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But for me as a casual reader of history rather than a formal student I could have done with some analysis, perhaps even comparison with contemporary Western texts and some comment whether the Arabic texts are believed to give a more reliable picture.
For instance I know that battle accounts often inflate numbers of participants and dead but there is no indication here whether the figures given are credible.
I am aware that Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes has been criticised but it made a better read, leaving me feeling I'd been informed whereas the Costello makes me question where I should be doubting what I read and gives no help working it out.
The e-text itself is a great disappointment. There is a disclaimer saying that it has been optimised for MobiPocket PDA; on the Kindle the characters i-macron, u-macron, ae-ligature and Greek letters are malformed, being sized larger than the upper case standard of the typeface distorting the line spacing, curiously i-macron is fine: using the macron diacritic to mark long stressed vowels they litter just about every page. Another fault is that it has obviously been through a too-smart word processor: leading apostrophes - which abound in transliterated Arabic - appearing as quote marks. For £14.50 I think one has the right to expect much better. In fact offering a MobiPocket e-text as a Kindle book from the Kindle store with these faults strikes me as sharp practice.
This book reads quite fast, as the excerpts for the most part are very short. The best section of the book has to be the detailed information on Saladin, the Arab general and sultan who dealt the Christians a punishing blow at Hittin in 1187, and who eventually retook Jerusalem. Lots of stories provide an interesting character study of this Islamic hero. We read about his military heroism, his religious piety, his sense of justice and honor, and his relationship with the Christians. There is the interesting story of how Saladin helped a Christian woman recover her child. The child was seized and was almost sold into slavery until Saladin intervened on her behalf and returned the child to its mother. The other sections of the book deal with the initial campaigns of the Christians during the First Crusade, such as the taking of Antioch and the legend of the Holy Lance, a ridiculous story that the Arab historians rightly perceive as total bunk. The last part of the book deals with the Egyptian campaigns of Louis IX and the eventual collapse of the Christian occupation in Palestine.
Most of these writings are pretty interesting, but there are a few drawbacks. Many of these accounts are propaganda meant to paint the Muslims in the best possible light. Also, this would be a useless review unless I mentioned the amazingly horrible writings of Imad ad-Din, who served as a close official to Saladin. His prose is so turgid and congealed that it is very taxing to get through. He spends a whole page giving EXTREMELY gory descriptions of the dead Christians at Hittin. There are only so many descriptions of bashed in heads and ripped livers a person can take! His prose is so difficult that it is hard to glean the actual history out of his writing. A final downfall of the book, which is more my fault then anything else, is the complicated names of the Arabs. These guys have more names then you can shake a stick at. It takes a leviathan effort to wade through them.
Overall, this is a very worthy book for someone interested in this time period. Any serious historian should always look at as many sides of an event as possible, and this book will give many insights. Just be prepared for Imad's interesting accounts!
Not only is it a great work of selection, editing and translation, but it is an enthralling read throughout. Always intersting, sometimes shocking and humourous.
An essential accompliment to anyone's book collection who is intersted in crusader history.
The main drawback is that I would not consider this a stand-alone book, particularly on a lot of the convoluted political arrangements - I'd suggest Wasserman's "Templars & the Assassins: The Militia of Heaven" for that - and I really don't think one can get the full understanding of the Muslim mentality in fighting the Crusaders from it. For that I'd suggest al-Sulami's "Way of Sufi Chivalry" (for those on a budget) or preferably Sabzawari's "Royal Book of Spiritual Chivalry" (for those who aren't) to get into the mindset of the Muslim warriors. For while "Arab Historians" includes a lot personal commentary from the authors, these last two books were written as guides for the emirs and warriors, and once reading them one gets the feeling that "Arab Historians" was written by some military public relations officer.
Still a highly recommended, enjoyable read, though.
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