Many of our joint projects, stimulated by common research interests, started with a conversation at a conference or during a visit. This time, however, it was not around Scottish tea or some other libation. The conversations were over Skype or WhatsApp or Zoom, and the common interest was pedagogical: how best to teach our students about the complexity of the interactions between Franks and Muslims in the broader context of Islamic history. Therefore, we decided that we should simply collect and translate the kinds of sources that we would want to use ourselves in our classes. Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology is the result. It is our hope that colleagues who teach courses on the Crusades as well as courses on the premodern Islamic Near East will find this anthology useful in their own teaching. We equally hope that this anthology will be useful to researchers who seek a better understanding of the contemporary Islamic perspectives on the Crusades and the period in general, and who might encounter for the first time some of the sources that we included.
There are several people we want to thank for their help in bringing this project to fruition. Rick Todhunter, our editor at Hackett, for his interest in and his willingness to take on such a project and especially for his patient prodding along the way. The discussions with him have been very constructive and allowed us to make the anthology accessible to a wide audience of students and researchers. Elana Rosenthal, our project manager, and her team for shepherding the anthology through the different production stages. Our students at Colorado State University and Smith College who were the first to read and analyze some of these translations in our classes. The three outstanding reviewers for Hackett for their insightful comments. The meticulous care with which they read the text and their valuable suggestions stimulated us to rearrange some of the material, and helped us revise and finalize the anthology in a much better way. Of course, any infelicities or errors are our own.
Finally, we thank our families for their love and support. This project took time and attention away from them. They even had to put up with our constant musings about the texts we have translated, and grandiose claims about the importance of the anthology. They received all of that with tremendous wisdom and graciously offered in return smiles and encouragement.