The Crusades had a tremendous impact particularly on the Western Europe; these wars led to the development of the European civilization. The Crusades necessarily include both destructive and constructive elements. It expanded the trade, exploration, and scientific inventions much significantly for the Europe. Similarly, but not as deep and wide as on the Western Europe, the Crusades impact could be seen on some socio-religious elements of the Muslim world. Further, the bitter legacy of these wars widened the hostility, hatred, and dissent between the West and the Muslim world that still is perceived in one way or the other. The present paper attempts to revisit the impact of the Crusades into a broader social, economic, political, and religious context. It will first investigate the Crusades’ impact on the Muslim world and, then accordingly and importantly on the Western Europe vis-a-vis trade, economy, religion, knowledge, scientific inventions, literature to name a few prominent areas. The Crusade imagery, ideology and symbolism are so much powerful and immense so that it has subsided and undermined the constructive/positive impact the Western Europe achieved by confronting with the Orient/Muslim world. The paper concludes that the Crusades’ positive impact and interaction if broadly highlighted and explored, and if given considerable space in public and academic discourses then the possibilities of the East-West tension and hostility could be alleviated to a considerable extent.

Books Reviewed: Thomas F. Madden, The Concise History of the Crusades,3d ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Paul M. Cobb, The Racefor Paradise (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jonathan Harris,Byzantium and the Crusades, 2d ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). During the last six decades, historians have adopted various approaches tostudying the Crusades. Unfortunately, few contemporary Muslim scholarshave dealt with this topic at all. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, this seriesof European military invasions of the Middle East began to reappear in themedia as analysts, historians, and academics posited that they were a precursorof the region’s present sociopolitical disorder as daunting as the current East-West discourse and relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds.1 Someworks deconstruct the perception that there is no connection between them,whereas others view the Crusades from the Islamic perspective in an attemptto balance the general triumphalist western narrative.2This essay focuses on three recent works that, although dealing with differentstandpoints, are explicitly interwoven. Thomas F. Madden’s The ConciseHistory of the Crusades “is an attempt to illuminate the complex relationshipof the past to the present” and narrates the Crusades in a “concise, understandable,and engaging manner” (pp. vii, viii) based on modern scholarship; PaulM. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise shows how medieval Muslims perceivedthe Crusades and is based on his research primarily from original Islamicsources (p. 6); and Jonathan Harris’ Byzantium and the Crusades concentrateson the relations between Byzantium and the Latin West during the Crusades.Madden’s book comprises ten chapters. Chapter 1, “The Call,” discussesthe crusading movement’s background as primarily an act of piety despite anunderlying current of selfish/secular desires, a fact that western scholars oftenoverlook. He also criticizes historians who believe that many Crusaders weremotivated by medieval Europe’s policy of “castoffs,” wherein only the firstson could inherit his father’s estate, by stating that the majority of crusading ...

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