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..

This paper will address the question of the expansion (cast her as the "rediscovery") of the category of "Sahaba" and of the concept of ta‘dil in medieval biographical dictionaries. The broader context for this inquiry is specifically anti-Shi'i, examining the expansion of ta‘dil al-Sahaba and Sunni understandings of protection from sinfulness and error, under the broad category of ‘isma. Revivalist interpretations of the Sahaba and of ta‘dil ought to be seen as rejoinders to the development of Imami Shi‘i concepts also found under the broad category of ‘isma. I will therefore suggest a more contextualized corrective to some current understandings of ta‘dil al-Sahaba as a mere hadith mechanism invented by early traditionists, and address the broader question of how modern scholarship on Islamic intellectual history has often been dominated, occasionally ahistorically, by hadith studies Underlying the impulse (in medieval formulations of "orthodoxy") to revive older concepts and redeploy them to new ends is a recognition of the legitimizing power of historical continuity. The paper will interrogate that historicizing impulse, arguing against continuity with a static version of the past as the main mechanism of legitimation in formulations of “orthodoxy” or right belief. In the post-formative period, received versions of the past may not have been as subject to reconstruction as they had been previously, but they were freshly open to being endowed with new symbolic meaning. This is, in one way, the very essence of “revival.” To put it differently, the Sunni doctrine of ta‘dil al-Sahaba and the subsequent expansion of the number of Companions in biographical dictionaries to many thousands from the 4th/10th to the 9th/15th centuries is more than the result of a technical maneuver by early hadith scholars, and is part of broader discourses at stake during the Sunni resurgence.

Ibn 'Asakir states in the introduction to his voluminous work titled "tarikh Madinat Dimashq" that he started working on it early in his life, but neglected it for a long time. Then, when Nur al-Din Mahmud ibn Zengi took over Damascus around the middle of the 12th century, the self-styled hero of the Jihad against the crusaders contacted the author upon hearing about the work and encouraged him to finish it. From that moment, it took Ibn 'Asakir ten years to bring the project to a successful end. Appropriately, he dedicated the work to Nur al-Din Mahmud. Ibn 'Asakir used in the writing of his work a large number of compilations that he had collected earlier in his life while studying in Baghdad and other eastern centers of Islamic learning. One particular work of which he acquired several copies is Ibn Sa'd's Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir (and the shorter version titled Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Saghir). That book appeared in Syria a generation earlier when al-Khatib al-Baghdad resided there for a number of years. Ibn 'Asakir knew about Ibn Sa'd's work from his Damascene teachers and was keen to hear it from certified teachers in Baghdad. In my paper I argue that Ibn 'Asakir's work was the real big introduction of Ibn Sa'd's work to Syrian intellectuals. Moreover, I argue that Ibn 'Asakir heard this and other major works from a number of Baghdadi teachers who specialized in preserving what they saw as a Sunni tradition. These teachers are simply the students of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi and his "Sunni" circle, just like Ibn 'Asakir's teachers were in Damascus. Writing Tarikh Dimashq and before it transferring the Baghdadi Sunni tradition to Damascus was not a coincidence. It was part of a Syrian movement to strengthen the Sunni character of Syria, and Damascus in particular, in the face of two great challenges: the Christian Crusades and the Ismaili Fatimids of Egypt. It is the aim of this paper to prove that Ibn 'Asakir had this same intention, based on the long history of Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat as representing the Ahl al-Hadith and then the Sunni perspectives of Islamic history. There is nothing coincidental about the meeting of Ibn 'Asakir and Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat. In fact the latter served, or was made to serve, a similar purpose during the reign of the Shi'i Buyids in Baghdad during the late 10th and early 11th centuries.

The Fada'il Bayt al-Maqdis was a popular genre of religious literature before the Crusades. This literature extols Jerusalem’s religious symbolism and sanctity from the Muslims’ perspective, starting with major Biblical episodes and events (e.g. binding of Isaac, building of the Temple, association of Mary and Jesus with the Temple), and ending with Muhammad’s Night Journey and Ascension and the Islamic conquest of the city. Two main works from the eleventh century have survived (by al-Wasiti and Abu al-Ma`ali)—though we also have evidence pointing to the existence of at least one more work on the subject which was known in the medieval period but is now lost. Moreover, most of the narratives found in these works are also encountered in other genres of Islamic religious scholarship (e.g. tafsir, geographical dictionaries, prosopographies, historical annals, etc.). Jerusalem’s fall to the Crusades in 1099 only fueled the interest in its Fada'il traditions, as evidenced by the increase in the number of compilations on the topic during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. But in some of these works, we encounter a new attitude regarding Jerusalem’s sanctity that eliminates the biblical dimension and focuses instead on exclusively “Islamic” narratives: verses from the Qur'an and traditions from Muhammad’s life that relate to Jerusalem. This paper analyzes why in some Crusader-era works Jerusalem’s pre-Islamic biblical legacy is eliminated, which incidentally was familiar to the authors of these works due to their exposure to the pre-Crusader Fada'il works. It is my contention that this attitude originated with important Hanbali scholars from Jerusalem, whose families escaped in 1099 to Damascus (such as Diya' al-Din al-Maqdisi’s (d. 1245) Fada'il Bayt al-Maqdis). The Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem and massacre of the Muslim population as well as their continuous occupation gave rise to this tendency among exiled Hanbalis, who were also instrumental in the Counter-Crusade movement under Nur al-Din, Saladin, and the Ayyubids. This approach to the Fada'il of Jerusalem became well established in Hanbali circles in Syria and Egypt; for instance, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), in Qa`ida fi Ziyarat Bayt al-Maqdis, was influenced by these works when he condemned “excessive” and “un-Islamic” customs and rituals by Muslim pilgrims in association with Biblical sites in and around Jerusalem. In contrast, Fada'il of Jerusalem works by Shafi`i scholars, who were not from Jerusalem, do not share this Hanbali anxiety; they included the biblical traditions and were tolerant of pilgrimage practices there.