Download PDF | Jonathan Phillips - The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin-Yale University Press (2019).
519 Pages
Dramatis Personae and a Note on Names
Some of the names here are not easy for a western reader to distinguish. My main aim has been to promote clarity and so I have often adopted a name in simplified form or chosen to use a particularly distinctive part of it; similarly, if a nickname exists, I have sometimes selected it. Muslim names are properly a combination of a given name, a lineage, a parental honorific, an honorific or title, and an ascription (geographical or ethnic origin, profession or a distinctive attribute). Breaking down Saladin’s name is an interesting example of this:’ Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah al-Din Abu’l Muzaffar Yusuf ibn Ayyub al-Tikriti al-Kurdi.
Thus: the king who supports/aids (an honorific); righteousness of the faith (another honorific); father of the victorious (parental honorific); Joseph (given name, in Quranic form of a biblical name); son of Job (lineage, in Quranic form of a biblical name); of Tikrit (ascription of birthplace); the Kurd (ascription of ethnicity). Our familiar ‘Saladin’ is a Latin corruption of ‘Salah al-Din’, just as his brother, known to us as ‘Saphadin’, is a blur of ‘Sayf al-Din’, meaning ‘Sword of the Faith’.
I have also chosen to use the phrase ‘counter-crusade’. This can suggest an overly strict parity in the concepts of crusade and jihad. The definitions and discussions in the main text draw out important distinctions (as well as the similarities) between the two ideas. A more precise phrase in the context of Saladin’s labours would be ‘antiFrankish jihad’, although with the caveat above duly noted, the more readable ‘counter-crusade’ has been employed. As will also be apparent, Arabic diacritics are rarely used; with apologies to the purist, the issue of ease of reading overturned strict linguistic practice.
Preface
In the post-9/11 climate we are increasingly familiar with al-Qaeda and ISIS using the word ‘crusade’ as a powerful and inflammatory shorthand for Western aggression against the Islamic world. As this book shows, this is by no means a new practice. There has been increasing use of crusading imagery by the far right in North America and Europe and now also in connection with the regime of President Bolsonaro of Brazil. Within the broad historical legacy of relations between the people of the Near East and the West—one that in reality is far more complex than these binaries allow—the Sultan Saladin occupies a distinct position: a holy warrior dedicated to the recovery of Jerusalem for Islam, yet a figure to be respected in the West as well.
Because of his capture of Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin is a hero to the people of Sunni Islam. This is logical enough, but for him to have acquired an attractive profile in the West is much less understandable. As the man who took Christendom’s holiest city he was, initially at least, an object of virulent fear and hatred, an evil harbinger of the apocalypse. Based on his personal qualities of piety, mercy, generosity and justice, the startling transformation from antipathy to admiration began within a few years of the fall of Jerusalem and is a subject explored within this book. By the time of European settlement and the colonial era in North America, his image was set in generally positive terms; ideas and attitudes already formed within Europe had moved across the Atlantic. The crusading movement had largely declined by this point and the great Enlightenment thinker Voltaire was scathing in his assessment of it, regarding the crusades as a form of madness and the crusaders themselves as cruel and immoral. But his perception of Saladin, informed by the transformation noted above, meant that the sultan was ‘a good man, a hero and a philosopher’. French settlers in North America could access Voltaire’s writings easily enough, and in 1750 an English translation of his History of the Crusades appeared in the widely circulated Gentleman’s Magazine. A plethora of other references in both historical works and popular literature reinforced the sultan’s reputation in all sorts of contemporary literature.
For obvious reasons of geography and history, the relationship between America and the Near East has been different to that of Europe and the Near East, not least because the latter pair saw almost two centuries of direct engagement through the crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and the subsequent establishment of the crusader states. From the nineteenth century onwards, as the major European powers launched their imperialist ambitions in the Mediterranean, a nascent United States developed significant trading interests in the area, generating contact with Islam and the Near East that stretched across religion, warfare (the Barbary Wars being an early example), culture and co-existence. Within this spectrum, the history of the crusades and the memory of Saladin himself are part of the broader environment. They are, of course, inextricably linked.
