when Muslims would individually volunteer their services on the thughur. But it is also clear throughout his text that this nostalgia was active, and

33 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 329. 34 Ibid, 330-331. 35 Ibid, 329. 36 Ibid, 331.

82 was meant to trigger an exhortative memory among his contemporaneous audience. Al-Sulami’s deployment of hadiths discussing the merits of the Levant and Jerusalem was a pragmatic blend of reaction to the reality that these regions were the worst afflicted by the Crusaders and rhetoric which reignited memories of the region’s status as the traditional home of the jihad. This reminder, however, also required an imaginative reorientation of the literary thughur facing the enemy; al-Sulami actively blurred the real and imagined distinctions among Jerusalem,

Damascus, and the greater Levant in order to deliver reassurance that the Muslims on this new military frontier were the same Muslims who God had chosen to fight the enemies of the faith

“until the Day of Resurrection.”37 Although the part of the Kitab al-Jihad that al-Sulami tells us he included to speak of the merits of the thughur is lost, we can only speculate that this book further strengthened the ties al-Sulami drew among his locale, Jerusalem, and the original thughur along the Byzantine frontier in Syria and Anatolia. With this geographic and historical connection established, even without the section al-Sulami’s nisba promises his readers, we must consider the implications of these historical memories upon al-Sulami’s discussion of the origins of the first Crusade, and perhaps more intriguingly, his insistence that the Crusaders were fighting the “jihad against the Muslims.”38

37 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 215. 38 Ibid, 207.

83 Memories of the Thughur and the “Jihad of the Muslims”: al-Sulami’s Crusading Historiography

Although his text is the first Arabic source that addresses the events of what is referred to as the First Crusade, al-Sulami clearly did not perceive these invasions and conquests as the first of their kind, and while they had a penchant for seizing control of Jerusalem, this enemy had been taking Muslim territory for at least the past forty years:

A number of the enemy [ta’ifa] pounced on the island of Sicily while the Muslims disputed and competed, and they conquered in the same way one city after another in al-Andalus.39

As discussed in Chapter II, most translations of this section of the Kitab al-Jihad translate the word ta’ifa, which means a religious group or sect, as the phrase “a number of the enemy.”40

These translations clearly assume that al-Sulami is narrowly referring to the conquests of the

Franks as opposed to the Byzantines, and furthermore that he was not attempting to associate the enemies of Islam with any particular religion. This clarification of the translation and connotation of the word ta’ifa should allow for the possibility that al-Sulami was intentionally referring to the congregation [ta’ifa] of Christendom more generally. Also discussed in Chapter

II is al-Sulami’s seemingly intentional blurring of any geographic or ethnic distinction between the Franks and the Byzantines. Through his omission of an adjective describing this congregation, al-Sulami similarly leaves their geographic origins ambiguous.

Most modern historians read al-Sulami’s account of the events of the eleventh century as a confirmation of the way that they tend to interpret the events that fit within their historical paradigm of Crusading. Conveniently, there is now an overlap between the campaigns that al-

Sulami mentions in Sicily and in Spain and the growing consensus among contemporary historians that these two military ventures should be considered a part of the broader Crusading

39 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 207. 40 Christie’s translation. For further discussion, see Chapter II, 58.

84 narrative conventionally beginning with the Council of Clermont in 1095.41 But the Kitab al-

Jihad is a text much richer in tradition than this excerpt suggests; it is not intended to be a history or a chronicle. Its Islamic legal genre guarantees its preoccupation with tradition. Outside of their cultural context, these lines seem to validate the contention that the phenomenon of western

European Crusading was decades older than traditionally thought, but they should not be read without an understanding of the genre and region in which they were written. With a better informed approach to al-Sulami’s text and the time and place in which it was composed, these few lines become much more groundbreaking than Crusading scholars have previously suggested.

