Historiography in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

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 ...

Intercultural Communication in the Perspective of Orientalism and Colonialism Against Islamophobia

“…Many people in the West, according to Thomas F. Madden (2015), are concerned that their actions resemble those of medieval crusaders. Significant military forces from the United States and Europe, for example, remain stationed in the Middle East.…”