Memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh

Summary

Usama ibn Munqidh dictated these reminiscences, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-I'tibar (the Book of Learning by Example), when he was nearly ninety lunar years old and living in Damascus under Saladin's patronage. The book is not a continuous autobiography but a sequence of anecdotes, grouped loosely by subject and linked by association, meant to teach that the length of each life is fixed by God and that neither daring nor caution can change it. The beginning of the only manuscript is lost, so the text opens in the middle of a battle of Zanki against the Franks. Section I recounts Usama's wars and travels: his first stay in Damascus with the atabeg Mu'in al-Din Unur, whom he accompanied on embassies to King Fulk of Jerusalem; his decade at the Fatimid court in Cairo amid mutinies, assassinations and the murder of the caliph al-Zafir in 1154; his flight to Syria, during which Franks plundered the ship carrying his family's goods and his library of four thousand volumes; and many skirmishes around Shayzar against Franks, Isma'ilis and Arab raiders. A chapter on lions and other beasts follows, then the famous chapter on the Franks. There Usama tells of a Frankish knight who called him brother and offered to take his son to Europe; of the Christian physician Thabit, sent to treat Frankish patients, who saw a Frankish practitioner amputate a knight's leg with an axe and cut a cross into a woman's scalp, both patients dying; and, just after, of Frankish physicians who healed a leg wound with vinegar and a Frank who gave an effective remedy for scrofula, which Usama himself later used. He describes Templars in Jerusalem who cleared a chapel so he could pray, a newly arrived Frank who forcibly turned him to the east, judicial duels and ordeal by water, and the better manners of Franks long settled in Syria. Section I closes with reflections on old age, the unlikely survivals and deaths that prove life's term is fixed, and a eulogy of Saladin. Section II gathers stories of holy men and remarkable cures, including those of the Christian physician ibn-Butlan of Aleppo. Section III is a book of the chase, describing hawking and hunting with his father, Zanki, Nur al-Din and others across Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt over seventy years. The library text is Philip K. Hitti's 1929 English translation with his introduction, from an OCR scan.

Plot or Argument

• Hitti's introduction

  The translator sketches Shayzar and the Munqidhite family, Usama's education under his father and uncle, his career and writings, and the value of the memoir as a record of contact between Muslims and Franks.

• Wars and service in Damascus and Cairo (Section I, chs. 1-4)

  Fragmentary opening in a battle of Zanki's; service with Mu'in al-Din Unur; court intrigue in Fatimid Egypt and the flight of 1154; the loss of four thousand books; return to Damascus under Nur al-Din.

• Battles against Franks and Muslims (Section I, ch. 5)

  Dozens of encounters around Shayzar, Apamea and Kafartab, with notes on lance wounds, feats of horsemen, cowardice and courage, and the conviction that victory comes from God rather than planning.

• Lions, wild beasts and the family at home (Section I, chs. 6-7)

  Hunts of lions, leopards and hyenas; portraits of his devout father, his mother who armed the household against an Isma'ili attack, and his pious grandmother.

• The Franks observed (Section I, ch. 8)

  Friendships and frictions with Franks: the knight who called him brother, contrasting cases of Frankish medicine, the Templars and the newcomer in the Aqsa mosque, judicial duels and ordeal by water, and the settled Franks who abstained from pork.

• Sundry experiences and old age (Section I, ch. 9)

  Fainting at the sight of blood and courage under the knife, gashes survived and trifles that killed, reflections on the weakness of old age, and a eulogy of Saladin.

• Rare anecdotes: holy men and noteworthy cures (Section II)

  Stories of ascetics and answered prayers, and remarkable recoveries, including the cures attributed to ibn-Butlan and Usama's own chill cured by a melon.

• Hunting in Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt (Section III and epilogue)

  Falconry, hawks, cheetahs and hounds; the hunts of his father, Zanki and Nur al-Din; and a closing prayer that the little remaining of his life be spent in obedience to God.

Characters

• Usama ibn Munqidh, author and narrator

  Syrian nobleman, warrior, hunter and poet, recalling his life at nearly ninety.

• Murshid, Usama's father

  Devout reader and copyist of the Qur'an and a peerless hunter, who declined the lordship of Shayzar.

• Sultan, Usama's uncle, lord of Shayzar

  Head of the family who trained the young Usama and later turned against him.

