Saladin
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Barbarossa informing him of the calamity of Hattin but also relating to him
how contemptuous Saladin was of the Christian religion. In one story
Saladin, having captured the Holy Cross, flung it into an open fire, only for
it to emerge unscathed. In all these accounts the aim was to garner support
for another crusade. It was at this time that Henry II imposed the famous
Saladin tithe on his subjects as a means to raise money. One of the things
to be taxed was beer which, given the English fondness for the drink, must
have made Saladin even more unpopular.
Gradually, however, there began to emerge a different perception of
Saladin. This was largely due to the oral accounts of those returning home.
The dominating theme was Saladin's generous behaviour towards the
enemy. It was largely due to his generosity that Dante placed him, barely
one hundred years after his death, in the first Circle of Hell. In Boccaccio's
Deca-mcron, Saladin is obliged to borrow money from the Jew Melchisedech
because he has exhausted his treasury out of generosity. In another anec-
dote, Jean le Long recounts how the Lord of Anglure was freed by Saladin
in order to allow him to collect his ransom. When the lord however found
out that his French estate was too poor to pay the ransom, he returned to
Saladin with the intention of being his prisoner again. Saladin, moved by his
honour, set him free on the condition that he build a mosque when he
returned home. An apocryphal story? Almost certainly, but as late as 1927
a visitor to Buzancy would have come across a building, then used as a
school, known as 'le Mahomet'.''
Saladin's religion needed to be rationalised by Christian writers and,
within a century, stories began appearing hinting at Saladin's conversion to
Christianity. Some even attempted to draw his ancestry to European origins.
In one story, attributed to Jean Enikel who died in 1251, Saladin lay on his
death-bed unable to choose between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In the
Recits d'un Menestrel de Reims, written in 1260, Saladin, once again on his
death-bed, asks for a basin of water to be brought to him with which he
baptises himself® So enraptured were writers by the figure of Saladin that
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further embellishments were added which spoke of his fame as a lover rather
than a warrior. Thus we read that during the Second Crusade, Eleanor of
Aquitaine became smitten with Saladin and had to be sent home in disgrace
by her husband the Idng. This is of course nonsense: Eleanor was in the
Holy Lands when Saladin was ten years old and the story of the romance
relates an alleged affair that she had with Raymond of Antioch, which
caused a great scandal at the time.
Military prowess, it seems, was equally incumbent on a Christian parent-
age. Matthew Paris, in his Historm An^lorum, makes Saladin's mother
English, while another common theme was that he was dubbed a Christian
knight by Humphrey of Toron when the two men met in Alexandria. Other
stories change the name to Hugh of Tiberius, but the story of Saladin's
knighthood remained consistent up to the 1930s when, in his biography
of Saladin, Rosebault devoted the entire opening chapter to the knighting
incident, presenting it not as legend but as historical fact.® We even have
stories of Saladin travelling to the West. Curious about the Christian way of
life and accompanied by Hugh of Tiberius, Saladin finds himself in Paris,
where he enters into a single combat with a knight to save a damsel in dis-
tress. Later, in a tournament in Cambrai, he unhorses none other than
Richard in a joust. The queen of France naturally falls in love with him
and (once again) he is sent home in disgrace. In MMhilde by Sophie Cottin,
published in 1805, it is not Saladin but his brother with whom the epony-
mous heroine falls in love and whom he marries, though not without first
converting to Christianity. And so we reach the famous visit in 1898 of
Kaiser Wilhelm 11 to Saladin's tomb in Damascus. The little mausoleum,
half hidden in a small garden, and covered by a red-ribbed dome was in such
a neglected condition that the kaiser, moved by this sight, instructed that
it be restored at his own expense and that his monogram be placed on a
lamp hanging over the tomb. And it is perhaps in that moment, when the
successor of Frederick Barbarossa paid homage to his ancestor's nemesis,
that the separation between legend and the historical Saladin reached its
widest point. However at this point an astute reader may ask an awlcward
question: why, if Saladin was such a great hero, was his tomb in such a
dilapidated state?
The state of the tomb reflected a deeper truth; the fact was, for the
Muslims, Saladin was neglected for many centuries. Hillenbrand writes of
the 'ironically roundabout route for Muslims to take in search of their own
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past'/ and she chooses her words carefully. The Saladin whom the Muslims
would raise to an almost messianic status in the twentieth century bore a far
closer resemblance to nineteenth-century European popular imagination
than to any historical character, and this was largely a reflection of the
obsession which the West had with the Crusades; one of the few subjects,
as Tyerman points out, that is the obvious exception to the rule that history
is written by the victors.^ This obsession with the Crusades was largely not
shared by the Muslims, for example the Arabic term al-Hurub al-Salibiyya
(the war of the crosses) was not used until the middle of the nineteenth
centuiy and was largely borrowed from Europe. Gradually, however, in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the idea of parallels between European
policies past and present 'crystallised in the Muslim consciousness'' and
as the stories of his glowing reputation percolated into the Middle East,
Saladin's fame grew greater among the Arabs. And so in this way, within
two months of the kaiser's visit, the famous Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi
responded with an ode eulogising Saladin's achievements.