It may be clear that al-Sulami is alluding to the Norman Conquest of Sicily in Book 2 of the Kitab al-Jihad, just as it may be clear he is alluding to the Reconquista of the eleventh century in Spain and the First Crusade in Syria and Palestine. However, when historians bring with them their knowledge of these Christian offensives when they use Islamic sources like the

Kitab al-Jihad to “prop up a traditionalist view of the Crusades,” as Chevedden claims, they risk

“seeing [these events] through the distorting medium of our own knowledge.”42 Instead, al-

Sulami’s reimagining of the Damascenes and Palestinians as those chosen to fight the enemies of

Islam and receive Providential support in doing so, along with his use of hadith and rhetoric invoking the memory of jihad against the Byzantines should warn historians against such a hasty dismissal of the Kitab al-Jihad as a mere confirmation of events the way 19th Century Crusades scholars understood them.43

41 For a more detailed discussion of the ‘1095 Thesis,’ see Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,” Oriens 39 (2011) 257-329, 305. 42 Belloc, Hilaire in Chevedden, Paul E., “The Islamic Interpretation of the Crusade: A New (old) Paradigm for Understanding the Crusades,” 91. 43 Ibid, 91.

85

“Sicily, part of the territory of the Rum:”

In Book Twelve of the Kitab al-Jihad, al-Sulami cites a hadith not long after the one he cites from Hisham about Sa’id, the mujahid who dreamed of his celestial wives rewarded to him for his performance of the jihad, about another mujahid from Medina that he appears to have copied from the Kitab al-Jihad of Ibn al-Mubarak (d. 797). Al-Sulami’s choice to directly cite from Ibn al-Mubarak further reveals his reverence for the individual mujahid, like Ibn al-

Mubarak himself, who fights without the need to be mobilized by a ruler, but also his respect for those who fight the jihad against the Rum. In addition, at the beginning of this hadith, al-Sulami conspicuously copies the following lines:

There came to us a man from the people of Medina named Ziyad ibn ‘Abdallah...we were conducting an expedition against Sicily, part of the territory of the Rum...and we were besieging a city...there were three of us travelling together, myself and Ziyad and another man from the people of Medina.44

The narrator of this hadith, Abu Idris al-Madini, calls Sicily a Byzantine territory, and it appears that this detail contributed to al-Sulami’s pervasive theme in his Kitab al-Jihad of invoking the memory of the Rum to both explain the events of his day and to guide his audience to undertaking the jihad against an enemy that he deemed righteous. It is important to consider that of all the Muslim territory conquered by the Crusaders, al-Sulami mentions Spain, Sicily and

Jerusalem specifically and omits other noteable losses of cities like Antioch and territory in

North Africa that are mentioned in the near contemporary histories of Ibn al-Athir and Ibn al-

Chevedden cites Carole Hillenbrand and her indictment of the 19th Century Geschichte trend of Crusades historiography which posited Pope Urban II as the “great man” of Crusading history. This evolved into an understanding that Pope Urban II was largely responsible for the phenomenon, and that anything that resembled Crusading prior to the Council of Clermont in 1095 should not be considered a part of the movement. 44 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 335.

86 Qalanisi.45 It seems that al-Sulami was particularly interested in the loss of Sicily to the

Normans, and that his choice to lift a hadith from Ibn al-Mubarak’s Kitab al-Jihad discussing the original Muslim conquest of the island is therefore unlikely to be coincidence. This preoccupation with Sicily deserves attention, especially because al-Sulami took such care in preserving Abu Idris’ comment about the island’s Byzantine past. Al-Sulami, who seems to have been interested in exploiting the Crusaders’ nebulous connections with the Rum to pique the interest of potential mujahidin, was perhaps similarly interested in associating lost Muslim territory with the lands of the Rum. This is not to say that al-Sulami believed the Byzantines were responsible for retaking the island from Muslim control, but instead that he appears to have thought his listeners would be more inclined to “[take] back the country from them [the

Crusaders]” if they associated that country with the lands of the Byzantines.46

This hadith, and indeed most of the hadith and analysis from al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad tend to be forgotten in historical research done on the Crusading period, but these seldom noted hints demonstrate the problem of understanding the Crusades with a temporally truncated frame of reference. Hadith like this one that al-Sulami took from the work of Ibn al-Mubarak may not be able to fully account for the range of reactions undertaken by Muslims in the wake of the First

Crusade, but it shows that al-Sulami believed the best way to mobilize his coreligionists was to reassure them that through the jihad they would “gain a glory of which the clothes will remain on

[them] for many ages to come.”47 Clearly, that glory would need to be conferred by long standing traditions, and in al-Sulami’s oikoumene there could be no more glorious enemies than the Rum, and thus no more important land to repossess than their country.