• Mu'in al-Din Unur, atabeg of Damascus

  Usama's patron, whom he accompanied on visits to the Franks of Jerusalem.

• Thabit, Christian physician

  Physician of the Munqidhites who reports the fatal Frankish treatments at al-Munaytirah.

• Ibn-Butlan, Christian physician of Baghdad and Aleppo

  Celebrated healer whose shrewd cures fill the chapter on remarkable recoveries.

• The Templars, Frankish military order in Jerusalem

  Knights whom Usama calls his friends, who protect his prayer from a newcomer.

• Saladin, sultan

  Usama's last patron, praised in a formal eulogy for rescuing him in old age.

Lessons

• The appointed term of life

  Usama's governing lesson is that each life has a length written beforehand, so that a warrior who rushes into danger does not die sooner and a cautious man does not live longer. He tells of men who survived terrible gashes and of others killed by a trifle. The teaching frees him from fear in battle and gives his book its title, learning by example.

  • Which stories does Usama tell to show that the hour of death cannot be advanced or delayed?
  • How does this belief shape the way he fights and the way he speaks of defeat?
  • How does the Christian teaching of providence compare with Usama's view, and where might they differ on human responsibility?

• Seeing an enemy as neighbors

  Usama fought Franks all his life and often curses them in the conventional phrases of his time, yet he records a Frankish knight who called him brother, Templars he calls friends, and Franks long settled in Syria whose manners he respects. He also records shocks and disagreements, such as the newcomer who forced him to pray eastward. His chapter is valuable because it shows contact, courtesy and conflict side by side.

  • What different kinds of Franks does Usama describe, and how does he distinguish them?
  • What happened when Usama prayed in the chapel beside the Aqsa mosque?
  • Can a person be an honest enemy and also a fair witness about the other side?

• Two kinds of medicine, fairly reported

  The memoir sets Thabit's poultice and diet beside a Frankish practitioner's amputation by axe, and immediately adds a Frankish vinegar cure that healed a festering leg and a Frankish remedy for scrofula that Usama himself later used successfully. In the cures of Section II, ibn-Butlan diagnoses with care, warns his students against dangerous remedies, and, after a jest about his fee, tells a worried father honestly that a boy's skin spots will pass without treatment. Usama's medicine is a medicine of observed cases, told with an eye for both failure and success.

  • How did Thabit treat the knight and the woman, and what did the Frankish physician do instead?
  • Why does Usama immediately follow the fatal cases with Frankish cures that worked?
  • What does ibn-Butlan's warning to his students teach about a physician's responsibility?

• Losses borne and remembered

  Usama lost his castle home, most of his family in an earthquake, his fortune in Egypt, and four thousand books at sea. He grieves most for the books and says the wound will last until his death. Yet his memoir closes not with complaint but with a prayer that he use his remaining days well. Old age, he writes, is a heritage of forgetting that goes back to Adam, and his book is an act of remembering.

  • What losses does Usama record, and which does he say he feels most?
  • How does he describe his own old age?
  • Why might an old man write down his memories for others to learn from?

Context

Usama's life spanned the First Crusade, which began the year he was born, through Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem in 1187, the year before he died. The crusaders founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and for generations Frankish and Muslim lords along the Orontes raided, besieged, made truces and traded with one another. Shayzar was a small independent emirate between the Franks of Antioch, the Seljuk-descended atabegs of Aleppo and Mosul, and Damascus. Usama also knew Fatimid Egypt, the Shi'ite caliphate whose court was riven by vizieral coups, and he served Zanki, Nur al-Din and finally Saladin, under whom Syria and Egypt were united. Medicine in the Islamic lands of his day drew on Greek learning translated into Arabic and on the clinical work of physicians such as al-Razi and Avicenna; Christian and Jewish physicians served Muslim households, as Thabit and ibn-Butlan did. Frankish medicine in the East varied widely, and Usama's own book records both failures and successes.

Composition

Usama dictated the Kitab al-I'tibar about 1183, in his ninetieth lunar year, as a didactic collection of exempla, not a chronological life. The work survives in a single manuscript in the Escorial library near Madrid, which lacks its opening leaves; Hartwig Derenbourg edited and translated it into French in the 1880s. Philip K. Hitti of Columbia University published his English translation in 1929, dividing it into sections and chapters with descriptive headings, and an edition of the Arabic text followed. The library text is an OCR transcription of Hitti's volume, including his introduction but omitting the index.

