Usama Ibn Munqidh - Reputation

Reputation

Usama was known for meddling in the business of others, rather than commanding any power of his own. As the Encyclopaedia of Islam says, "his career was a troubled one, and for this his own actions were surely responsible in large part."

To contemporary and later medieval Muslims, however, he was best remembered for his poetry and his poetry anthologies. Ibn Khallikan, author of a fourteenth-century biographical dictionary, calls him "one of the most powerful, learned, and intrepid members of the family" and speaks at great length about his poetry.

He was also known for his military and hunting exploits. Ibn al-Athir described him as "the ultimate of bravery", regarding his presence at the Battle of Harim.

For modern readers he is most famous for the Kitab al-I'tibar and his descriptions of life in Syria during the early crusades. The disjointed nature of the work has given him a reputation as a senile rambler, although it is actually written with an anthological structure, with humorous or moralistic tales that are not meant to proceed chronologically, as a true autobiography would. Since this style of literature, adab in Arabic, does not necessarily have to be factual, historians are quick to point out that Usama's historical material cannot always be trusted. Usama's anecdotes about the crusades are sometimes obvious jokes, exaggerating their "otherness" to entertain his Muslim audience. As Carole Hillenbrand wrote, it would be "dangerously misleading to take the evidence of his book at its face value."