看哪！法蘭克人：阿明莫洛夫的「阿拉伯人眼中的十字軍東征」再探

Behold the Franks: Amin Maalouf's The Crusades through Arab Eyes Revisited

1983年法語黎巴嫩作者阿明莫洛夫筆下的暢銷著作「阿拉伯人眼中的十字軍東征」（法文原文標題：Les croisades vues par les Arabes），藉由穆斯林教徒的觀點重新審視十字軍東征。作者透過許多當代阿拉伯世界的資源，企圖扭轉過去長久以來由西方人眼中陳述的十字軍東征事件，該書指出，十字軍東征所造成的傷痛，深深影響阿拉伯人對於西方國家及其現代化社會的觀感。然而，正當該書因由從穆斯林的角度呈現中世紀各文明間的衝突而廣受好評，本研究旨在爭論，阿明莫洛夫也仗著身份的優勢，便利取得大量法國及西方國家的文學、文化史料，以討好法語系國家以及歐洲讀眾的文筆寫出此書，此舉不啻使該書某種程度上消費了伊斯蘭文明，同時也加深了西方讀者對於回教文化深根深蒂固的成見。

In 1983 the francophone Lebanese author Amin Maalouf published The Crusades Through Arab Eyes （original French title: Les croisades vues par les Arabes）, a critically acclaimed and best-selling retelling of the Crusades from the Muslim point. Using a variety of contemporary Arab sources, Maalouf aimed to offer a corrective to traditional Western views of the Crusades and concluded that the traumatic events of the Crusades profoundly influenced the Arab perception of the West and its conception of modernity. Yet, while The Crusades Through Arab Eyes was generally praised for its effort to represent the Muslim point of view on the medieval clash of civilizations, the present study will argue that Maalouf availed himself generously of a whole range of French and more generally Western literary and cultural constructs to make his material accessible and interesting to francophone and other European readers. In doing so, some aspects of his work may have unexpectedly reinforced some entrenched consumptions of Islamic civilization among the Western reading public.