The first direct connection between North America and the crusades is, it must be admitted, marginal. In 1278 the archbishop of Trondheim sought collection of church taxes from Greenland and the neighbouring islands in support of the crusades; payment for the holy war appeared in the form of walrus tusks and sealskins. By the eighteenth century, formal crusades (campaigns called by the pope against enemies of the Church with participants receiving spiritual rewards) had almost entirely disappeared. But over the centuries the idea had become deeply ingrained, and Christian societies anywhere could look to invoke the language and associations of zeal and positive purpose. The circumstances of the American War of Independence prompted William Bradford to write to James Madison on 1o July 1775 that ‘an enthusiasm almost equal to that which prevailed in Europe for the crusades’ had infused volunteers joining to fight the British. In other words, conflicts fought for what a protagonist saw as a right cause could wrap themselves in the aura of moral virtue, determination and idealism which formed one understanding of the medieval wars. So attractive was this broad notion that from the mid-eighteenth century, the word ‘crusade’ could be invoked in a purely metaphorical sense, as it is so frequently employed in the English language today. Thomas Jefferson provided an early example of this in 1786 when he called for ‘a crusade against ignorance, to establish and improve the law for educating the common people’.
It is also possible to catch sight of the sultan in the political and cultural discourse in North America, and it is intriguing to see by whom and in what circumstances he was invoked. In January 1764, Benjamin Franklin wrote a passionate condemnation of the massacre of a Native American group by a party of frontiersmen. Within his carefully constructed text he held out the example of Saladin as a man whose behaviour towards captured opponents was superior to that exhibited by the Christians whom Franklin so decried. Eighteenth-century Philadelphia is a very long way from Saladin’s struggle to recover Jerusalem from the crusaders, but in referencing him Franklin gives us a glimpse of the durability and the reach of the sultan’s reputation.
A romanticised view of Saladin and the crusades (and the medieval period in general) was given a huge boost in nineteenth-century America by the writings of Sir Walter Scott. His novels of the medieval age such as Ivanhoe (1819) and the crusade-focused The Talisman (1825) were enormously successful in America; think of the omnipresence of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and you have some sense of comparison. Rival editions of a new book would appear simultaneously and multiple reprints would follow. This was ‘an unprecedented demand for fiction’, and in 1872 a statue was erected in Central Park to mark the centenary of Scott’s birth. The chivalric world so brilliantly created by Scott, in which Saladin featured as a man of sophistication and integrity, certainly sunk deep into American culture. Mark Twain published his Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, an account of his journey to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land, in 1869. The author wrote of the crusaders as chivalric warriors of the days of old, and after visiting the Holy Sepulchre Twain drew parallels between medieval times and the more recent Crimean War (1853-6). He also visited the site of the sultan’s great victory in the Battle of Hattin. Yet, in spite of Twain's fierce hostility and disdain towards the Arabs and Turks, the ‘princely courtesy’ of the ‘peerless Saladin’ survived his scathing pen.
Alongside this, American use of ‘crusade’ as a metaphor for a struggle grew ever more familiar. The sense of virtue and right was brought to bear on such emotionally charged issues as slavery, alcohol and the Civil War. By the time of World War I, given the popularity of the word in Europe coupled with its familiarity in the US, it was no surprise to see ‘Pershing’s Crusaders’ as the headline for US troops joining the fray in Europe. The official government film poster shows Pershing and his men shadowed by a series of ghostly crusader knights. As a contemporary commentator noted, the troops were embarked upon ‘a just cause to rescue Europe from the brutality of German militarism’. Mural paintings in the Widener Library at Harvard University emphasised the same theme: Happy those who with a glowing faith In one embrace clasped death and victory. They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help The nations battling in a righteous cause.
After World War II, General Eisenhower drew upon the same imagery in the title of his memoirs: Crusade in Europe. The word ‘crusade’ had become part of the lexicon of conflict; Henry Kissinger warned against ‘ineffectual posturing or adventuristic crusades’ in discussions of Cold War diplomacy. In other areas of contemporary foreign policy the issue of the crusades was rather sharper. Kissinger’s multiple visits to Damascus in the early 1970s included listening to President Hafiz al-Asad commenting on a large painting of Saladin’s victory over the crusaders at the Battle of Hattin.
