The Maqāmāt of Amad b. Abī Bakr b. Amad al-Rāzī al-anafī and the Ideology of the Counter-Crusade in Twelfth-century Syria

This essay argues that the little-studied Maqāmāt of Amad b. Abī Bakr b. Amad al-Rāzī al-anafī was completed in Aleppo in 573–575/1178–1179, during the reign of the Zengid ruler al-Malik al-āli Ismā‘īl. The work glorifies the counter-Crusade of the Zengids while expressing opprobrium for Christians, Twelver Shiites, and the Assassins or Nizārī Ismā‘īlīs of Syria. It should thus be interpreted as part of the jihād propaganda patronized by Nūr al-Dīn and later Muslim rulers, which espoused the theory of unified jihād, linking the internal threat of Shiism with the external threat of the Crusader Franks.