It is certainly not a coincidence that the 'reintroduction' of Saladin to
the Arab world was accompanied by European intervention in the region,
which reopened psychological wounds that had been left dormant for many
centuries. Akbar Ahmad puts his finger on this when he comments that the
memory of the Crusades lingers in the Middle East and colours perceptions
of Europe,^" and Hillenbrand goes fiirther in pointing out that the Crusades
are seen through an anti-imperialist prism and the Islamic response in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries is viewed as the blueprint for modern Arab
and Islamic struggles for independence.^^ And so the Saladin legend grew
and endures powerfully to this day. But what this legend actually says is less
clear. Is it a truly potent messianic banner, acting as a balm and a ray of hope
for the disillusioned and disfranchised in the Muslim world, or is it a hollow
clarion call, an excuse for inaction reducing the individual, in the words of
Edward Said, 'to an idle spectator waiting for another Saladin or for orders
to come down from above?'^^ In his 1997 book on Paldstan, Akbar Ahmad
could use the title Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity - The Search for
Saladin, and assume that his readers would automatically understand what
the title implied. The assumption is a simple one, but the reality is more
diverse and complex. Like the Godot character in Beckett's play, Saladin has
come to represent in the Muslim consciousness a sort of political messiah, a
longed-for liberator.
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The scars run deep. Muslims will not forget the Crusades as long as their
lands are subject to Western intervention and as long as Palestinians aix
obliged to react to the state of Israel. Wliether Israel is the Latin Kingdom
and the US intervention in the region a new crusade is of litde relevance
for the purpose of this book, and no amount of emotive rhetoric will make
it so. The reflisal to draw any comparisons does not in any way diminish
the present-day struggle; however, it remains a historian's duty to insist that
Saladin was a man of his age and was influenced by, and to an extent was
influencing, events of his age. The Crusades were a particular phenomenon
at a particular time in history which required a particular response from the
Muslims. However, the raw emotions felt at the presence of Israel fan the
flame of the Saladin legend and it is not a coincidence that the centuries
when Jerusalem was in Muslim hands was the period when Saladin was most
neglected. In the Middle East the events of the distant past have a sharp
contemporary relevance.
So where does this leave the historian attempting to set aside the legend
and to write about the historical character!' The main challenge as far as
Saladin is concerned is that he became a legend during his lifetime. His
capture of Jerusalem and its restoration into the Islamic fold 88 years after
its capture by the crusaders transformed him into the most famous and
powerful figure in the Muslim world and a symbol for the aspirations and
hopes of the Muslims who, with increasing fervour, sought the restoration
of the third holiest city in Islam. At the same time his acts of chivalry became
magnified and retold by Europeans returning home, so adding to the
legend, and all this during his lifetime. And as the stories multiplied, the
historical Saladin drifted fiirther and further into the shadows. For the his-
torian one solution, and the one adopted in this book, in trying to draw
Saladin from the shadows is to ignore the obvious. If Jerusalem and its
capture gave birth to the legend then, it can be argued, by putting
Jerusalem aside we can catch a glimpse of the real Saladin. Ehrenkreutz in
his biography of Saladin hints at this when he asks the question of how
history would have viewed Saladin had he died in 1185, two years before his
capture of Jerusalem. ^^ It is an intelligent question, but the conclusion that
Ehrenkreutz draws is wrong. He argues that Saladin would have been no
more than an unknown warlord. Ehrenkreutz confiises fame with achieve-
ment, and this book argues that in fact Saladin's greatest achievement took
place before 1185, when he was still 'obscure', and that all that followed -
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Jerusalem, Richard, Acre, the Third Crusade - was built on this achieve-
ment. It was Saladin's restoration of Sunni Islam into Fatimid Shiite Egypt
that proved to be his greatest legacy, but to understand why this was of such
fundamental importance we need to move away from the personality of
Saladin and focus on the age in which he lived.