Saladin was also visible across widely divergent aspects of American cultural life. To give a couple of examples: From the late nineteenth century, immigrants from the declining Ottoman Empire started forming communities in the US, and they brought their memories of the sultan with them. Ameen Rihani was a young Lebanese author whose Book of Khalid is regarded as the first Arab-American novel, and, as we will see later, he looked to the medieval sultan as an inspirational figure. Around the same time, in 1886, the positive associations of Saladin’s reputation can be seen, for example, in the naming of the Grand Rapids branch of the charitable Masonic organisation, the Shriners, as the ‘Saladin Shriners’. Much more recently, in 2008, the Salah al-Din Temple was founded in Maryland, once more referencing his nobility of character as a guiding principle.
In broader popular culture, cinema brought Saladin to a far bigger audience. Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 epic, The Crusades, blended a post-World War I wish to avoid conflict with a strong dose of Sir Walter Scott and major cultural stereotyping of the people of the Near East. The portrayal of Saladin treads a curious line. It is initially negative, signalled by his wearing a helmet bearing devil’s horns, but he becomes the courteous and diplomatically polished figure of his usual reputation. Richard the Lionheart’s wife, Berengaria, was obviously enamoured of the exotic sultan (“They told me he had horns like the devil. I think he’s magnificent!’), and when she is wounded by an arrow Saladin rescues and heals her, and then releases her back to Richard. DeMille wrote that his aim was ‘to bring out Saracens that were not barbarians, but a highly cultivated people, and their great leader Saladin as perfect and gentle a knight as any in Christendom’.
In 1955 the book The Talisman was openly pressed into service to make the film King Richard and the Crusaders. Imbued with the generous imagination of the book, coupled with the glamour of the silver screen, here Saladin is an exotic figure drawn to Lady Edith, who hopes that love can cross the boundaries of religious war and that she can persuade the sultan of the virtues of Christianity. Saladin (played by Rex Harrison) is said to know the geography of a female like the palm of his hand, and so obvious is his allure to Edith that her Western admirer explodes in fury at ‘that silky son of Satan!’ The sultan is, inevitably, courteous enough to stand to one side and let his jealous rival escort Edith away. He is also, however, brave, wise and noble, characteristics that can survive the Orientalist caricature and keep his reputation bright.
While we frequently use the word ‘crusade’ in its secularised sense as a good cause, or else associate it with events from the distant medieval past, there is a manifest need to understand how its meaning has remained potent in the Near East and to be aware that in this context it is a much more loaded term. Woven in with this, Saladin has long held a prominent position in the Arab and Muslim worlds as the man who drew together the region and defeated Westerners. His status as an attractive character to emulate and to rally around adds considerable lustre to this.
The way in which he achieved these extraordinary feats lies at the heart of this book, but as we will see, he was far from perfect, attracting hostility from some contemporaries for his dynastic empire building and his periodic conflicts with other Sunnis. In the way that past heroes of a Western society can be attacked for what we now consider unattractive attitudes or political failings, some in the modern world can criticise Saladin—notably, the Shi'ites, because he ended their caliphate in Cairo 1171. This important point aside, for the Sunnis, Saladin stands as symbol of success, as a figure both aspirational and inspiring. His centuries-long status as a hero and the fact that he became so admired by his Western enemies, opponents across linguistic and cultural boundaries, also stand out. All these interlaced features run deep. He stands as a cultural ‘given’, not simply to be used by dictators and in situations of conflict, but to stand as a positive reference point in everyday life.
Introduction
Damascus 2009
Early morning, October 2009. I am strolling alongside the bustling, horn-honking traffic of downtown Damascus when a poster catches my eye. A bearded face looks out calmly from under a decorated conical helmet: Saladin. The text, in both Arabic and English, names a dance company and states a place and a time: the Damascus Opera House, a twelve-night run starting, by coincidence, the following evening. I carry on walking, moving into the quieter residential areas. A modern dance production about Saladin. I’m not convinced that’s quite my cup of tea. But the further I walk, the more the idea appeals. Look, I reason to myself, how often are you going to be in Damascus with this sort of event taking place? What’s to lose? It’s only one evening. I’m attending an academic conference and in the course of the day I find a friend and colleague intrepid enough to come along. We get tickets for the opening night.
