Lindsay (Colorado State University) and Mourad (Smith College) write:

The authors succeed in presenting an account of the Crusades from an exclusively Muslim perspective. Their sources, “many translated here into English for the first time,” cover topics and genres including travel and geographical literature, jihadist and juridical directives, chronicles and poetry, treaties and truces.

Not only is the book balanced, reproducing the accounts of enmity and amity (the latter admittedly few and circumstantial), but it is objective, not dissembling about the topics that most concerned their Muslim authors yet might cause embarrassment today. Take jihad: After correctly dismissing the “spiritual” or “greater” jihad phantom as being “without foundation,” Lindsay and Mourad assert,

The authors end each chapter with pedagogical questions to prompt the reader to explore. Especially helpful are the many scholarly footnotes to assist the non-specialist in navigating what may be strange terrain, including one that exposes a little-known pun among Muslims, who referred to Christendom’s most sacred church in Jerusalem, the Church of Resurrection (qiyama) as the Church of Refuse (qumama). For students of the Crusades, the book offers several important features, including appendices (an especially useful one is titled “Quranic Verses on War and Peace”), biographical overviews, glossaries, and maps.

Those interested in current events and questions will find that the book unwittingly demonstrates many continuities with the present. It confirms that much behavior now presented as aberrant—intrinsic animosity for non-Muslims, expectations of cowed (dhimmi) behavior from subjugated Jews and Christians, the destruction or transformation of churches into mosques, the temporal nature of truces, the eternal nature of jihad, praise for jihadist martyrdom, and the allure of the houri (supernatural women who will accompany Muslim believers in Paradise)—were the norm for those Muslim authors excerpted in this very welcome anthology.