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Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese writer and journalist. He is the author of bestselling books, including Leo Africanus, Samakand, On Identity and Ports of Call. He has lived in Paris since 1976.
Most accounts of the Crusades written in western Europe, from contemporary chronicles to recent historical studies, have been written from the Christian perspective, seeing these wars, which lasted for 200 years between the end of the 11th and the 13th centuries, as an attempt to civilize the heathen Arab world. The people of the Middle East, however, have always viewed this episode very differently, as a long and bitter struggle to resist invading armies bent on destroying Islamic religion and culture. Maalouf gives us a history of the Crusades from this Arab perspective and describes their wars of resistance, culminating in Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem in the late 12th century. Well informed by the primary sources, his narrative and novelistic style brings these distant events vididly to life. (Kirkus UK)
