The Muslim struggle against the Crusaders was conducted primarily on the battlefield and through diplomacy, but the struggle on these levels was a checkered affair. Down to the last half of the 13th century, Muslim leaders were often ready to join with their Crusader counterparts against a common Muslim opponent. This was certainly the case under the Ayyubids after the death of Salah al-Din. On the ideological level, however, there was a more consistent effort at resistance and mobilization. The ideological struggle manifested itself in laudatory dynastic histories and biographies, inscriptions, sermons, and panegyric poetry. But it also took a quieter and we might say more organic form, in the traditional processes of textual study and transmission. Two third/ninth-century works claiming to recount the heroic deeds of the Arab-Muslim conquests—the Futuh al-Sham of al-Azdi al-Basri, and the Futuh Misr of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam—were revived in public readings in Jerusalem and Alexandria. At least three manuscripts produced in those public readings have come down to us, with detailed isnads and listings of those attending each session of the presentations. These manuscripts—found in Paris, Berlin, and Istanbul—constitute our oldest surviving copies of these texts. Such recitations were obviously meant to inspire contemporary Muslims to emulate the deeds of the founding generation. (We see a parallel movement in twelfth-century Andalus, facing the Reconquista, but we cannot explore this issue here.) A third work, very different but equally a part of the movement of ideological motivation, is Ibn ‘Asakir’s Ta’rikh madinat Dinashq, compiled in the 1160’s and 70’s. This gigantic opus mostly survives in an Ottoman-period copy in the Asad Library in Damascus, but there are two segments, independently copied, created during a public reading by the author’s nephew Fakhr al-Din in Damascus ca. 1216. One is in the British Library, in a standard eastern naskh—a bit hasty but legible. The other, larger (2 volumes) and finer, was made by an expatriate Andalusian scholar in a good Maghribi hand and is now located in Patna, India. This paper will explore the milieux in which these manuscripts were produced and the role they played in mobilizing public consciousness..