Book description
The volume comprises lightly annotated translation of a key medieval
Arabic text that bears directly on the Crusades and Crusader society and
the Muslim experience of them.
Usama ibn Munqidh was born on 4 July, 1095 in northern Syria. In the
last decades of his life he concentrated on writing, collecting his
scattered poems into a much-praised Diwan, but specialising in
topical anthologies of poetry and prose like The Book of the
Staff or Kernels of Refinement. Usama's last patron was the
mighty sultan Saladin, to whom he intended his most famous work, the
Book of Contemplation. He died in Damascus in 1188.
Paul Cobb, Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic History at the
University of Pennsylvania, has been engaged on a long-term project
involving Muslim views of the Crusades and the writings of Usama ibn
Munqidh in particular.
