Addressing a group of UCLA community members Wednesday,
Professor Paul Chevedden spoke about an ancient topic, but put it
in a new light ““ an Islamic light.
Chevedden, a history professor at Santa Monica College who gave
a lecture in Royce Hall hosted by the UCLA Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, has focused his study on the Crusades, and is
using Islamic texts to illuminate the past.
“I’m going to start off by telling you a
secret,” Chevedden said at the beginning of his lecture.
“We don’t know much about the Crusades.”
“The Islamic sources could throw the Crusades into a
proper perspective,” he said.
He said this fresh perspective re-evaluates the traditional
history of the Crusades which has been “prone to tunnel
vision” because it has only considered European texts on the
events.
The professor said his research is pertinent because
“there is a feeling in the Islamic world that the West is
guilty of unpardonable crimes, beginning with the
Crusades.”
Chevedden suggested that this misunderstanding is part of the
cause of tensions between the West and the Islamic world. Chevedden
wrote in his article that “more often than not, the Crusades
are taken out of their historical context and are viewed not as a
response to ongoing circumstances, bus as the cause of a new set of
circumstances.”
Some present at the event said Chevedden’s work can be
used to help understand the current world.
“(Chevedden’s work) is so relevant to today,”
said Aino Paasonen, an associate for the UCLA Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies and a comparative literature professor at
Antioch University. “There are problems in that local
Europeans don’t know very much about Islamic culture and
Islam is resistant to learning about the Europeans that are now
their host.”
According to Chevedden’s article, Muslim historians
recognized the Crusades as a Christian jihad.
By calling the Crusades a “jihad” or “common
Christian cause and Christian struggle worth fighting for …
Indicates that the Crusades were actually a counteroffensive
against initial Islamic aggression,” Chevedden said.
Chevedden said his research began when he was teaching a class
on Western civilizations. Instead of using the common Western
sources, he “went back to the Arabic sources for the Crusades
and decided to take them by their word.”
Chevedden, an Arabic scholar, said the “(Arabic sources)
were explaining it differently than the Western Crusade
sources.”
This realization launched Chevedden into an in-depth study of
the Islamic interpretation of the Crusades. Chevedden said he has
written several articles, which are working their way to a
book.
Chevedden’s article, “The Islamic Interpretation of
the Crusade: A New (Old) Paradigm for Understanding the
Crusades,” was published recently in the journal Der Islam.
In the article, he challenges the Western interpretation of the
history of the Crusades.
“(Chevedden) is doing a good job getting Muslim
scholarship and European scholarship in dialogue with each
other,” said Andrea Jones, an English graduate student.
“The understanding of the Crusades in the Middle East is very
different than the understanding we have.”
Chevedden is trying to bridge the two understandings of the
Crusades into one history.
“One can always go back to the stories and make new
discoveries,” he said
And that is exactly what he has been trying to do.