Title: The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades Author: Usama ibn Munqidh Creation Date: c. 1183 Location: Syria
Summary
Usama ibn Munqidh was a Syrian Arab warrior, diplomat, and poet who lived through nearly the entire Crusader period, from his birth in 1095 (the year the First Crusade was proclaimed) to his death around 1188. His memoir, composed in old age, is a vivid, often astonishing collection of anecdotes from a life spent fighting alongside and against the Crusaders — the Franks, as he calls them. Usama describes battles, sieges, hunting expeditions, medical practices, and intimate encounters between Muslims and Christians with a keen eye and dry wit. He recounts Frankish knights who became his friends and Frankish customs that baffled or horrified him (their medicine, their justice, their attitudes toward women). The book is not a systematic history but a mosaic of lived experience — funny, violent, humane, and utterly irreplaceable as a window into the Crusades from the other side.
Why This Book Matters
The Crusades produced an enormous body of European literature — chronicles, romances, songs — but almost no accessible first-person accounts from the Muslim side have entered the general reading canon. Usama's memoir fills this gap with extraordinary specificity. He reveals that the reality of Crusader-era warfare was far more complex than the clash-of-civilisations narrative suggests: Muslims and Franks traded, negotiated, hunted together, and developed grudging respect alongside mutual incomprehension and periodic slaughter. For any collection concerned with religious warfare and the exercise of power across civilisational boundaries, Usama provides the essential corrective to a European-dominated Crusades narrative. He shows that "the enemy" had a rich interior life, a sophisticated literary culture, and his own judgements about the barbarians who had arrived from the West.
Historical Context
Usama was born into the Banu Munqidh clan, rulers of the castle of Shayzar in central Syria. He lived through the establishment of the Crusader states, served various Muslim rulers including the great Saladin, and witnessed the complex web of alliances and betrayals that characterised the Crusader period. He composed his memoir around 1183, just a few years before Saladin's reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187. The text survived in a single manuscript and was not widely available in European languages until the twentieth century, which partly explains its absence from the general Western reading canon despite its extraordinary value.
Literary Significance
Usama writes in the Arabic adab tradition — learned, witty, anecdotal prose designed to instruct and entertain. His style is digressive and personal in a way that feels remarkably modern: he interrupts battle narratives to discuss a curious medical case, follows a description of siege warfare with reflections on the unpredictability of fate. The memoir's literary value lies in its specificity — Usama is always concrete, always particular, always interested in the telling detail rather than the grand generalisation. As a rare example of medieval Islamic memoir, the text is also significant for scholars of Arabic literary history, occupying a space between formal historiography and personal reflection that few other works of the period fill.
Research Notes
Flagged by the war-power analyst because Islamic civilisation scholars will likely prioritise the Quran, the Muallaqat (already in the collection), Ibn Khaldun, or the Thousand and One Nights (already in the collection). Usama's memoir is specifically war-power territory: it is the most accessible first-person Muslim account of the Crusades, the longest and most consequential religious war in Western and Islamic history. Without it, the collection's treatment of religious warfare would rely entirely on European sources — an imbalance that would undermine the project's commitment to representing all sides of civilisational conflict.
The Reading
Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds, and prayers and peace upon our master Muhammad, His messenger, and upon his family and his companions altogether. To proceed: I have lived long, and seen much. I have outlived almost every man I once rode with, and the few who remain are scattered between Damascus and Cairo, and what they remember they remember imperfectly. I am nearly ninety years of age. My eyes have grown weak; my hand still answers; the secretary at my side writes what I dictate, and I correct him where the pen of memory has slipped. The matter of this book is the contemplation of the vicissitudes of fortune — how brave men perish from scratches and cowards live through massacres, how a tile from a roof may finish a man whom the lances of the Franks could not touch, how the decree of God Most High is woven through every thread of a life, and how a man may only watch, and wonder, and submit. What I have set down is the truth as I remember it. If it amuses, then the praise is God's; if it instructs, the same.
I was born in the city of Shayzar, on the river Orontes in the land of Syria, in the year of the Hijra four hundred and eighty-eight — which was the very year in which, as I have been told, the Pope of Rome cried out to the Franks to come and seize the lands of Islam, and they obeyed him. So I and the Franks came into the world together, and we have not been parted since. My family, the Banu Munqidh, held the castle of Shayzar from my grandfather's grandfather; we were a minor people among the Arabs, neither so great that we ruled provinces nor so small that we could be ignored, set down by God in a country that the Franks coveted and that the Turkish sultans claimed, and obliged therefore to live by the lance and the embassy together. We fought the Franks; we made truces with the Franks; we hunted in the same forests as the Franks; and we observed them, as one observes a strange and dangerous breed of animal whose habits are not those of any people of the lands of Islam.
I shall not arrange these recollections in their order, for memory does not arrange itself in that fashion. One thing reminds me of another, which reminds me of a third, and each is set down where it falls.