45 Ibn al-Qalanisi, Tarikh Dimashq, trans. H.A.R. Gibb, 41-44 (siege of Antioch), & Ibn al Athir, al-Kamil fi al- Tarikh, trans. D.S. Richards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13. 46 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 233. 47 Ibid, 210.

87

Jihad al-Muslimin:

If most secondary scholarship is correct, and al-Sulami knew that military offensives as disparate as the Reconquista in Spain and the First Crusade in Syria and Palestine were related to one another by a common sense of Christian Holy War, the question still stands: why refer to

Christian campaigns as “jihad of the Muslims” [jihad al-muslimin]?48 An Islamic legal scholar like al-Sulami would have approached the use of the word jihad cautiously. Legal hadith compilations like the Kitab al-Jihad were conventionally concerned with the accuracy and rigor of the evidence and analysis they presented. Al-Sulami was certainly conscious of his responsibility to relay accurate information at several points in his text:

The Prophet, may God have mercy on him, showed in another hadith, which I think for me is sufficiently old in origin and documented...49

Before presenting this particular story of the Prophet as factual, al-Sulami felt it necessary to qualify its origins and the rigor of its documentation. Christie notes that in one of the original manuscripts, the line, “which I think for me,” is crossed out.50 This piece of marginalia offers a rare insight into al-Sulami’s intellectual character, and his simultaneous reverence for the perceived rigor of tradition coupled with his desire to endow his argument with agency so that the Muslims might be more inspired to defeat their enemy. Nonetheless, al-Sulami was demonstrably aware of the reputational and intellectual risks of deploying an unsubstantiated hadith, and was also careful enough to attempt to hide any evidence that his arguments were propped up on the ‘sufficiency’ of their documentation alone.

48 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 207. See original Arabic: “and so they are continuing, assiduously in the jihad of the Muslims,” my translation. ﻢﻠﻓ اﻮﻟاﺰﯾ ﻦﯿﺒﺋاد ﻲﻓ دﺎﮭﺟ ﻦﯿﻤﻠﺴﻤﻟا 49 Ibid, 214. 50 Ibid, see 214 n57.

88 Legal concepts like jihad were therefore not to be manipulated without fear of consequence. Al-Sulami was a respected thiqa, or transmitter of legal hadith, according to Ibn

‘Asakir, and was clearly concerned about preserving that reputation in his composition of the

Kitab al-Jihad.51 Such a man would be hard pressed to use the technical and sacred term of jihad to describe anything except what was widely perceived to qualify for it in the eyes of other

Muslims. It should be expected, then, that other Muslim authors who were near contemporaries of al-Sulami would refer to the early-Crusades as jihad, and this is the case. Ibn al-Athir, while he may have been writing a historical chronicle, similarly described the escalation of the First

Crusade:

If you are determined to fight the jihad against the Muslims, the better [means to do] that would be to conquer Jerusalem. Free it from their hands and you will gain glory. As for North Africa, there are oaths of allegiance and treaties between myself and its people.52

Here, Ibn al-Athir imagines an exchange between Roger of Sicily and his relative, Baldwin, before both embarked upon the First Crusade against Jerusalem. It seems clear from this passage that Ibn al-Athir assumed the primary motivation for the First Crusade was the accumulation of glory through the performance of jihad, and that the ultimate objective of the Crusade was the subjugation of Muslim territory beneath Christian rule:

Roger assembled his men and consulted him about [his plan to take Jerusalem]. They said, ‘By the truth of the Gospel, this is excellent for us and them. The lands will become Christian lands.’53

Ibn al-Athir’s injection of altruism into the voice of Roger and his retainers was meant to deprecate rather than elevate these Christian warriors; directly thereafter in al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh,

51 Christie, Niall, “Introductory Study’ in ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, The Book of the Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106),” 4-5. 52 Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh accessed in Christie, Niall, ‘Religious Campaign or War of Conquest? Muslim Views of the Motives of the First Crusade,’ in Christie, Yazigi (eds.), Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities (Brill Academic Publishers, 2005) trans. Carole Hillenbrand in The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, 52. 53 Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh, trans. D.S. Richards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13.

