Usamah

After being conquered by the Crusaders, it is hard to think that the Muslims would be accepting of their new neighbors. Considering that they were not like-minded religiously and that there was still tension between the two groups, positive reviews of the Christians should be very little or obsolete. In a primary source from a Muslim named Usamah, it withholds experiences of how the Christians appeared to the recently conquered Muslims. He goes through several different experiences in which he describes the interaction he had with a Christian, something he heard about, or an event he witnessed himself. The historical accuracy of the article is likely not authentic to what actually happened, but rather more accurate concerning how Muslims viewed …show more content…
The first example comes from his witnessing of a Christian showing a Muslim a picture of Jesus as a baby. This can be interpreted as a Christian attempting to share the story of Jesus, but their disagreements in religion is one of the main reasons they started warring in the first place. This is taken as such an insult to what the Muslim believes, that he continues on to say, “Allah is exalted far above what the infidels say about him” (451). The fact that the Christians depict God as a child baffles him, as he believes that God could never be shown in a from such as a baby. His tone towards the sharing of beliefs is extremely condescending and religiocentric, as he shames the beliefs Christians, which in turn, is not surprising. Usamah also mentions a case in which a Christian man was frantically attempting to get him to pray eastward, however he describes the man’s actions as crazy and senile. The story of this man could have stretched the truth in order to have a negative connotation towards Christians, as a way to show that Muslims were more civilized. Both examples show almost show extremist behavior from Christians, which could have easily changed a Muslim’s perspective on