Modern scholarship on jihad in the Crusading period has tended to focus on the practice of jihad rather than the ideology of jihad. This is, in part, due to the nature of the surviving source material: where there is considerable evidence for the practice of jihad, there is a paucity of sources which reveal what twelfth-century figures meant when they referred to and invoked jihad. The sources which allow us to document and reconstruct the practice of jihad – reports of military victories in chronicles, the poetry and monuments which celebrate these victories, and so on – are ill-suited to helping us recover contemporary understandings of the ideology of jihad. We are not, however, entirely without sources; one such source is the Kitab al-jihad of ‘Ali b. Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106).

Composed in a series of majalis over the course of 1105, the Kitab aljihad is one of the earliest surviving Muslim responses to the First Crusade; at its simplest it is a call to jihad which seeks to exhort the residents of al-Sham – in particular Damascus – to unite and fight against the Crusaders. Al-Sulami did not, however, intend his work to be merely an exhortation: in the prefatory descriptions to each part, he states that the work concerns also siyar (the literary genre which focuses on the establishment of rules for proper conduct in war), fada’il al-Sham (the merits of al-Sham), and recent events. In short, al-Sulami envisaged his work to be a comprehensive guide to the performance of jihad, from first motivation through to proper conduct in war, all against the background of the historical and political developments which necessitated its performance. Not all of this material survives: the Kitab al-jihad is preserved in a single fragmentary manuscript, which comprises the second, eighth, ninth and twelfth parts of the work. The manuscript gives no indication whether the twelfth part was also the final part.

The second part of the work has found particular favour amongst modern scholars: when the work was first discussed, Emmanuel Sivan chose to focus only on the second part, which he partially edited and translated into French. His decision is not hard to understand: the bulk of the second part is devoted to exhortation, whilst the rest of the work focuses primarily on siyar.