89 Ibn al-Athir writes that Roger loudly flatulated in reply to his men.54 But while this section may imply that the Christian were less intelligent and practiced an inferior religion than that of the

Muslims, it upholds the intentionality of Christian Crusading. There is no talk of expansion for the sake of temporal gain, but instead the explanation offered by Ibn al-Athir posits the

Christians believed spreading their religion was a righteous endeavor. Moreover, this religious expansion would be beneficial both to the Christians and the Muslims, ostensibly because more people would follow Christian law.

Ibn al-Athir may have ascribed a genuine desire to expand the domain of Christendom to the Crusaders, but al-Sulami seems to have been less charitable in assessing the motivation behind their jihad. According to al-Sulami, Jerusalem was the primary objective of the First

Crusade, and thus the jihad of the Crusaders was especially focussed on controlling symbolic territory regardless of what religion the population practiced.55 But like Ibn al-Athir, al-Sulami’s primary concern regarding the Crusaders’ “fighting the jihad of the Muslims” appears to have been related to his repugnance for living beneath Christian law:

The most astonishment is [what one feels] at a sultan who takes pleasure in life or remains where he is despite the appearance of this calamity, of which the outcome is conquest by these blasphemers.56

Al-Sulami perhaps cared less about the extraction of taxes and the reorganization of socio- political life in the Levant as a result of the Crusaders’ invasions than he feared the religious and cultural order in the Levant becoming reorganized beneath a Christian hierarchy. After all, the

Levant had endured a similar upheaval only a few decades earlier at the hands of the Seljuqs, but the Seljuq conquests did not threaten to elevate the status of local Christians and they did not

54 Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh, 13. 55 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 207. 56 Ibid, 211.

90 completely disrupt the social hierarchy for Syrian Arabs who continued to serve as bureaucrats and study the shari’a. Despite the consensus among Crusades historians that medieval jihad and

Crusading were distinct ideologies and practices from one another, the acts of the Crusaders from 1097-1099 could reasonably be interpreted by a scholar like al-Sulami as a campaign intended to impose divinely-inspired law through military conquest. However, could the slaughter of Jerusalem’s women and children that Ibn al-Qalanisi described in his Tarikh

Dimashq be legally considered a jihad by a thiqa like al-Sulami? After all, al-Sulami wrote that the only noncombatants who could be killed during offensive jihad were monks, and he made it clear that the shari‘a forbade killing women and children unless they took up arms themselves against the Muslims.57 It seems that al-Sulami may not have been comfortable deeming the conquest of Jerusalem a jihad in any sense of the word; both al-Sulami and Ibn al-Qalanisi report that the Crusaders violated the proscriptions of the shari‘a when they breached the city walls.58Therefore, Al-Sulami appears to have been referring to a much broader pattern of

Christian conquests that threatened to impose a religious overhaul of Muslim society in order to make a judgement as stark as referring to the First Crusade as an example of “the jihad of the

Muslims.”59

An Earlier Jihad?

Chevedden argues that al-Sulami’s use of the phrase jihad al-muslimin, or jihad of the Muslims, implies that he conceived of jihad as a broad category, and that the jihad al-muslimin was merely one kind of jihad in this collection. He is correct that there are several types of jihad, and that al-

57 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 270-271. 58 Ibid, 211. 59 Ibid, 207. ﮭﺟ ﺎ د ا ﻟ ﺴﻤ ﻠ ﻤ ﯿ ﻦ .

91 Sulami mentions some, like the spiritual jihad [jihad anfusikum], in the Kitab al-Jihad.60

Chevedden thus contends that al-Sulami’s naming of the Crusade is a consequence of his unconscious assumption that the invading Christians came from a society that was a “mirror- image” of Islamic civilization, and that therefore they too had a political phenomenon akin to the jihad.61 But in distinguishing the Crusade as a ‘jihad of the Muslims,’ al-Sulami implies that it is the act the Christians were performing itself that was the mirror image of jihad in Islam, and not necessarily their society at large. Chevedden is correct to refute Christie’s interpretation that al-

Sulami’s use of jihad al-muslimin demonstrated his belief that what the Crusaders were doing was legitimate; al-Sulami shows no evident respect for the beliefs of the Chrisitans, and he hoped that God would hasten to destroy them.62 But Chevedden’s own interpretation of al-Sulami’s use of jihad al-muslimin is similarly unsatisfying. He argues that the qualification ‘jihad of the

Muslims’ merely reveals al-Sulami’s knowledge that the Crusaders believed their military campaign to be divinely sanctioned.63 But as al-Sulami himself cautioned, Muslims during this period did not accept any military action taken in the name of God to be jihad. Recall that al-

Sulami’s argument at the beginning of Book II in the Kitab al-Jihad stressed the importance of spiritual purity in undertaking the jihad:

May the objective of this your jihad...be pleasing to your Lord, so that...the goodness of your acts bears witness to your integrity. For if one does not desire God’s face by an act, then it is futile and the one who does it errs.64

60 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,” 290 n91. 61 Ibid, 290 n91. 62 Ibid, 290 n91. See Christie for counterargument: Christie, Niall, “Religious Campaign or War of Conquest? Muslim Views of the Motives of the First Crusade,” in Christie & Yazigi (eds.), Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2006). 63 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus,” 290 n91. 64 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 220.

92 Hypocrisy, therefore, could disqualify any performance of jihad, and the Crusaders were certainly hypocrites in the estimation of al-Sulami. Had al-Sulami intended to communicate that the Christians believed their fighting to be divinely sanctioned, it seems that he would have chosen another variety of jihad than that of the Muslims to describe their mission.

Instead, al-Sulami’s designation of the Crusade as a ‘jihad of the muslims’ indicates that he was likening it to what he believed the Muslims ought to have been doing. Neither al-

Sulami’s admonishing tone nor his choice to begin the Kitab al-Jihad with the argument that the jihad should be prosecuted annually can be forgotten when it comes to interpreting this phrase.65

Were they Muslims, the Crusaders would have been doing exactly what al-Sulami argued was the perpetual obligation of the Muslims to maintain the jihad expeditions into the lands of the enemy. Whereas the Muslims had dawdled in carrying out the jihad according to al-Sulami, the

Crusaders had succeeded, “[conquering] more than their greatest hopes had conceived of the country...and [humiliating] many times the number of people they had wished.”66 The greatest negative consequence of the First Crusade, however, had been the prospect of “conquest by [the] blasphemers” and “subjugation” of the Muslims.67 In short, al-Sulami was attempting to communicate that the success of the enemy against the Muslims was a direct result of the

Muslims’ failure to carry out their own jihad regularly. The jihad al-muslimin, therefore, was simply any military action that resulted in the rewards that al-Sulami envisioned for the Muslims, namely the control of their long-held territory along with their subjugation of the non-believers.

In referring to the Frankish invasions of the late eleventh century as a jihad, al-Sulami appears to have assumed his listeners at the Great Mosque would have immediately recognized

65 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 206: “those who were appointed as successors afterwards and ruled in their own time…[carried] out an expedition...every year.” 66 Ibid, 207. 67 Ibid, 211.

93 the connection he was drawing between the success of the Christians and the failure of the

Muslims. For this to have worked, the campaigns he was referring to had to sufficiently resemble what al-Sulami and his coreligionists envisioned as the ideal jihad. The siege of Jerusalem alone could not have offered a convincing example of what the ‘jihad of the Muslims’ ought to look like; the Muslims were not permitted by their religion to kill noncombatants, let alone murder dhimmis like the Muslims and Jews who were massacred by the Franks after their surrender.68 At the very least, al-Sulami had to have been referring to the broader pattern of Christian offensives around the Mediterannean, but at most, he was assuming that his audience would draw upon the

Syrian collective memory of Nikeophors II’s proto-Crusading offensives of the late tenth century in addition to the more recent invasions of Sicily and al-Andalus.

