Jihad Poetry in the Age of the Crusades

Abstract The article examines how the pre-Islamic with its pagan tribal character could be transformed into a core component in Arabic Muslim religious literature. Indeed, it proved to be elastic enough to adapt itself to the realities of running a vast Muslim empire. Moreover, this conventional form of medieval Arab panegyric poetry came to be deployed as a political and religious tool in the monumental struggle between Western Christendom and the Muslim world at the time of the Crusades. To the state the obvious, jihad poetry is poetry in the service of religion. Its function mattered more at the time than its intrinsic quality. Jihad poetry was not the creation of Muslim poets as a response to their unprecedented contact with Western Christendom at the time of the Crusades. What we see in the twelfth and thirteenth century jihad poetry is in fact the easy and seamless transfer of earlier invective against Christian Byzantium to a new Christian target, the Crusaders. The Muslim poets who extolled the virtues of Nur al-Din, Saladin and their successors in the jihad do not belong in the pantheon of the greatest names of medieval Arabic poetry. But their verses resonate with the spirit of a period which would change the relationship between Christendom and the Muslim world and would harden the ideological battle lines between them. The jihad poetry gives us insights into the stereotypical way in which the Muslims viewed the Christian «other».