Usama ibn Munqidh was a remarkably long-lived warrior, political adventurer, and poet, who wrote the Kitab al-I‘tibdr (Book of Examples), a memoir that drew on incidents in his action-packed life in order to provide moral guidance for his descendants.
Usama was born on 25 June 1095. His father, a member of the Banu Munqidh clan who ruled over the city of Shaizar (mod. Shayzar, Syria), renounced his inheritance in favor of his youngest brother. Most of Usama’s kinsmen were killed in an earthquake that struck Shaizar in 1157 at the time of a circumcision feast. Successively Usama sought service with Muylin al-Din Unur in Damascus, with Ibn Salar in Egypt, and
Uxkull
With Nur al-Din in Damascus. In the 1160s he spent time in Hisn Kayfa before retiring to Damascus, where he died on 6 November 1188 at the age of ninety-three. Usama’s account of his political intrigues is somewhat disingenuous and elliptical. He finally ended up in Damascus as a pensionary of Sal-adin, who is reported to have been a great admirer of Usama’s poetry. During his early career in Unur’s Damascus, Usama went on frequent embassies to the kingdom of Jerusalem, and it emerges from the various vivid anecdotes in the I‘tibar that he fraternized with the Frankish aristocracy, hunting with them, and enjoying their hospitality. It is clear that he found much to ridicule as well as much to admire in such matters as Frankish medicine and justice. Together with Ibn Jubayr’s account of his journey through Palestine, Usama’s I‘tibar provides the most vivid and revealing account of the Latin kingdom seen through Muslim eyes. However, Usama wrote a great many other books, and in his own lifetime he was chiefly famous as a poet. Some of his writings, such as his books on women and on dreams, have not survived, but historians still have not paid sufficient attention to the historical materials to be found in such texts as the Kitab al-‘Asa, his anthology of stories about sticks.
-Robert Irwin
Bibliography
Christie, Niall, “Just a Bunch of Dirty Stories? Women in the ‘Memoirs’ of Usamah ibn Munqidh,” in Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050-1550, ed. Rosamund Allen (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 71-87.
Cobb, Paul M., “Usama Ibn Munqidh’s Book of the Staff: Autobiographical and Historical Excerpts,” Al-Masaq:
Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 17 (2005), 109-123.
Derenbourg, Hartwig, Ousdma ibn Mounkidh: Un emir syrien aupremier siecle des croisades (1095-1188), 2 vols. (Paris: Leroux, 1889).
Irwin, Robert, “Usamah ibn Munqidh, an Arab Syrian Gentleman at the Time of the Crusades Reconsidered,” in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed. John France and William Zajac (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 71-87.
Memoirs of an Arab-Syrian Gentleman, or An Arab Knight in the Crusades. Memoirs of Usamah ibn Munqidh (“Kitab al-
I'tibar”), trans. Philip K. Hitti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927).
Morray, D. W., The Genius of Usamah ibn Munqidh: Aspects of “Kitab al-I‘tibar” by Usamah ibn Munqidh (Durham, UK: University of Durham Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 1987).
Usama ibn Munqidh, Kitab al-I‘tibar, ed. Hasan Zayn (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr al-Hadith, 1988).
World History
