This paper attempts to interpret the Crusades in terms of what was said about them by the first Muslim scholar to come to terms with the Mediterranean-wide counteroffensive directed by the Latin West against Islam. This scholar is the Damascene jurist 'Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, who wrote the Kitab al-Jihad (1105), "one of the most remarkable works ever composed on this subject" (Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History [Princeton, 2006], p. 139). Al-Sulami has recently been disparaged as presenting the crusading enterprise as a "grander scheme of conquest" than it actually was so that "by presenting the crusades as more systematic and opportunistic than they actually were," he would be able to increase "the magnitude of the threat" and "effectively [frighten] his listeners into action." According to this view, al-Sulami acted much like George W. Bush did before the war in Iraq, hyping the threat so that his war would find approval. Al-Sulami does not speak hyperbolically of the Crusaders but views them objectively and with a great deal of understanding. Surprisingly, he does not begin with the Jerusalem Crusade, as do so many modern accounts of the Crusades. Instead, the Jerusalem Crusade is presented as the final conclusion of a long development that started in Sicily with the Norman conquest (1060-91), proceeded on to Spain, and finally reached Syria. Al-Sulami views the military thrusts by the Latin West in these regions, not as self-contained discrete campaigns, but as "three different fronts . . . in which the same fight between Christianity and Islam was being waged." The fundamental problem faced by al-Sulami was how to rehabilitate Islam in the face of repeated defeats. He identifies the crisis as a religious and a moral problem that can be remedied by moral reform. If the terrible losses being inflicted on Islam are due to the discontinuation of jihad and the disregard of religious obligations, Islamic society can be set right and the losses reversed by inculcating the duties of jihad and the religious obligations of Islam. Al-Sulami offers a tripartite plan for the revival of Islam: religious reform, followed by political action to achieve unity of effort on the part of the Muslims in Syria, the Jazirah, and Egypt, and finally military action "to obliterate all traces [of the Franks]."