The Race for Paradise

It would perhaps be stretching things to say that the period of the Crusades is enjoying something of a revival—because the allure and appeal never went away in the first place. Other than the wars of the twentieth century and the reign of Henry VIII, more has been written about the Christian attempts to conquer the Holy Land than just about any other topic in history. What is striking, however, is that while the level of focus on the Crusades is as strong as it has ever been, seismic shifts are afoot when it comes to some of the most basic ideas about the expeditions to capture and retain Jerusalem—and about the response that idealistic Christian knights met from within the Muslim world. Paul Cobb, long a rising star amongst scholars working on the pre-modern Islamic period, is part of the new wave seeking to look at the Crusades in a fundamentally different way. We ignore the Arabic sources at our peril, he argues, in this invigorating and refreshing book, noting that the plentiful contemporary accounts are usually ignored by most commentators who have been fixated by stories of knightly piety, tales of derring-do and breathless accounts of heroism on the battlefield. Western medievalists certainly do like their horses, armour and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat. From the Islamic point of view, he says, the Crusades look very different. It is hard to disagree with him

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