Holy Warriors

by Jonathan Phillips

  Alongside these geopolitical events there is a recognition that the rise of capitalism and science have helped to propel the West forward at a considerably faster rate than the Muslim world. Colonialism, imperialism, economics, and technology have all been of immense significance in relations between Islam and the West, and in the cases of trade, capitalism, and the media, western values continue to flow into the Islamic world. Within this complex mesh the idea of crusading emerges as a factor of some note, although in no way the dominant one. More importantly, the crusade–jihad prism should not distort a situation whereby the majority of the Islamic world has been at peace with the West. Koranic verses attest to this desire, for example: “And if they incline to peace, do thou incline to it; and put thy trust in God.” (Koran 8:61). Since the terror attacks of 9/11, representations of bellicose western crusaders have once more been propelled toward center stage. It is, therefore, interesting to offer a few broad brushstrokes to trace the history of the crusades in the Muslim world and to follow Saladin’s reincarnation as an Islamic role model.

  For many centuries the Ottoman Empire stood as the major power in the Islamic world; jihad imagery was prominent in the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the Ottomans assumed the role of ghazis as they extended the lands of Islam. Victory over the Mamluks in 1517 brought the caliphate—the spiritual head of Islam—under their control, a point emphasized when the sultan ordered relics of the Prophet to be transported to Istanbul where some remain in the Topkapi Museum. The Ottoman Empire was not, however, a strictly Islamic state and it operated on a combination of secular laws for government and finance and sharia law in other matters. Jihads continued to be proclaimed but their targets were usually the heterodox Safavids of Iran and Iraq, rather than the Christian powers. Suleyman the Magnificent’s wars against the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century had more of an imperial rather than a religious edge and there was a decline in the ghazi ethic.87

  Examples of jihad against western powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are comparatively rare. From around 1800 onward there was an intensification of European intervention and involvement in North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and India. The Egyptians briefly regarded Napoleon’s invasion of 1798 as a crusade but the French soon made plain their secular, imperialist agenda and managed to convince the locals of their good intentions toward Islam. Bonaparte’s proclamation (translated into Arabic when originally published) also delighted in his victory over the Knights Hospitaller on Malta: “I honour . . . God, his Prophet and the Koran. . . . Is it not we who destroyed the pope, the Christian enemy of the Muslims? It was this army who destroyed the Chevaliers of Malta, the ancient enemies of your faith.”88

  There was no Arabic word for “crusades” until the mid-nineteenth century; in the medieval period the western invasions were simply referred to as “The Wars of the Franks,” or as jihads by contemporaries—reasonable enough analogues in the circumstances. In the course of the nineteenth century, perhaps in response to the westerners’ self-perception as crusaders, some Muslims began to call for a holy war, the Algerians fighting the French and the Indians against the British being but two examples.89

  In the eastern Mediterranean, however, another approach began to emerge, prompted by the Ottoman Empire’s efforts to survive and encouraged by the expansionist agenda of Germany. In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II courted the Muslim world with his visit to Jerusalem and Damascus (a trip organized by Thomas Cook’s travel company, an arrangement that earned him the nickname “Cook’s Crusader”). Dressed in a white uniform with his helmet surmounted by a golden imperial eagle and riding a splendid black stallion, Wilhelm processed into Jerusalem on October 29 through a specially made gap in the city walls. Frederick II of Germany, almost seven centuries earlier, had been the previous Christian monarch to enter the city, a connection Wilhelm deliberately emphasized; indeed his presence in the holy city was announced from the pulpits of Berlin and became the subject of many publications, including illustrated books and children’s stories.90 In November the kaiser reached Damascus where he visited Saladin’s tomb and laid a wreath with the message “from one great emperor to another;” clearly Wilhelm saw no irony in the fact that he had recently portrayed himself as a crusader. He also paid for the construction of a grotesque marble shrine next to the medieval wooden coffin; surprisingly, perhaps, the former remains in situ, an incongruous reminder of western imperialism in the burial chamber of one of Islam’s greatest heroes. Until this visit Saladin had been a figure of limited interest to the people of the Muslim Near East and it was the deeds of Baibars that continued to attract far greater attention; in fact, in Cairo in the 1830s no fewer than thirty street performers earned a living reciting a verse account of the Mamluk sultan’s life. It is ironic that the kaiser, presumably indoctrinated by Saladin’s prominent place in western art and literature—and we know that he had read or heard works by Walter Scott as a child—appeared as familiar with the sultan as his hosts, and that it was a western monarch who brought the medieval hero back to prominence and reminded the rulers of the Middle East of his great achievements.91