Unlike the seasonal jihad campaigns undertaken by the Muslims and the consequent

Byzantine counterattacks launched to retake whatever territory had been temporarily lost to them, Nikephoros II’s offensives were aimed at permanently subjugating these cities beneath

Byzantine-Christian law. In the infamous Cursed Poem [al-Qasida al-Ma’luna] sent by

Nikephoros II to Baghdad, Nikephoros II threatened his objective was to, “conquer east and west and propagate everywhere the religion of the cross.”69 Clearly, this piece of the poem, written in

Arabic, was meant to ensure that if he got his way, the Byzantine Emperor would not allow the

Muslims to govern themselves according to the law of their own religion, just as the Muslims did not allow Christian dhimmis to subjugate Muslims with their laws and customs. Subjugation, whether by way of conversion or the acceptance of second class citizenship and regular payment of the jizya, was the object, at least initially, of the jihad. Anything that threatened this was

68 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 19. 69 Nikephoros II Phokas, trans. Nadia Maria El-Cheikh in Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 174.

94 therefore an inherent risk to the integrity of Islamic civilization as well as an analogy for the jihad that could be found among the non-believers.

Besides subjugation, there is other evidence that Christian armies had adopted the performative, if not ideological trappings of the jihad long before the arrival of the Crusaders in

1097. In the Taktika, an early tenth century Byzantine military manual attributed to Leo VI (d.

908), it is evident that the Byzantines understood the strategic advantages conferred by Muslim jihad. Leo VI wrote the Muslims claimed that, “God rejoices in war and scatters abroad the peoples that want to fight,” indicating his awareness that the Muslims felt justified in their pursuit of warfare against the world beyond their borders.70 Leo VI appears to have felt that this was an advantage, and he drew upon the Muslims’ example in instructing his officers to use similar rhetoric to inspire their own soldiers.

The Taktika sought to encourage Byzantine commanders to imitate the ideological strategy of their opponent’s jihad, but it also encouraged them to imitate a tempermental virtue of the Muslims who came from Syria and Palestine. Leo VI wrote that the Muslims from the Levant in particular had no fear of fighting, and were always in good spirits about it.71 If the Byzantines could maintain such fearlessness and high morale, perhaps they could enjoy similar success over the Muslims who lived on the other side of the Thughur along the Taurus mountains. The idea of jihad had inspired countless Muslims to cheerfully go out and fight against their enemies, but it seems likely that it inspired their enemies as well. The Taktika is only a military manual, but

Nikephoros II Phokas and his attempts to “propagate everywhere the religion of the Cross” attests to the influence of such arguments for imitating the jihad.72

70 Leo VI The Wise, Takitka, trans. George T. Dennis (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014), 479. 71 Ibid, 485. 72 Nikephoros II Phokas, trans. Nadia Maria El Cheikh in Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, 174.

95 It seems that the Byzantines came to share some of the same substantive ideology of holy war, albeit non-nominaly with their Muslim neighbors. In this sense, Chevedden is exactly right to argue that al-Sulami referred to the Crusades as jihad al-muslimin because he believed:

Christian society [was] the mirror image of his own society...If the Muslims engage in jihād, there is every reason to believe that the Christians do as well.73

But perhaps al-Sulami had more reason to suspect that Christendom was the mirror image of his own society, at least as far as the presence of jihad was concerned, than that which Chevedden credits him. The Byzantines weaponized their military in the ninth and tenth centuries by adopting tactics that appear to have been strongly inspired by their observations of Islamic jihad, and they specifically seem to have attempted to imitate the style of fighting of the Muslims of al-

Sham. Perhaps, then, al-Sulami’s efforts to situate himself and his Levantine audience within the thughur reveals his intent to invoke the original instances of Christians fighting the jihad of the

Muslims rather than only the latest examples of such warfare.

73 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus,” 290 n91.

