In recent years, there has been considerable scholarly interest in perceptions of ‘the other’ between the Islamic world and the West, from the beginnings of Islam up to the present day, due in no small part to recent political events. For the medieval period, while scholarship in this field has forged ahead strongly in the area of Latin European perceptions of the Islamic world, questions of how Muslims saw Latin Europeans – the Franks – and why, have been comparatively ignored, with a few notable exceptions. This chapter represents a modest attempt to add to current knowledge in this field by studying one aspect of Muslim perspectives on the Franks during the Crusading period.

In Hillenbrand's ground-breaking study on Islamic perspectives on the Crusades, two of the chapters, ‘How the Muslims saw the Franks’ and ‘Aspects of Life in the Levant, 1099–1291’, examine Muslim perceptions of the Franks. These highlight that there is little surviving evidence to suggest that there was any attempt to understand the Franks and that the Muslim writers from the period tended to simply use pre-existing negative stereotypes. As such, the Franks as a whole are seen as stupid, uncouth, ill-educated, religiously gullible, unhygienic, and with little idea how to comport themselves properly, although there is some praise for their fighting qualities.

Yet within one subsection of the latter of the two chapters, which has the rubric ‘Muslim views of the Frankish leadership’, Hillenbrand highlighted that Muslim writers presented individual Franks, and specifically the Frankish leaders with whom they were most familiar, rather differently. Despite there being harsh invective aimed at Reynald of Châtillon (d. 583/1187) and Conrad of Montferrat (d. 588/1192), it is shown that the rest of the Frankish leaders are not seen similarly, and are instead either lauded or presented neutrally. Given the intensity of ill-feeling often displayed in the nearly two hundred-year period of encounters between Latins and Muslims in the Levant that constituted the Crusades in that region, this comparative lack of criticism of the Frankish leadership may seem, at first glance, rather surprising.

However, such a lack of overt criticism of Christians, of any rite, by Muslim writers is fairly standard in medieval Arabic historical texts.