This book starts in Baghdad and with the disintegration of the Abbasid
caliphate. Although at first sight this may appear to have litde relevance in
a biography of Saladin, a close reading of the first couple of chapters reveals
the relevance. For it was in Baghdad, a century before Saladin's birth, that
the spirit of the Sunni Revival was born and it was the ideals inherent in this
revival, more than anything, that influenced and affected Saladin's beliefs
and actions. Saladin was a child of the Sunni Revival and he was a loyal and
obedient child. His subsequent fame, coupled with the West's obsession
with the Crusades, has tended to obscure the fundamental point that for
Saladin the restoration of Sunni orthodoxy within the Islamic fold was as
important - indeed more important - than the restoration of Jerusalem. It
is easy to make the i assumption that having captured Jerusalem he had
achieved his goal, but, as Gibb has pointed out, this goal was reached pre-
cisely because Saladin's eyes were fixed on the horizon and on a different
goal.^® The aim of this book is to discover what this goal was.
A secondary aim of this book is to throw some light on the characters
who surrounded Saladin. One of the most remarkable aspects when writing
about Saladin is to discover how his fame has tended to cast the achieve-
ments of all those around him into the shadows. Saladin did not capture
Jerusalem single-handedly and yet I was constantly struck when writing this
book by how most people struggle to name even one of Saladin's advisers
or generals, even though they were instrumental in his success. And yet
Saladin was surrounded by giants whose personalities and abilities certainly
matched his: the great Nur al-Din who was Saladin's 'spiritual father'; his
memorable uncle Shirkuh, who paved his way to success; his wise brother
al-Adil, and his courageous and headstrong nephew Taqi ul-Din. Other
more minor characters are scattered throughout the book and each one
helps throw a different light on Saladin: the enigmatic but profound
al-Haldcari; Qaraqush, the 'Turk who knows nothing about books'; the
wistflil Fatimid caliph al-Adid; and the brave and dashing Keukburi, the
'blue w o l f . And then there are of course the three men without him Saladin
would not have been Saladin. They were the jealous guardians of his legacy
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and were - apart from his close family - the nearest and dearest to him. They
were his historians, propagandists and spin doctors and they were not mere
scribes or witnesses to history but rather participants and contributors to it.
The three were different from each other but their differences were tran-
scended by the shared value and ideology which permeated the age in which
they lived. And Saladin owed al-Qadi al-Fadil, Imad al-Din al-Isfahani and
Baha ul-Din Ibn Shaddad a great debt.
Chapter 1
The Weakening of the Abbasid
Caliph and the Sunni Revival
All you can cluim from me is the na-me which is uttered from your pulpits
as a, means of pacifying your subjects; and if you want me to renounce that
privile£ie too, I am prepared to do so and leave everything! to you.
The Abbasid caliph al-Muti to the Buyid amir
By the mid-tenth century it had become clear that the Abbasid caliphate
as a political institution had failed. The second of the two great Sunni
dynasties, the Abbasids, had overthrown the Umayyad caliphate in 750 and
moved the seat of power from Damascus to Baghdad, which was established
as the new capital city on the west side of the Tigris river and which, until
its destruction by the Mongols in 1258, would remain the most important
and vibrant city in the Muslim world. Claiming descent from the Prophet
Muhammad's uncle Abbas Ibn Abd al-Muttalib, the Abbasid's close Idnship
to the Prophet had undeniably helped them gain popular support, as did
their claim of reasserting the orthodox rule of Islam as opposed to what they
claimed had been the Umayyad Arab secular and ethnocentric ways. For
two centuries the Abbasid empire flourished, reaching a peak under the
caliphate of Harun al-Rashid, but gradually the decline set in and the caliph
became unable to exercise religious or political authority. By the middle of
the tenth century, power was assumed by provincial governors, who rapidly
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founded hereditary dynasties,^ reducing the caliph to a mere pawn in an
empire of usurpers. Loss of revenue from the provinces meant loss of
militaiy authority that was needed to bring recalcitrant governors back into
line, for this was an age of private armies and mercenaries where loyalty was
a commodity which bowed to the highest bidder.^ Now a lion in winter, the
Abbasid caliph barely controlled the streets of his imperial city. In 945
his political authority effectively came to an end when the Buyids, a Shiite
'clan of freebooters'® who emerged from the province of Dailam, seized
Baghdad. Allotting the Sunni caliph a humiliating pension, they reduced
him to a figurehead with little authority outside his household, and placed
their names on the coins and in the Friday prayer.
Disputes between Sunnis and Shiites
There were many disputes between the Sunnis and the Shiites, but ultimately
there was only one, and that revolved around the nature of the caliphate.
Central to the Shiite tenet was the belief that following the Prophet's death
the only rightful heads of the Islamic community, the imams, were Ali (the
Prophet's son-in-law), his sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn, and the descendants