The Wonder of the Franks in War
I begin with the Franks (may God curse them), for I have spent the greater part of my life looking at them across the points of lances. The Franks are the most wondrous of animals: surpassing in courage and in fighting zeal, but in nothing else. I have seen them charge in a manner that no Muslim cavalry would dare, head down and unconsidering, like wild bulls. I have also seen them flee. I have ridden out with my father, may God have mercy on him, against a Frankish raiding party near Shayzar, and watched my cousin meet the charge of a knight in iron whose horse came on like a wall. My cousin did not flinch; he swerved his mount a little aside, caught the head of the Frank's lance beneath his arm, and ran his own lance through him with a single thrust. The Frank crashed to the earth, and the weight of his armour sounded against the stones, and his legs jerked for the briefest while, and then were still. I tell this not for the praise of my cousin (though God knows he deserved it) but because I have wondered ever since how a man so heavy may yet stand upright on a horse, and how, when he falls, no smith can lift him without a second pair of hands.
But the matter of war is not skill alone, nor courage. The matter of war is fate. I have known a brave man cut down for nothing, and a coward survive what should have been the end of him. I knew a warrior of our company called Jum'a, who in a skirmish took a Frankish lance fairly into his chest, and the head of it came out at his back, and he, without crying out and without losing his seat, reached behind him and drew the lance from his body with his own hand, and lived. I knew another whose face was opened by a sword from the forehead to the chin — the brain showed; I saw it with my own eyes — and he was sewn up and walked again and bothered no one for a long age afterwards. And I have seen men die of a thorn driven into a finger. There is no measuring such matters. The hour of death is appointed; the lance and the thorn are equally its servants when the hour has come; and when the hour has not come, no Frank and no fever can hasten it. This is the lesson of every war that I have fought in, and I have fought in more than I can count.
What I Saw of the Medicine of the Franks
A marvel, of a darker kind, is the medicine of the Franks. The lord of one of their castles once sent to my uncle (may God be pleased with him) and asked that he be lent a physician to attend to certain sick people. My uncle sent him a Christian doctor of ours, a man called Thabit, who was of long experience and learned in his art. He returned to us after only ten days, and we asked him in astonishment how he had treated his patients so quickly. He said: they brought before me a knight in whose leg an abscess had risen, and a woman afflicted with a wasting fever. I made for the knight a small poultice, that the abscess might soften and break, and the leg was beginning to mend. I prescribed for the woman a diet, that her humours might cool, and her colour was beginning to return. Then there came in upon us a Frankish doctor, who said: "This man knows nothing of how to treat them." He turned to the knight and asked, "Which wouldst thou prefer — to live with one leg, or to die with two?" The knight said: "To live with one leg." The Frankish doctor said: "Bring me a strong knight and a sharp axe." A knight came with an axe; the leg of the patient was laid upon a block of wood; the Frankish doctor said to the man with the axe, "Strike off the leg with one blow." He struck — and the leg did not come off. He struck a second time — and the marrow flew from the bone, and the man died at once.
Then the Frankish doctor turned to the woman, and said, "This woman has a devil in her head who has fallen in love with her; shave her hair." They shaved her hair. She continued to eat, after their fashion, of garlic and mustard, and the fever increased. He said, "The devil has entered into her brain." He took a razor, made a cross-shaped cut in her skull down to the bone, rubbed it with salt, and she died upon the instant. I, said Thabit, asked them then whether they had any further need of me, and when they said no, I returned home, having learned of their medicine what I had not known before. So far the words of Thabit; and I have set them down as he set them down to me, that the reader may know after what manner these Franks heal.
The Frank Who Was My Friend
Yet I would not have any man think that I write of all Franks as if they were one. There are among them those who have lived long in our country, who have eaten of our food and learned a little of our speech, and they are not as the others. There was such a knight in the days when I went often to Jerusalem upon embassies, and he and I were friends. I would go to pray, when I was in their city, in a small chapel beside the Aqsa mosque — for the Templars, my friends among them, had set it aside for me — and I would turn toward Mecca and begin my prayer. One day, while I was so engaged, a Frank rushed in and seized me, and turned my face to the east, saying, "Thus shalt thou pray!" The Templars hastened upon him, took him away, and begged my pardon, saying: "This is a man newly arrived from the land of the Franks; he has never seen anyone pray except facing east." I resumed my prayer; he was returned to wherever such men are kept; and I went home reflecting that those Franks who have dwelt long among us are nearer to us than those who have but lately landed at our shores. The latter are wolves; the former, at worst, are bears that have learned a few of the manners of men.
Of Hunting, and the Lessons Thereof
My father, may God's mercy be upon him, was the fiercest old man I ever knew, and the most diligent. He fasted three days in every week; he read the Qur'an in the night; and he hunted at every dawn that God gave him, into his seventies and beyond. Hunting, in our country, is not the diversion of idle nobles; it is the school of the warrior. The horse that will not stand to a lion will not stand to a Frankish knight; the falcon that flies at a crane is the same falcon that brings down a partridge for the lord's supper. From hunting we learned what we afterwards practised upon men, and from the chase we learned, again, the lesson that there is no measuring fate.