It is dark by the mid-evening start time. There is an energising buzz as the audience funnels into the modern concrete Opera House; local television crews interview the director, and then men whom I take to be government ministers arrive too. Before the show begins there are speeches that include a couple of denunciations of Israel, greeted with warm approval from the audience. Then the dance commences, a vigorous, contemporary production with segments of film, blended with drama and singing. It depicts Saladin’s resolve to recover Jerusalem from western crusaders, who had captured it in 1099, and his uniting of the Arab people to take on the crusaders’ untrustworthy (and in one case, drunk) leaders. Next, a great whirling of swords and banners portrays the Battle of Hattin, Saladin’s historic victory over the Christian armies in July 1187, The magnanimous sultan regains Jerusalem for Islam and the Arab people and, at the moment of triumph, he spares its population from a massacre of the sort inflicted by the First Crusaders eighty-eight years earlier. The show ends with a celebratory dance, by which time the audience is enthusiastically cheering and clapping along as they enjoy their hero’s success."
It was a revelatory evening. I’m not sure it kindled a lifelong love of the genre, but it set me thinking about why the event had been staged, not least in the most prominent location in the city, the House of Asad Opera House. Today Saladin is familiar to all Damascenes through schoolbooks and television drama series. There is a fine equestrian statue of him outside the citadel, and his tomb complex lies adjacent to the city’s Great Mosque. Yet what this modern representation of the story seemed to demonstrate was that his relevance is not merely historical but urgently contemporary. The symbolism of Saladin’s achievement in recovering Jerusalem from an occupying army was manifest from the very start of the evening, and the show celebrated a well-known episode to reach a conclusion the government of the day aspires to.
Watching this musical set me off on a journey that led, ultimately, to this book. Even while it describes the life and deeds of a twelfthcentury warrior leader, a Kurdish outsider who came to rule Egypt, the wealthiest land in the Near East; who usurped the Syrian lands of his overlord; who managed to draw together a fragile coalition to defeat the crusader states and recover Jerusalem for the people of Islam — and then to resist the might of King Richard the Lionheart — this is a book that was inspired not by the past but by the present.
As I was to discover in the years following my visit to Damascus, Syria is far from the only place where the legacy of Saladin is alive and well. In fact, over the last few years the sultan has emerged in a number of wildly different guises — in both the Middle East and the West — almost all of them, glowingly positive. A couple of years after the Damascus dance production, the Baalbek Arts Festival in Lebanon hosted a musical called From the Days of Saladin. A local newspaper summarised: ‘In this portrayal of the conflict between West and East, the former stands opposed to justice, fairness, courage, wisdom and kindness. Saladin is, on the other hand, perfect.’? In Oslo, the House of Literature hosts the annual ‘Saladin Days’ event, a gathering inspired by the sultan’s merciful behaviour towards the defenders of Jerusalem and designed to promote religious tolerance.* More recently, in 2014, the Globe Theatre in London saw Holy Warriors: A Fantasia on the Third Crusade and the History of Violent Struggle in the Holy Lands by David Eldridge. An elegant and charismatic Saladin (played by Alexander Siddig) reached out across the centuries as a symbol of hope and compromise, denied by an inflexible Richard the Lionheart (John Hopkins): “What a tragedy it is for our people when you or | cannot imagine a different future even as we weigh the triumphs and failures of our times’, lamented the sultan.
