The relationship wasnвЂ™t dogmatic, it was pragmatic.

We have letters from Saladin to the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin III, that convey friendship and deep alliances. No sooner did the crusaders infiltrate, they were accepted into the political landscape as any others that came: with alliances, wars, treaties, commerce. How could people from the edge of the known world invade this divinely protected, culturally sophisticated and militarily triumphant region? There was a lot of soul searching on the part of the Muslims. That accounts for the sense of trauma from the Muslim side. So weвЂ™re talking about an invasion of peoples from a marginal, underdeveloped region of the world to one of the most urbanized, culturally sophisticated zones on the planet. Whereas the cities of western Christendom had populations measured in the thousands-Paris and London would have had maybe 20,000 each-Baghdad likely had hundreds of thousands of citizens. PC: The Islamic world was much bigger and more urbanized, with more wealth and cultural patronage, and more ethnic and linguistic diversity. How would you compare European and Islamic civilizations during this time? For pretty much the whole apparatus of science, mathematics and logic, Muslim scholars, along with others based in the Muslim world, provided corrections to the Greco-Roman tradition. The main accomplishment was when, on a large scale, Muslims began to creatively engage with the science and philosophy of the classical Greco-Roman-Byzantine tradition-and began to rethink those ideas. One example: A physician named Ibm al-Nafis, who lived in the 13th century in Cairo, was the first person to describe the pulmonary circulation of blood-four centuries before the Europeans discovered that. Within that time, there were golden ages of mathematics and astronomy and medicine, with many advances. SM: Actually, IslamвЂ™s вЂњgolden ageвЂќ goes much longer, from the 9th to the 14th centuries-and it moves around, from Baghdad to Damascus to Cairo. WasnвЂ™t there a flowering in the 9th and 10th centuries? Tell me about medieval Islamic civilization. He would go on to ultimately recapture Jerusalem from the crusaders and push them back to a thin strip along the Mediterranean. He took over Egypt, then set about reconquering Syria and parts of Iraq. PC: Saladin, IslamвЂ™s most famous counter-crusading hero, was a very astute politician who knew he had to get his own house in order before he could deal with the Franks. But there was eventually a movement toward unification, right? (Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)ДЄt that time, the core of the Islamic world was divided between a ShiвЂ™ite dynasty in Egypt and a Sunni dynasty in Syria and Iraq. While Saladin led Muslim opposition to the western Crusaders, he also befriended some, like King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. Portrait of Saladin, the first sultan of Egypt and Syria and the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. ItвЂ™s not just Franks invading Jerusalem, holding it 87 years and leaving, but a long-term and consistent assault on the most exposed areas of the Mediterranean edge of Muslim world-Spain, Sicily, North Africa, and what is now Turkey-over hundreds of years. PC: Muslims saw the Frankish threat as Mediterranean-wide. What came before and after reflected a lot of continuity and not abrupt change. SM: To say the Crusades started in Clermont in 1095 and ended at Acre in 1291, we are fooling ourselves. And whereas most Western historians recognize the 1291 fall of Acre as the end of the main Crusades, Muslim historians donвЂ™t see the end of the Frankish threat until, I would say, the mid-15th century, when Ottoman armies conquer Constantinople. By 1060 Christians were not only nibbling at the edges of the Islamic world, but were actually gaining territory in Sicily and Spain. (I use вЂњFranksвЂќ or вЂњFrankishвЂќ to refer to western Christians.) For them, the Crusades didnвЂ™t begin in Clermont with Pope UrbanвЂ™s 1095 speech, as most historians say, but rather decades earlier. They recognize the events we call the Crusades today simply as another wave of Frankish aggression on the Muslim world. Paul Cobb: Chronologically, Muslim sources differ from the Christians because they donвЂ™t recognize the Crusades. 1988 Chicago Bears beat Philadelphia Eagles in freaky Fog BowlДo Muslim perspectives match Western ones in terms of chronology and geography?

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