I have hunted lions in the thickets of the Orontes. I remember one day that a lion broke from the reeds and struck down the horse of a companion before any of us could level a lance. We surrounded the beast; he killed another mount; we drove our weapons into him at last, and he died with a roar so close to my face that I felt his breath upon my cheek. I had been in many battles by then; the battle with that lion was no smaller than any. And I remember, in another season, a falcon of mine striking a crane in mid-air, and the two of them tumbling locked together to the earth, the talons of the falcon set in the crane's back and the great wings of the crane folding over both of them. We came up; we untangled them; the falcon lived, the crane did not; and I thought that day, as I have thought many days, that the world is dangerous, unpredictable, beautiful, and altogether in the hand of God Most High.
Of Wounds and Laughter, and of Women
I have looked closely at wounds. I have seen the angle at which the head of a lance enters the breast and the angle at which it leaves; I have seen the organs of men exposed by a careless sword stroke; I have seen the gut of a comrade in his hands as he carried himself, calmly, to a place where he might lie down. I report these things without ornament because they were not, to those of us who lived among them, ornamented. A man I knew lost his nose to a sword in a skirmish; years afterwards, when his face was a familiar ruin among us, my father, who feared nothing and respected fewer things, teased him about his appearance over the cups. He answered with so dry a turn of phrase, holding the napkin where his nose had been, that the whole company fell from their cushions laughing. This is the laughter of soldiers; it is the laughter of men who have seen too much death to be solemn before it.
Nor are the deeds of valour confined to the men of the Banu Munqidh. I have seen our women take up swords. During one siege upon Shayzar, a woman of our own household armed herself and stood in the line with the men, and gave better account than some of them. I have seen women defend their honour with the steel; I have seen an old servant of ours carry a wounded knight upon her back from a field where his own people had abandoned him. The women of our country are not as the women whom the books of the Persians describe. They are the daughters and the mothers of warriors, and at need they are warriors themselves.
The Decree of God
If there is one thread that runs through every story I have told, it is this: the decree of God Most High is the only certain thing in a life. The brave man dies when his hour is appointed; the coward dies when his hour is appointed; the just ruler is cast from his throne and the tyrant prospers, and we are not told the reason for any of it. I do not say this in the manner of those who sit in mosques and shake their heads at the world. I say it as one who has ridden out for sixty years and watched the lance fly past his own breast and into the breast of a better man beside him.
I will set down one story that contains the whole of my conviction. In a certain battle, a Frankish knight came upon me at full gallop, and I braced my lance and made ready to meet him. At the moment the points were to meet, the knight's horse stumbled in some hidden hole of the ground, and the knight flew over its head and crashed to the earth, and my lance passed harmlessly above where he had been a heartbeat before. My men took him; we kept him; in due season he was ransomed and went home. Had the horse not stumbled, one of us would surely have killed the other. Which one? God knows; I do not. The horse stumbled because God willed it. Every battle I have ever fought is of this shape.
What Was Taken From Me
There runs beneath all this, like a hidden stream beneath a dry country, a sorrow that does not announce itself. I have not been at home since I was a young man. Family quarrels drove me from Shayzar long before I would have left of my own will; I have served, in my years of exile, the kings of Damascus, the Fatimids of Egypt, the great atabegs of Mosul, and at the last my lord Salah al-Din, may God preserve him, in whose court I now sit and dictate these pages. In the year five hundred and fifty-two of the Hijra, an earthquake shook the country, and the castle of Shayzar collapsed upon the heads of my kindred at a feast where they had gathered, and most of them died in that single hour, and the place that had been the body of my house ceased to be. I have set down what I have set down concerning that catastrophe and shall not say more of it here. The men of my own blood are gone; their graves are under the stones of Shayzar; and I, who saw them all into the world, sit in Cairo and speak to a secretary.
I am old. I am tired. My sight is nearly gone, and what remains to me is memory, and memory is what I have given to this book. By contemplating what I have lived through, by tracing the design of fate where it can be traced, and by submitting where the design is hidden, I do what is left for a man of my age to do. I do not weep; I do not curse; I tell stories, and let him who reads them draw what he can. The decree of God Most High is the only certain thing.
And here, where the pen tires and the secretary grows weary, I shall close — though many other matters might be set down, were strength given for them. Praise be to God, the First and the Last, and prayers and peace upon Muhammad, His Prophet, and upon all his house.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Two translations are recommended for The Book of Contemplation. Paul M. Cobb's Penguin Classics translation (2008) is the standard modern English edition — accessible, well-annotated, and faithful to Usama's digressive, anecdotal style. For those who want the complete text in an earlier scholarly edition, Philip Hitti's Columbia University Press translation provides a more comprehensive rendering with extensive historical notes.
Translated by Paul M. Cobb. The standard modern translation — accessible, well-annotated, and faithful to Usama's voice.
Translated by Philip K. Hitti. A comprehensive scholarly edition with extensive historical and cultural annotation.
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