Comfortably the most high-profile exposure for Saladin was in Ridley Scott’s movie Kingdom of Heaven (2005), an international blockbuster shown across the western world and presented to great acclaim in the Near East too. In the wake of 9/11, this was a determined effort to tone down the religious rhetoric in its depiction of the crusades and to massage them into a chivalric enterprise. Saladin was played with great poise by the Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, who described the sultan as a Muslim hero ‘who returned to Arabs and Muslims their pride and dignity, an example for our people, our leaders, our society’.® A few years later, Saladin became the subject of a multi-part animated cartoon series for Malaysian children, commissioned by the then prime minister himself, and later translated into English. Here Saladin was an exemplar for young people; as the advertising material stated: ‘Saladin: the ultimate hero — courageous in the face of danger, never willing to admit defeat and funny when he needs to be. In a world of danger, there’s only one man you'll want in your corner .
In fact, both in the Near East and the West, Saladin has been the subject of a number of television programmes. During the holy month of Ramadan families gather to watch serials. In 2001, rival productions in Syria and Egypt aired at this time, dramatising Saladin’s deeds. More straightforward documentaries were also produced in Syria and elsewhere in the Near East.” Most recently, Al Jazeera Egypt broadcast a major four-part series on the crusades. In the West, there have been Richard and Saladin: Holy Warriors (BBC, 2005), The Cross and the Crescent (History Channel, 2009) and The Crusades (BBC, 2011), as well as a BBC Radio profile of the sultan in a series on The Islamic Golden Age.
Saladin has provided material and inspiration for contemporary musicians too. Soon after President Obama won the US presidential election in 2008 he announced plans to visit the Middle East. The wave of admiration for the new American president prompted concerns in some quarters that this energetic leader might too easily be seen as the saviour for all Arab issues. Shaaban Abdel Rahim, a highly polemical rap artist, came out with a warning: Bush, may his years be ruined, has caused us losses for days and years And Obama, people are imagining him to be Saladin What will Obama do for the catastrophes of Bush and his father?*
Saladin is also the subject for nasheed, a form of instrument-free vocal music that is popular online in the Islamic world. Some songs have footage from Kingdom of Heaven to accompany their message: ‘O Salah al-deen, you are a hope we'll wait for forever.’®
In the second part of the book I will explore more fully what that cultural legacy means and where it has come from. But as we shall also see, it is in the political arena that Saladin appears most frequently. In 2011, when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was pushing for Palestinian membership of the United Nations, he was hailed on his arrival in Cairo with the words: “Welcome, Erdogan, Saladin’, and was described as ‘Erdogan, who angers Israel, will liberate Palestine like Saladin.”° Back home Erdogan developed the theme further. In 2015, along with Prime Minister Davutoglu, he opened a new airport in eastern Turkey named after Saladin. The opening ceremony was an opportunity to make some particular points: “We are naming this airport Selaheddine Ayyubi,’ he said, ‘to send a message of solidarity and brotherhood and to say that Jerusalem belongs to Kurds, Turks, Arabs and Muslims forever.”
Saladin was of Kurdish origin, and partly Erdogan’s speech was for domestic consumption, an attempt to win the support of Turkey’s Kurdish population for an upcoming election. In Irbil, meanwhile, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, there is the well-established Salahaddin University. In this region, an image of the sultan takes precedence on their coinage. Clearly it remains a source of immense pride to Kurds that he achieved what hitherto Turks and Arabs had been unable to do, namely, to defeat the crusaders. But a few express frustration. A Swedish-based exile from Syria said: ‘I feel proud about him, but I also get mad at him because he did nothing for Kurdistan or the Kurds.’ But in the twelfth century Saladin was not fighting on behalf of his own ethnic group, but in the name of Islam (and for the advantage of his own family, the Ayyubids). At the same time Saladin’s appeal ran across ethnic lines to include Turks and Arabs in his army and it continues to do so today.” The Free Syrian Army features the “Descendants of Saladin Brigade’, while ISIS frequently casts its conflict with the West as a struggle against ‘crusaders’.¥ In Egypt in March 2015, the Egyptian military cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood with an order that banned Saladin from school textbooks on the grounds that he could be used by extremists to incite violence.“ Saladin has taken a prominent role in school textbooks across the Near East and North Africa since the 1920s, with his moral and military success heavily contrasted with the imperialistic greed of the westerners. This ban was a stark, if backhanded, compliment to his ability to act as a powerful rallying call even in the context of a political-religious struggle within a Sunni Muslim country.
