A recent study of the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 by Konrad Hirschler (“The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative,” Crusades 13 [2014]: 37-76) reduces the study of this event to a second-order process that concentrates on how this historical event was transformed into a product of a collective historiographical tradition in the Islamic world. The concern of a second-order investigation of events is with the conditions under which events were “forged” and “created” in transmission and diffusion, and the inherent limits to factual knowledge gleaned from such a process, rather than with the events themselves. The special interest of the historian of the Crusades, however, is with crusading events themselves, not with the way they happened to be reconstructed later on when the events were transformed into something cultural in the sense of representing the past to fit a latter-day intellectual environment or to serve social and political purposes. The main emphasis of a second-order examination of events is on explanation of occurrences as they have come to be known, whereas the chief aim of the historian is interpretation or understanding of the events of the past that were experienced first in all their singularity and uniqueness before they were interpreted and reinterpreted from all their many different perspectives. By engaging in a first-order examination of the Arabic sources for the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099, this paper will provide new understanding of this event and how it was first perceived in the Islamic world. Since the methodology that we employ in examining this event determines the results that we get, the implementation of a first-order examination of the Arabic sources for the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 will provide a very different result from that obtained by a second-order evaluation of this event.