Reception

Since its rediscovery the memoir has been one of the most widely read Arabic sources for the crusading period in the West, prized for its first-hand anecdotes of Frankish life and medicine and its portrait of an Arab nobleman's household, hunts and faith. Historians read it beside Frankish chronicles such as William of Tyre and Arabic histories such as ibn-al-Athir. Paul M. Cobb's newer translation, The Book of Contemplation (2008), renders it afresh from the Arabic.

Comparisons

• villehardouin-conquest-of-constantinople

  A Frankish marshal's account of the Fourth Crusade gives the Western side of the crusading world a generation after Usama, with the same mixture of oaths, sieges, plunder and piety.

• anna-komnene-alexiad

  The Byzantine princess's history of her father Alexios describes the first crusaders as they passed through Constantinople, a third perspective beside Usama's Syrian and the Franks' own.

• avicenna-canon-of-medicine-book-i

  Avicenna's Canon systematizes the humoral medicine behind Thabit's diet that would make a patient's humor wet, the learned tradition that Usama sets against Frankish practice.

• al-razi-treatise-on-smallpox-and-measles

  Al-Razi's case-based clinical writing is the scholarly counterpart of Usama's anecdotal cures, both grounded in observation of particular patients.

• ghazali-deliverance-from-error

  Al-Ghazali's spiritual autobiography, written a generation earlier, turns inward to doubt and certainty, where Usama's memoir turns outward to battle, hunt and fate.

• ibn-battuta-travels

  Another first-person Arabic narrative rich in anecdote and observation of foreign customs, from the fourteenth century.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How Usama links one story to the next by association rather than chronology.
• Every story that illustrates his belief that the term of life is fixed by God.
• The differences he draws between newly arrived Franks and those long settled in Syria.
• The order in which he tells the cases of Frankish medicine, failures first and then successes.
• His portraits of his father and mother and his reflections on his own old age.

Key terms and names

Franks

The Arabic name (al-Ifranj) for Western European crusaders and settlers, whatever their homeland.

Atabeg

A Turkish title for a regent or governor, such as Zanki of Mosul or Mu'in al-Din Unur of Damascus.

Templars

The Frankish military religious order whose headquarters in Jerusalem was the Aqsa mosque.

Isma'ilis (Batinites)

A Shi'ite sect whose followers attacked Shayzar and were feared for assassinations.

Qiblah

The direction of Mecca, which Muslims face in prayer.

Humors

The four bodily fluids of Greek and Arabic medicine; Thabit treats by diet to restore their balance.

I'tibar

Arabic for learning a lesson from examples, the title and purpose of the memoir.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What did Thabit do for his patients, and what did the Frankish physician do to them?
2. Comprehension What happened to Usama's library, and how does he say he feels about it?
3. Comprehension How did the Templars respond when a newly arrived Frank interrupted Usama's prayer?
4. Interpretation Why does Usama follow the fatal Frankish treatments with stories of Frankish cures that worked?
5. Interpretation How does Usama's belief in a fixed term of life affect the way he tells stories of battle and wounds?
6. Interpretation What does the eulogy of Saladin, set beside his complaints of old age, show about Usama's situation as he wrote?
7. Big Question Can we learn true things about a people from someone who fought against them, and what must a reader do to learn them well?
8. Big Question If God appoints the length of every life, why should anyone take care of their health or seek a physician?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 139:16 (Scripture)

  In your book were written all the days ordained for me. The psalmist and Usama both speak of days written beforehand; Christian teaching joins this to the duty of prudent care for life.

• Luke 10:33-35 (Scripture)

  The Samaritan binds the wounds of a man from a hostile people. Usama's Frankish knight who calls him brother, and the Templars who shelter his prayer, show courtesy across enmity.

• Sirach 38:1-4 (Scripture)

  Honor the physician, for the Lord created him, and the earth yields medicines. Usama's stories of physicians and remedies, and his praise of God who sends both disease and cure, sit close to this teaching.

• Basil the Great, Long Rules 55 (Church Fathers)

  Basil teaches that the medical art is a gift of God to be used with gratitude, while trust is placed in God rather than in the physician alone, a balance worth comparing with Usama's view of cures.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Usama has seen men survive the gravest wounds and die of trifles, and the bold live long while the cautious perish. If the length of life depended on human choices, these cases could not be. Therefore the term of each life is fixed by God, and a man should neither fear danger nor trust in caution.

