Students of the Crusades in the Islamic Near East will welcome Alex Mallett's Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant, 1097–1291. Mallett has meticulously scoured many of the usual suspects from the Arabic chronicle tradition, but has also examined much less utilized Arabic literature and folkloric material as well as Latin sources to produce this wonderful little book. Despite its brevity (176 pp.), Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant, 1097–1291 is full of specific examples of and thoughtful insights about a wide range of non-elite Muslim reactions to the Franks and the Crusader enterprise in Egypt and Syria, and to a lesser extent in Anatolia.

Mallett is also concerned with what to call this resistance: jihad, which is the preferred term in the Arabic sources; or the more recent term Counter-Crusade, which one finds in some Western scholarship? Mallet essentially comes down in the middle and uses jihad to describe resistance to the Franks based on explicitly religious motives and Counter-Crusade when speaking of run-of-the-mill banditry and/or Bedouin raids against Frankish armies, cities, or travellers for material gain. One suspects that in the minds of many Franks (and possibly in the minds of many bandits and raiders) this was a distinction without a difference. But it did in fact matter to the sharia-minded religious elites who were well aware of the ḥadīth that states that for the pure-hearted martyr “the sword purifies from sin”, but for the hypocrite “the sword does not wipe out hypocrisy (nifāq)” (Ibn al-Mubārak, Kitāb al-jihād. Beirut: Dār al-Nūr, 1971, 30–31).

Understandably, most previous work on Muslim responses to the Franks has drawn on the rich Arabic chronicle tradition to understand the political and military responses of various sultans and amirs to the Crusades. Mallett, however, is explicitly concerned with non-elite Muslim resistance to the Franks. In order to impose some sense of order on the disparate materials on which he draws, Mallet divides his study into two parts, Part One consists of seven chapters that examine Muslim resistance to the Franks: resistance to the Franks in besieged cities; appeals for help; fighting alongside Muslim armies; acts of religious piety; opportunistic attacks; and financial resistance; and concludes with a chapter devoted to miscellaneous methods of resistance that don't quite fit under his major headings, e.g. communal celebrations after Muslim victories as well as unrestrained Muslim violence against local churches and Christian communities. Part Two is much briefer and consists of three chapters that investigate examples of non-resistance – Muslim conversion to Christianity, leaving cities to the Franks, and working with the Franks.

Alex Mallett's Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant, 1097–1291 is an excellent model of how scholars can exploit a disparate source base to tease out the wide spectrum of popular Muslim responses to the Franks. As is the case with any monograph project, material is published after the manuscript has been sent to press. A useful complement to Mallett's overall argument is the work of the eminent twelfth-century scholar, Ibn ʿAsākir (1105–1176), who authored The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad at the behest of his patron, Nūr al-Dīn. (For the Arabic text and English translation of Ibn ʿAsākir's Forty Hadiths, see Part Two of Suleiman A. Mourad and James E. Lindsay, The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period, Leiden: Brill, 2013). Ibn ʿAsākir also informs us in his Muʿjam al-shuyūkh (Glossary of Teachers) that several of the scholars who taught him ḥadīths on jihad in Damascus were scholars who had been displaced from their home towns of Tyre, Sidon, Nablus, Jerusalem, etc. in the context of the First Crusade. While Ibn ʿAsākir certainly qualifies as an elite scholar, the repeated teaching sessions of his Forty Hadiths in Damascus during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries testify to his enduring influence on popular jihad preaching during the Crusader period.

Alex Mallett's Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant, 1097–1291 delivers on its title. It is a welcome addition to the growing and increasingly sophisticated historiography of the Crusades and the Islamic Near East. Mallett's clear and accessible prose makes it ideal for classroom use, especially in tandem with Paul M. Cobb's more geographically expansive narrative, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), which appeared subsequent to Mallett's work. See also the translations of Frankish and Muslim sources in Ashgate's “Crusade Texts in Translation” series as well as the forthcoming monographs, edited volumes, and translations in Brill's new series, “The Muslim World in the Age of the Crusades”.