Popular histories like Brownworth are usually based on academic histories, but usually out of date ones. In this case, the story is usually that:

“…the majority of Muslims essentially forgot about the Crusades, and their interest in them was only re-awakened in the nineteenth century, as a result of increasing encounters with the European colonial powers.” (Christie, pg. 113)

Nineteenth-century Europeans still considered the crusades part of their glorious past, and something to celebrate. When they controlled/colonized the Middle East, they figured that Muslims didn’t remember any of it, so they were somehow unworthy of their own history. They even forgot about the great Saladin! That’s the narrative repeated by Brownworth but he’s definitely not alone. Even academic historians of the crusades have included this story until fairly recently.

In one sense it is true. The Muslim world was very big, and the crusades to Jerusalem were a very local phenomenon. They involved Anatolia and Syria and Egypt, but had little or no effect on the caliphate in Baghdad, or Persia, or anywhere further east in the Muslim world. Would someone in Central Asia have any idea that the Mediterranean coast had been invaded by Europeans? Probably not. There were sometimes crusades against North Africa, and the Reconquista in Spain is essentially another kind of crusade, but these attacks weren’t coordinated against all of the Muslim world in general all at once. Muslim states could easily see them as random unconnected attacks. In this sense, it’s not that Muslims in the 19th century had forgotten or were ignorant, it’s just that the crusades were not as important as Europeans thought they were, so there was no reason for Muslims to remember them.

Diana Abouali’s 2011 article attempted to correct these misunderstandings. It’s mostly about Saladin specifically - this whole argument begins with, and centres around, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Saladin’s tomb in 1898. The Kaiser thought the small wooden tomb was unworthy of such a great hero, and Europeans then assumed that all Muslims had forgotten about Saladin and the crusades.

But Abouali has found plenty of sources that show the crusades weren’t forgotten at all, at least not by local historians in Syria and Egypt. There were the usual historians of the 13th century, during or shortly after the crusade period, that were well-known to European crusade historians (e.g. Ibn al-Athir, Abu Shama, etc.), but there were lots of other histories written in the 14th-18th centuries that hadn’t been translated or studied, so Europeans simply didn’t know about them. Abouali lists, among many others, a 15th-century history of Jerusalem by Mujir ad-Din al-Ulaymi, and one from the 16th century by Nasr ad-Din Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Alami, both of whom were well aware of the crusades and the Muslim heroes of the period.

Maybe we could argue that the crusades weren’t forgotten by a few scholars who wrote obscure history books, but surely the general public forgot about them? Well Abouali also mentions a 17th century incident where France tried to send an ambassador to Ottoman Damascus. The governor of Damascus and the local leaders in Jerusalem complained, as they were fully aware of the medieval French crusades against both cities. This was long before modern France began to colonize the area again in the 19th century.

There was also popular literature and plays about the crusades. One example is the extremely popular folk tale about the 13-century Mamluk sultan Baybars, the Sirat al-Zahir Baybars. This epic continued to be recited/performed at least up to the 19th century. Clearly, even if the crusades were unimportant in the grand scheme of Islamic history, local Muslims never forgot about them.

So we have several things going on here. First, 19th-century Europeans believed that things that were important for them must therefore be important for everyone. It would never have occurred to them that their own ideas could be wrong and that the crusades weren’t that important! Secondly, if Muslims in the Near East really had forgotten about the crusades, maybe they were right to forget it? Islamic history stretches over 1400 years and over huge parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia and the crusades are just a blip in all of that. And thirdly, the people who lived in Syria and Egypt, the places most affected by the crusades, actually did remember them in their scholarly histories and their popular literature; and on top of that, since Europeans simply didn’t know about that literature, they incorrectly assumed the Muslims were ignorant, due to their own ignorance.

As for the use of crusade imagery by more recent extremist groups, well, I hope this doesn’t come up against the 20-Year-Rule…crusade historians have talked about it a lot though so hopefully this falls under historiography instead! References to the crusades have never really gone away for Europeans (and Americans). General Eisenhower described D-Day in 1944 as a “great crusade”, there were “crusades” against vices like drinking or drugs or prostitution, and there was evangelical preaching like Billy Graham’s “crusades” - the word and the imagery have always been popular. After 9/11 both George Bush and Osama bin Laden described what was happening as a “crusade”. Bin Laden also described Israel as a crusader state (recalling the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem), and described wars elsewhere as crusades - e.g., Ethiopian interventions against al-Shabaab in Somalia. I could go on but I don’t want to trample any further on the 20-Year Rule, haha.

But would bin Laden (et al.) have been able to talk about the crusades if no one remembered them? Why would they pick something no one knew about? Surely they can refer to the crusades this way because the crusades have never really been forgotten, even if Muslims in the past may have assigned them much less importance than Europeans did.

Sources:

The two main sources here for corrections to the old narrative (as repeated by Brownworth) are:

Diana Abouali, “Saladin's Legacy in the Middle East before the Nineteenth Century,” in Crusades 10 (2011)

Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (Routledge, 2014)

Some other excellent books about the crusades from the Muslim point of view are:

Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Routledge, 1999) (but this is also a great example where the “they forgot about it” story is repeated, even in a recent academic book)

Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: an Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014)

And for a look at how the crusades have been used and abused in recent history, see:

Thomas Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)

Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Islam and the Crusades in History and Imagination, 8 November 1898-11 September 2001”, in Crusades 2 (2003)

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011)