96

Epilogue: “Are these not the Rum?”

When al-Sulami wrote and preached his Kitab al-Jihad from the pulpit of the Great

Mosque in Damascus, Usamma ibn al-Munqidh was only ten years old. Unlike al-Sulami, who died in 1106, he grew up in a Levant broken up between the Frankish states and the territories of the Seljuq sultans, but furthermore, he would live to see the days when the Sultans Nur al-Din and Saladin finally committed to fight the jihad against the Crusaders. The years of Muslim lethargy between al-Sulami’s death and the emergence of a jihad against the Franks should not suggest, however, that al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad did not make what many in his society, including Ibn al-Munqidh would have considered a compelling case for taking up arms against the enemy.

Ibn al-Munqidh recorded his most famous work, the Kitab al-I‘tibar as an old man in the late twelfth century, almost eighty years after al-Sulami finished his own final work.1 In his memoir, Ibn al-Munqidh recorded a story about two pious Damascenes during the Second

Crusade. These two ascetics, the same sort of men who might have manned the ribat outposts along the Taurus mountains during the time of Harun al-Rashid, found themselves staring down

“the Frankish king of the Germans” outside the walls of the city.2 One of them, a legist like al-

Sulami, turned to the other, an “ascetic sheikh,” and asked, “Are these not the Byzantines?” The

Sheikh replied, “yes, of course,” and to this, the legist cheekily pressed, “well, until when, then,

1 Hitti, Philip K., An Arab Syrian Gentleman: Usammah Ibn al-Munqidh (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 14. 2 Usammah Ibn al-Munqidh, Kitab al-I‘tibar, 124.

97 are we going to keep still?” Ibn al-Munqidh reports that after this exchange, both men advanced against the Franks and were martyred together on the same spot.3

More stunning than this dialogue that appears more than a half a century after the

Muslims first encountered the Crusaders in the Levant is Ibn al-Munqidh’s apparent trust that his readers would need no further explanation of this exchange. Clearly, Ibn al-Munqidh understood the difference between Byzantine and Frank. By referring to Conrad III as the “Frankish king of the Germans,” he implies that the Damascenes living at the time of the Second Crusade were familiar enough with their enemy to understand that they did not come from Byzantium. Yet, like al-Sulami, both these Damascenes actively obfuscate the origins of their opponents and use the abundant traditions that establish the merits of the jihad against the Byzantines to secure their own martyrdom. Ibn al-Munqidh’s neglect to comment further on the story suggests that this type of behavior would indeed rank these ascetics among the likes of Sa’id and the old martyrs of the Thughur. It appears, that, for Ibn al-Munqidh, the merit of this sort of fighting went without saying4

Ibn al-Munqidh is, in some ways, an unsuspecting inheritor of al-Sulami’s idea that jihad against the Franks and the more established jihad against the Byzantines could be considered, legally speaking, two sides of the same coin. Al-Sulami was a legal scholar, an ‘alim, and while

Ibn al-Munqidh certainly had some religious education, Islamic tradition was not his specialty.

Ibn al-Munqidh was a polymath, and unlike al-Sulami, he fought against the Franks and served as governor of Beirut during the reign of Saladin.5 He grew up to become a member of the exact class of Muslims that al-Sulami was attempting to exhort to action. As Philip Hitti notes in his

3 Usammah Ibn al-Munqidh, Kitab al-I‘tibar, 124. 4 See Ch. 3, 13. 5 Hitti, Philip K., An Arab Syrian Gentleman: Usammah Ibn al-Munqidh, 9-13.

98 translation of Ibn al-Munqidh, his Kitab al-I‘tibar was a didactic work, and regardless of whether his tale about the Damascene martyrs refers to an actual event, its inclusion in his work suggests that this nostalgia for the eternal struggle against the Byzantines was alive and well among the

Muslim elite in the late twelfth century.