  While acknowledging the importance of this external stimulus in a revival of the memory of the crusades, especially in the elite levels of Muslim society, the enduring position of the crusades through popular culture should not be underestimated. The genre of the epic narrative has been largely ignored in any analysis of this subject, in part because the language used in them was far less polished than the fine literary texts produced in courts, and also by reason of the immense difficulties in finding definitive texts.92 Coupled with this, as one writer notes, these epics “tread gingerly along the shoreline of historical fact.” This distortion of the historical record can be shown by Saladin’s alleged recovery of Baghdad from the Mongols, or Baibars’ relief of Damascus from the Franks, neither of which ever happened. Yet public storytelling was, certainly down to the later twentieth century, an extremely important aspect of Middle Eastern culture, and western visitors to Aleppo in the 1790s and Cairo in the 1830s provide significant evidence of this. As noted, the Sirat al-Zahir Baibars was very popular, as was the Sirat Bani Hilal and the Sirat Antar. Yet these texts are surely worth consideration as long-term transmitters of opinion, prejudices, and preoccupations, rather than descriptions of actual events. While the crusaders do not take a dominant role in these stories, they are presented as a menace to the Muslims. They are huge, clean-shaven men, who carry broad-headed lances and whose archers never miss, led by an unnamed but wicked and guileful man. Such tales helped provide a seedbed of memory that political and religious leaders could tap into whether they were Islamists or Arab nationalists. In conjunction with this, as Muslim empires began to decline during the nineteenth century, the concept of looking to the past to learn lessons for the present also emerged.93 Through this variety of channels, therefore, the history of the crusading age began to appeal to a variety of religious and political movements across the Muslim community.

  Bolstered by German support, Abdulhamid II chose to enter World War I against Britain, France, and Russia. Over previous decades the sultan had developed the concept of pan-Islamism, a response to his declining power as Ottoman sultan and a sincere reflection of his conception of his religious responsibilities as leader of the umma. He issued a call for Muslims across the world to defend Islam from western Christian powers (whom he often termed crusaders) and to rally around their spiritual leader.94 On November 11, 1914, he issued a fatwa to all Muslims, including those who lived outside Ottoman lands, which proclaimed a jihad against these enemies of Islam. This call was the ultimate expression of Ottoman pan-Islamic aspirations and the document’s impact was enhanced by translation into Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkic. The fatwa stated that it was “incumbent on all Muslims in all parts of the world, be they old or young, on foot or mounted, to hasten to take part in the jihad.” It enjoined a responsibility on Muslims in lands ruled by Britain, France, Russia, and their allies to
resist their overlords, all of whom were trying “to extinguish and annihilate the exalted light of Islam.” It argued that it was a terrible sin to fight against Germany and Austria (the allies of the Supreme Islamic Government).95 Although no large-scale uprising took place, a substantial new corpus of jihad literature began to emerge and one strand of the Muslim community’s challenge to the West was formed.

  While religion provided a cornerstone for confrontation with the West, for several decades during the twentieth century Arab nationalism emerged center stage. This was a credo concerned to promote a shared cultural and ethnic identity across Arab lands in the Levant (principally Egypt, Syria, and Palestine), as opposed to the broader Muslim consciousness; groups such as the Ottoman Turks, for example, would not have fallen into this category. The concept did not exclude Islam—far from it, the leadership were Muslims and could wage jihad—but it was defined as an Arab community and as a people, rather than by faith alone.

