What’s more, the Crusades stimulated no particular curiosity in the Muslim world about Western Europe. No one expended much energy wondering where these Franj had come from, or what their life was like back home, or what they believed. In the early 1300s, Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, a Jewish convert to Islam, wrote an epic Collection of All Histories, which included the history of China, India, the Turks, the Jews, the pre-Islamic Persians, Mohammed, the khalifas, and the Franj, but even at this late date, the part about the Franks was perfunctory and undocumented.7 In short, the Crusades brought
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