Ibn al-Munqidh shows us that al-Sulami was not alone in his nostalgia for the jihad on the thughur against the Byzantines, but more importantly, that his preaching may not have fallen on deaf ears. According to Islamic historians of the crusades, al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad may have been enterprising, but it is also believed to have been rather unsuccessful in “inciting the

Muslims” to go out and fight.6 Tughtigin Beg, the Seljuq sultan of Damascus went out shortly after al-Sulami’s death in 1106 to raid Frankish settlements, but as was so often the case with the

Seljuqs, this seems to have been a campaign unfreighted by the ideology of jihad between two competing family members.7 Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad, while by itself an important piece of evidence for jihad’s intellectual condition in the wake of the First Crusade, is therefore assumed to be a text that had little, if any tangible effect.8

What is to blame for the supposed lack of interest in the Kitab al-Jihad? Was it the social status of its author, and the limitations inherent to his station as an ‘alim? Was al-Sulami incorrect to believe his invocations of the history and culture of his region would inspire his listeners at the mosque to leap onto the backs of their chargers? The disruption brought by the

Seljuq conquests that al-Sulami had witnessed firsthand might provide the obvious answer: the arrival of these newcomers and their divergent political culture and historical memory could potentially have provided the upheaval necessary for Muslims to forget the “golden age” of the

6 ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, Kitab al-Jihad, 203. 7 Christie, Niall, Muslims and Crusaders, 25. 8 Ibid.

99 ‘Abbasid caliphate. But over a century after the Seljuqs conquered al-Sham, the Kitab al-I‘tibar testifies to the survival of an Islamic culture laden with romance for the jihad against the

Byzantines, and the virtue of the scholar-turned-soldier fighting to the death in the path of God.

We can never know why nobody who listened to the khutba of al-Sulami in Damascus immediately went out to fight the Franks, but the fact that they did not heed his exhortations does not mean that the Kitab al-Jihad and its rhetorical style lacked the potential to instigate action. If al-Sulami’s text did not clearly fail in its attempt to strike a chord among Levantine Muslims, then historians have been given a remarkable opportunity to glimpse into the intellectual culture of a socially-diverse spectrum of Islamic society in the twelfth century.

Historians like Chevedden and Tyerman take pains to warn modern readers of the potential for misunderstanding when they project historiographical labels into the minds of history’s characters.9 Although he surely had no idea he was witnessing only the first of several expeditions to the Levant, al-Sulami is remembered for his temporal proximity to an event so popular in our own time. But in addition to his ignorance of the events that would unfold after his death in 1106, al-Sulami was ignorant of the modern concept of a “counter-crusade,” or a jihad exclusively directed against the Crusaders. Besides the few lines that he devotes to interpreting the events of the late eleventh century through the First Crusade, al-Sulami composed a Kitab al-Jihad that could potentially have instructed Muslims prior to the arrival of their new enemies just as well as it may have instructed those Muslims who would come after him.

9 Chevedden, Paul E., “The View of the Crusades from Rome and Damascus: The Geo-Strategic and Historical Perspectives of Pope Urban II and ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami,” Oriens 39 (2011) 257-329, 305-307 & Tyerman, Christopher, The Crusades: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11.

100 Historians present a progressive narrative of the Crusades. We count the Crusades,

Tyerman suggests, without realizing that we assume the Muslims and Christians were counting them too, as they lived through them.10 But al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad forces us to be even more wary of our potential for unfair, anachronistic assumptions; we tend to assume that, since the

Europeans were encountering a civilization so profoundly different from their own for this first time, the Muslims were likewise coming face to face with the only Christian holy warriors they had ever encountered. For one thing, al-Sulami demonstrates that there was quite an imbalance between the knowledge the Muslims had of the Franks and the little that the Franks knew about them. But more importantly, the omnipresence of traditions and references back to the jihad during the height of the ‘Abbasid period, along with al-Sulami’s unconcealable pride in the

Levant and its mujahid heritage in his text demonstrate the historical familiarity of the Muslims with disruption, warfare, and religious opposition. His Kitab al-Jihad demonstrates that, for medieval Muslims, it would have been far more difficult to count the crusades and jihads that they had already seen than it would have been to begin counting all over again.

10 Tyerman, Christopher, The Crusades: a Very Short Introduction, 16-18.

101

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