The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer who moved to France in the mid-1970s because of the Lebanese civil war. He was raised by Christian parents and received a Jesuit education. He wrote for, and eventually became editor of, the magazine Al-Nahar Arabe et International and Jeune Afrique. He was elected secretary of the Académie Française, the official authority on the French language, in 2023. Maloof published The Crusades Through Arab Eyes in the early 1980s, after which he quit journalism for a full-time career as a writer. His works, including his historical fiction, explore themes that reflect his journalistic interests, including religious and ethnic conflict, which characterizes The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Maalouf’s lived experiences in Beirut likely shaped this interest, for he witnessed these types of conflicts firsthand.

Reviewers describe his writing as accessible and enthralling, reflective of his journalistic career. Historians, however, have criticized his limited analysis and embellished narratives that are not derived from historical source material. For example, he describes the unrecorded thoughts and feelings of historical figures while failing to inform readers that these scenes are imagined reconstructions. Maalouf’s work, nevertheless, filled an important gap in historical scholarship at the time of its publication in 1983 because few Crusade historians wrote about these conflicts from the