Rhetorical device: exemplum (argument by accumulated examples). In the chapter on sundry experiences Usama states that exposure to war does not shorten the life written beforehand, then tells of a Shayzar man who survived a deep sword cut from an Isma'ili attacker.

Debate: Resolved: that Usama's chapter on the Franks is a fair account of the people he describes.

Memory Work

Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?

How mysterious are the deeds of the Almighty, who afflicts with disease and gives the cure!

Writing Prompts

Essay: Usama calls the Franks curious and rough, yet names a Frankish knight his brother and the Templars his friends. Using the chapter on the Franks, write an essay on how he distinguishes among them and what standard he uses to judge them.

Comparison with Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople: Compare how Usama and Villehardouin explain victory and defeat. Where does each see the hand of God, and where human courage or failure?

Medical Lens

The memoir is one of the most cited medieval sources for medical practice at the meeting point of Islamic and Frankish worlds, and it should be read as anecdote, not as a survey. In Section I, ch. 8, the Christian physician Thabit treats an abscessed leg with a poultice and a woman with a mental disorder (Hitti renders the term as imbecility, noting its uncertainty) by diet to moisten her humors, in the Galenic manner of Arabic medicine; a Frankish practitioner instead amputates the leg with an axe and, judging the woman possessed, shaves and incises her scalp and rubs it with salt, and both patients die. Usama immediately adds two Frankish successes: a festering leg healed by removing ointments and washing it with strong vinegar, and a remedy for scrofula (glasswort ash in oil and vinegar, then burnt lead in ghee) that cured a Shayzar boy and that Usama later used himself. Section II, ch. 2 gathers cures attributed to the Christian physician ibn-Butlan, including a dropsy case, an emetic for a sifter's throat with a warning that the remedy could kill, and his reassurance that a boy's skin spots were not leprosy; other cases involve a carbuncle, a hernia, a chill relieved by melon and diagnosed as biliousness, and colic relieved after a dream. Section I, ch. 9 records men who fainted at the sight of blood or of bloodletting, a man who sawed off his own leg, and survivals from deep wounds, all used to argue that the term of life is fixed. Usama's reflections on his own enfeebled old age, and his loss of family and books, give the book a sustained voice on aging and grief. Retrospective diagnoses of these cases are interpretive readings.

• Section I, ch. 8, 'Their curious medication'

  Thabit's poultice and diet; the Frankish amputation by axe and the scalp incision of a woman judged possessed; both patients die.

  Surgery Humoral Medicine Madness Psychosis Physicians Doctors
• Section I, ch. 8, following cases

  A Frankish physician heals a leg with washings of strong vinegar; a Frank's remedy for scrofula cures a boy, and Usama uses it on others.

  Physicians Doctors Pharmacology Poisons
• Section I, ch. 9

  A man faints at gushing blood, another at bloodletting; a man saws his own leg; a dropsy case relieved by a wound to the abdomen.

  Bloodletting WAR Wounds Surgery
• Section I, ch. 9, reflections on old age

  Usama on the feebleness of extreme old age and his withdrawal from service.

  Aging Senescence
• Section II, ch. 2 (Noteworthy Cures)

  Cures by ibn-Butlan and others: dropsy, a dust-clogged throat, a feared leprosy, a cold in the head, a chill and a colic cured after a dream.

  Physicians Doctors Medical Ethics Dreams Nightmares

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation in which the Frankish knight asks Usama to send his son to Europe, and Usama courteously declines because of his mother's oath.

• Essay

  Usama follows his account of a fatal Frankish treatment with Frankish cures that worked. Explain what this arrangement shows about him as a witness.

• Fiction

  Retell the scene in the chapel beside the Aqsa mosque from the point of view of one of the Templars.

• Classroom

  Make a timeline of Usama's life from 1095 to 1188 beside the main events of the crusades, and mark the patrons he served.

Further Reading

• The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, Usama ibn Munqidh (trans. Paul M. Cobb)

  A modern translation of the same memoir with additional writings.

• Usama ibn Munqidh: Warrior-Poet of the Age of Crusades, Paul M. Cobb

• The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand

• Arabic Historians of the Crusades, Francesco Gabrieli (ed.)

• Islamic Medicine, Manfred Ullmann