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.