Unsheathing Poet’s Sword Again: The Crusades in Arabic Anticolonial Poetry before 1948

Abstract

Both Arab and Western scholars agree that, starting in the mid-20th century, the correlation of Western Europeans with the Crusaders and the extrapolation of the term “Crusade” to modern military conflicts have become an integral part of modern Arab political discourse, and are also widely reflected in Arab culture. The existence of works examining references to the theme of the Crusades in Arab social thought, politics, and culture of the second half of the 20th century contrasts with the almost complete absence of specialized studies devoted to the analysis of references to this historical era in Arab culture in the 19th century and first half of the 20th. An analysis of references to the era of the Crusades in the work of Arab poets before 1948 shows that, already in the period of the Arab Revival, this topic occupied an important place in the imagery of anti-colonial poetry, and not only in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, historically attacked by the Crusaders, but also in other regions of the Arab world. If, before World War I, Arab poets only praised the commanders of the past who defeated the Crusaders, then afterwards the theme of the Crusades was also used to liken the European colonialists to the “medieval Franks”. The authors of the poems containing images from the era of the Crusades were, among others, the participants of the Arab Uprising of 1936–1939 and the Arab-Israeli War of 1947–1949, who set their goal with the help of poetry to mobilize the masses for the struggle.