This project's aim was to provide the bibliographical and methodological bases for a KAKENHI grant application for a project into how medieval Muslims wrote about the Crusades and non-Muslims in the period 1097-1291, something that builds on my many preliminary investigations published over the last ten years. This is extremely important because the period of the Crusades still provides a main basis for contemporary Muslim perceptions of and interactions with the ‘West’ and ‘Westerners’ (including Japan and the Japanese); thus, this project would help further cross-cultural understandings between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds today. Its main objectives were: 1) to build up a definitive bibliography of the relevant primary source material for the KAKENHI project via research into the manuscript holdings of libraries around the world; and 2) to develop the methodology to be used in that project and the related academic events (workshop, conference papers, etc.), through discussions with leading experts in the field.

In order to produce a full bibliography for the project, I went to the UK and examined Arabic manuscript catalogues from libraries around the world in order to locate material that has not been published or utilized thus far; this will be added to my own already extensive knowledge of the published primary source material, developed ever since my MA studies fifteen years ago. The creation of the definitive primary source bibliography for the planned project will form the basis for my research over the next decade.