Muslim Perspectives on Latin Europeans

Over the course of the nearly 200 years of the crusading period, Muslim writers produced many works describing the Christians from Europe. Most of these were less than flattering. They describe them as physically unclean, sexually promiscuous, having strange and exotic funeral practices, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) extremely belligerent. To these parochial (to the Muslims) practices was added the belief that they were religiously backwards, stubborn adherents to a religion that had been superseded by Islam. Of more direct concern, however, was that they were also religiously unclean, with the resultant belief among many of the more fundamentalist Muslims that the Franks’ mere presence around Islamic sites was enough to pollute them spiritually.

These perspectives did not begin with the Crusades. Instead, they had their origins centuries earlier, and on two main bases. One of these were various Islamic texts, such as the Quran, hadith (the supposed sayings of Muhammad), and biographies (sira) of Muhammad, all of which contain sometimes strongly anti-Christian sentiments. These had originally been employed against the Greek Orthodox Byzantines but were taken and then applied to the Latin Christian Franks upon their appearance. The other consisted of primarily geographical works composed by ancient Greek authorities, such as Pliny and Strabo, which had been translated into Arabic and then incorporated into the Islamic worldview. In the latter,, a primary feature was the theory of the climes, which asserted that where a people lived in the world determined their appearance and behaviour. The Muslim world was in the third and fourth climes—the best ones—and so they viewed themselves as being the most attractive, cultured, sophisticated, and intelligent. The Latin Europeans, on the other hand, were in the fifth and sixth climes and so were stereotyped by Muslim writers as ugly, lazy, stupid, and backwards, in what was little more than a racist trope.

One such example can be seen in the following words by Said b. Ahmad, who was writing in the late eleventh century: