Jerusalem’s Muslim conquest did not immediately define the Orient as Muslim

Evidence

True, from almost the beginning of Islam in the seventh century, Jerusalem and the biblical lands came under Muslim control. But this event did not immediately define the image of the Orient as Muslim. For one thing, Constantinople rather than Jerusalem was the major city of the Orient in the Western mind, and it remained in Christian hands until 1453. For another, even under Muslim rule there was a substantial Christian presence in the Holy Land, which the Crusaders attempted to use as a tool for the establishment of political domination. They were seldom very successful (with the “Latin Kingdom,” 1099–1187, the most notable exception) but they won enough skirmishes to make the idea of a Christian-ruled Palestine appear feasible to reasonable Christians until as late as the fourteenth century. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 101

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s ‘Imaginative geography’ and the general Orientalism debate; also to my chapter on how the Orient-as-Islam equation was a late medieval construction.