Cumulatively, across politics, theatre, music and television, Saladin today has a formidable profile. How has this happened? And despite the fact that the crusaders are viewed completely differently in the Near East and the West, it is notable that Saladin is largely conveyed in a positive light in both places. Why is this?® In the West runs a deep sense that the history of the crusades is something very distant and long gone. Paradoxically, however, the man who defeated the westerners to recover Jerusalem is, and has been for over 800 years now, a figure often hugely admired. The Royal Navy named a vessel HMS Saladin in the First World War, and between 1959 and 1994 the British Army had an armoured car named the Saladin — hardly signs of hostility to the sultan’s memory. The crusaders remain knights of old, the brave and impetuous King Richard clanks around in his heavy, uncomfortable chainmail, leading his troops into battle. Centuries of using crusading as a metaphor for a good cause have compounded this to blunt the edge of the sword and Saladin’s relatively benign persona massages this further into the distance. But this romanticised and chronologically remote view is the disjuncture, the point where the understanding of much of the West does not mesh with, for example, the ongoing struggle for a Palestinian state and control over Jerusalem. More broadly, in the eyes of the Muslim and Arab Near East, the crusaders were motivated by greed and/or religious fervour, invading and conquering their lands, killing their people. And the man who defeated them was Saladin.
Watching the dance musical in Damascus set me seeking the various ways in which Saladin’s image and achievements have been adopted and recast in the modern age, but it also prompted me to ask how he has come to have such a predominantly heroic character. As one reviewer of the 1963 Egyptian film El-Naser Salah al-Din wrote, the problem with the movie is that Saladin starts as a good man, becomes a great man and ends up as a legend; within such a framework there is little chance of character development. Yet as one explores Saladin’s life and career it is apparent that in reality, he was as capable of mistakes, of self-interest and cruelty as anyone else in such a position. Saladin has become a man famous for his faith, generosity, mercy and justice — personal qualities that drew people to him and did much to explain his success. To some of his contemporaries, though, he was a usurper and simply out to build a dynastic power base. And in attaining such heights, he was also, it must be said, the beneficiary of considerable good fortune.
What I hope to convey in the pages that follow is some sense of the man within these various images, whose story repeatedly takes us beyond the crude stereotypes of the “Clash of Civilisations’, of Christianity against Islam, even while its legacy returns us to it. As Saladin gathered an empire that stretched from North Africa through the Holy Land and Syria, and over to the River Tigris in modern Iraq, his life involved people from a bewildering variety of religious, ethnic and political backgrounds. His is a story rich with bloody conflict but not always across the neat divisions of faith which were only inconsistently observed at the time: we will see Christians fighting Christians and Muslims fighting Muslims. We have Christians and Muslims fighting different Christians and Muslims. They might well make a truce, switch sides, and carry on their conflict, or even exist together for a period. Then as now, the reality of the situation on the ground was always far more complicated than it appears from a distance, a cocktail of ethnic, political, economic and personal factors, not just religious beliefs.
The Near East in the twelfth century saw these various factors combined in a particularly unstable blend. Today, Saladin is often presented for political reasons as a man who united his peoples under a common cause, but the turbulent conditions of the time promoted only a limited sense of unity or shared purpose. Arguably Saladin’s most extraordinary achievement was to conjure up just such a coalition, to hold in check the bubbling range of interests and priorities of those whom he had gathered, and then to steer it to victory at Jerusalem in 1187. But in conquering a place of such unique religious significance to such a huge array of people, that variety of motives, not all of which were religious, easily slipped out of sight.
This book begins by tracing Saladin’s emergence into the rich religious and cultural environment of the Near East. It places his rise in the context of dynastic ambition, holy war and family politics, and describes how Saladin accomplished his great and defining victory at Jerusalem. It narrates his epic confrontation with the armies of Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade, but it also goes further. After his death it explains how he has come to be a figure of such renown and respect in the West and of such major significance in the Muslim Near East. We will trace his story through contemporary histories, poems and letters, and later through newspapers, plays, films and novels. Following their telling and retelling leads us down the centuries, back to the Damascus Opera House and beyond to the present day.
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