  An early instance of the fusion of nationalism with both jihad rhetoric and the memory of Saladin took place in Damascus between the end of Ottoman control in 1918 and the start of the French protectorate in July 1920. In the interim, Syria was ruled by an Arab government under Emir (later King) Faisal. As a part of their Independence Day celebrations the authorities looked to gather support through cultural events and they encouraged theater productions; unsurprisingly, perhaps, the victories of Saladin over the kingdom of Jerusalem proved a popular reminder of nationalist virtues.96 As the French threatened to impose their military authority Faisal directly invoked crusading imagery when he claimed that the pope wanted the conquest to succeed, and he called upon his people to anticipate death in a jihad.97 In the event the French army did prevail, a victory that prompted General Henri Gouraud’s triumphant comment on entering Damascus: “Behold, Saladin, we have returned,” a statement that only acted to confirm the belief that a new crusade was underway. The contrast with Allenby’s attempts to stage a diplomatically sensitive takeover of Jerusalem just three years earlier is striking.

  Several other Arab nationalists chose to identify themselves with Saladin and their reasons for doing so illuminate fascinating parallels—and contrasts—between their own agendas and the life of the medieval hero. The individual who drew the closest ties between his own career and that of Saladin was Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt between 1954 and 1970, and a man whose vision of pan-Arabism embraced modernization and technology, while simultaneously making links with Egypt’s history. His decision to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956 pitted Egypt against Israel, France, and Britain, and was, in his terms, a blow for Arab standing against western colonial powers and their Zionist allies. While his troops were soon driven away from the strategically vital waterway, by the following year international pressure (including support from the United States) brought a United Nations force into play and triggered a terminal decline of British and French influence in the region. In 1958, Nasser built upon this advance to become the head of the United Arab Republic, a confederation of Syria and Egypt—the same lands that Saladin himself had ruled. His speeches made frequent references to his illustrious predecessor and in February 1958 he planned a formal visit to the sultan’s tomb in Damascus.98

  Around the same time, Nasser emphasized that the Arab nation had always striven for unity; intriguingly, he extended his sense of an eastern Mediterranean community to include its indigenous Christian population (presumably the Copts, a significant minority of the Egyptian population, were at the forefront of his thoughts). He drew an explicit connection to the age of the crusades when he stated that “the whole region was united for reasons of mutual security to face an imperialism coming from Europe and bearing the cross in order to disguise its ambitions behind the facade of Christianity. The meaning of unity was never clearer than when the Christianity of the Arab Orient joined the ranks of Islam to battle the crusaders until victory.”99 A year later, in speeches at Katana in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt, he reiterated the importance of a strong Syria and the need for Egypt and Syria to work together: “the Syrian army, when it was united with the Egyptian, was able to liberate the Arab nation from the crusaders’ occupation and colonization. . . . Today our forces are united to protect the Arab fatherland. We shall not be impeded by the conspiracies of imperialist lackeys or agents.” Nasser also emphasized the Arab victory over the Mongols at Ayn Jalut (1260) as another momentous episode in history, although his claim that “the united armies pursued the retreating Tartar forces across the Euphrates until they liberated Iraq” stretched the truth somewhat.100

  Another theme that he developed was the historical roots of Arab nationalism. For him these lay back in the medieval period when “the Arab armies achieved their victory only when they felt that their unity brought them strength and that Arab nationalism was their shield of protection.”101 In strict terms this point was highly anachronistic because most commentators believe Arab nationalism came into being in the early twentieth century—on the other hand, it is undeniable that the basic parallels were there for Nasser to exploit. The president also fixed upon particularly favorable historical precedents. He argued that the western crusaders had used the cross as a slogan for imperialism, and in a speech of August 1959 he dwelt in some detail on the capture of Louis IX in 1250, a previous occasion when the French had been crushed.102 On May 7, 1960, Nasser led celebrations to mark the 710th anniversary of the defeat of Saint Louis at the Battle of Mansourah in 1250 and unveiled a new painting of Turanshah’s victory. Nasser saw this as an “epoch-making” event that showed “nothing can stand in the way of a unified Arab nation.” Louis’s humiliation represented a triumph for Arab nationalism and the president made reference to the crucial arrival of Turanshah’s troops from Syria, because during the Suez Crisis western forces (including, he claimed, French descendants of the crusaders) had again been turned back when Syria and Egypt acted together.103

