When news of the atrocities reached the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, it “brought tears to the eye and pained the heart.”17 Many in the caliph’s court cursed the world, and at least one blamed Islam’s Sunni-Shia sectarian divide for having weakened the unity of the umma to such an extent that the Franks (ifranj, as westerners were generically known to educated Muslims of this time) had been able to conquer their sacred lands.