  Nasser also spoke of the Third Crusade of 1189–92: “Fanatic crusaders attacked us in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Arab Muslims and Christians fought side by side to defend their Motherland against this aggressive, foreign domination. They all rose as one man, unity being the only means of safety, liberty and the expulsion of the aggressors. Saladin was able to take Richard . . . as prisoner of war and was able to defeat his forces.”104 Once again this last point is pure fabrication, but the reason for this manipulation was to compare it to the Egyptian victory in the Suez Crisis: “We had the honour of beating Britain and France together [at Suez] after we had beaten each of them before separately.”105 To hammer home the connections between the medieval and modern periods Nasser pointedly crushed the sentiments of Allenby’s celebrated, if fictional, phrase of 1917. He boasted that the westerners “had never forgotten their defeat [by Saladin]” and wanted revenge in another “fanatical, imperialist crusade.” Nasser then “quoted” the general: “when he entered Jerusalem during World War I he [Allenby] said: ‘Today, we end the fight of the Crusaders who were defeated 700 years ago.’” The president’s use of this statement shows exactly why Allenby tried so hard to disavow this phrase—and it demonstrates just how unsuccessful he had been in doing so.106

  Closely in tune with the president’s aspirations was an epic product of the Egyptian film industry, Youssef Chahine’s Saladin (1963).107 The narrative follows the crusaders’ murder of innocent Muslim pilgrims, through to the Battle of Hattin, the fall of Jerusalem, and the Third Crusade. As a product of its times it takes certain liberties with strict historical accuracy; it also offered a manifesto for pan-Arabism; for example, early on in the film Saladin says: “my dream is to see an Arab nation united under one flag.”108 The Arabs only fought the Christians because the latter had attacked them; Saladin asked: “Since when do aggressors impose conditions on the legitimate owners? You started this war; if you want peace truly, leave my country.” A crusader responded by asking if this was a declaration of war, to which the emir replied: “I hate war. Islam and Christ
ianity condemn bloodshed. Yet we shall fight if necessary to save our land.” By the end of the film there was a clear message: Saladin and his trustworthy allies presided over a cosmopolitan and humane society; they were worthy guardians of Jerusalem and would freely welcome outsiders to visit. Saladin explained: “Christianity is respected here; you know that. Jerusalem belongs to the Arabs. Stop this bloodshed. That would satisfy God and Christ.”109 The film closed with a wholly imagined scene in which Richard and Saladin hold a nighttime pageant with the former invited into Jerusalem (even though in reality he never entered the holy city). As snow falls, a choir sings “Come All Ye Faithful,” interspersed with a muezzin’s call: peace reigns supreme. What takes only a limited role in the film, interestingly, is religion. As we saw earlier, there was a strong spiritual dimension to Saladin’s jihad against the Christians, but for Chahine and pan-Arabism in the early 1960s this was of secondary importance behind the issue of Arab identity. Nonetheless, the history of the crusading age and the importance of Saladin, Egypt, and Syria in resisting the westerners was now clearly established in the public consciousness.

  Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat, forged close links with the West, particularly with the United States. Ultimately, this was to cost him his life, but in 1977 when he became the first Muslim leader to address the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), he too invoked the legacy of Saladin. Presumably based on the sultan’s decision to release Christian prisoners after the capture of Jerusalem, Sadat suggested a positive approach: “Instead of awakening the hatreds of the crusades, we should revive the spirit of . . . Saladin, the spirit of tolerance and respect for rights.”110