Salahuddin, known to Christendom as the great and chivalrous Saladin, was born to an influential Kurdish family in northern Iraq in 1138. His father, Najmuddin Ayyub, was governor of Baalbek at the time, and his uncle, Asaduddin Shirkoh, served as a general in the Syrian army. Salahuddin was still a child when his father sent him to Damascus, where he read theology, and learned the arts of warfare. He gained military experience under his uncle’s command in campaigns against the “Frankish” (European crusaders’) ruling houses in several towns in Syria and Palestine.

He rose to eminence during Shirkoh’s campaigns to Egypt that Nuruddin, the sultan of Damascus, had commissioned. These campaigns were intended to thwart the designs of the covetous Frankish king of Jerusalem upon that land. Strangely enough, as Shirkoh’s forces approached Cairo on January 2, 1169, the Frankish army, which had been besieging the city, retreated. Sixteen days later, Salahuddin ambushed and killed the chief Fatimid vizier, Shawar, whereupon Shirkoh entered the city and assumed the office of vizier. He died unexpectedly two months later (March 23, 1169), and Salahuddin at the age of 30 succeeded him as the vizier and virtual ruler of Egypt. Officially, however, he ruled as an agent of Sultan Nuruddin, who in turn professed allegiance to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad.

Nuruddin wanted Salahuddin to terminate the Shia Fatimid caliphate in Egypt forthwith. Knowing that the young caliph (Al Adid) was not only powerless but terminally ill, he withheld action until the latter’s death on September 12, 1171. He then instructed the imams to bless the Abbasid caliph, instead of the Fatimid, in their Friday sermons. The Fatimid caliphate thus came to an end without bloodshed.

Even though his relationship with Nuruddin had become tense as a result of his “insubordination” in the matter of the Fatimid caliphate, Salahuddin did not proclaim himself the sultan of Egypt until after Nuruddin’s death on March 25, 1174. Nor, until then, did he move out of Egypt to subdue smaller Muslim principalities. He went some distance in the Maghreb (along the North African coast), and to the east to conquer Yemen.

Nuruddin’s heir, Ismail al-Malik, in Damascus was a mere boy controlled by a bunch of eunuchs in the palace. Salahuddin was well received when he entered the city and became the sultan of Damascus. Popular approval might have been taken as sufficient evidence of his legitimacy, but he chose to firm it up further by marrying Nuruddin’s widow. Within a few years he brought nearly all of Syria and parts of northern Iraq under his dominion, partly by skillful diplomacy and, when necessary, by swift and resolute use of force.

Salahuddin engaged the crusader in numerous battles most of which he won. He lost the Battle of Montgisard (November 25, 1177) in which he had to face the combined forces of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, Raynald of Chattilon, and the Knights Templars. Two years later he attacked the crusaders again and defeated them at Jacob’s Ford. But they continued to provoke him.

Raynald harassed Muslim trading caravans and pilgrims. Worse still, he threatened to invade Makkah and Madina. He looted a caravan of Muslim pilgrims in 1184. On July 4, 1187, Salahuddin met and annihilated the forces of Guy of Lusignan, king-consort of Jerusalem, Raymond III of Tripoli, and Raynald in the Battle of Hattin (near Tiberias in northern Palestine). Raynald was captured and executed; Guy, too, was taken, but his life was spared. This was a terrible defeat from which the crusaders never recovered. Most of the towns under their rule (Acre, Toron, Beruit, Sidon, Nazareth, Nabulus, Caesaria, Jaffa, and Ascalon) fell to Saladin within the next three months.

When the crusaders first conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they slaughtered every Muslim and Jewish man, woman, and child in sight. By contrast Salauddin, upon taking the city on October 2, 1187, announced a general amnesty, ordered his soldiers not to hurt or harass any resident, assured those who wanted to leave safe passage and time to pack their belongings and take along with them all that they or their mules could carry.

The fall of Jerusalem to Salahuddin, and the crusaders’ successive defeats, shocked religious and political circles in Europe and prompted a third crusade in 1190 under the joint leadership of Richard I (the “Lionheart”), of England, and the kings of France and Austria. The Austrian king died on the way, and the French king went back home after a short stay in Palestine, leaving it to Richard to deal with Salahuddin. They met at the battle of Arsuf (September 17, 1191), which Richard won but not decisively. On his way to Jerusalem in June 1192, he became too sick and tired to continue, and made peace with Salahuddin (Treaty of Ramla), providing that Jerusalem would remain under Muslim control, but that it would be open to Christian pilgrims to visit freely. Soon thereafter, Richard left Palestine.

It is said that Richard was greatly impressed by Salahuddin’s generosity of spirit. Once when he was sick with fever, Salahuddin offered to send his personal physician to examine and treat him. On another occasion, Richard lost his horse, and Salahuddin sent him two of his own. When, on his way to Jerusalem, his men were without fresh water and extremely thirsty, Richard appealed to Salahuddin for supplies of fruit and water, which the latter sent.

Sir Walter Scott’s work, “Talisman,” depicts Salahuddin in Richard’s tent in the garb of a physician. So do legend and fable. Actually the two men had never met. Richard wanted a “summit” meeting, and sent a delegation of his knights to propose one, but Salahuddin declined. He asked the knights to tell Richard that they would meet only if and when one of them appeared before the other as a captive.

In terms of personal qualifications, Salahuddin is said to have been rather short, light brown of skin, slight of build, slim and frail, with piercing brown eyes and a pointed black beard. Beyond physical appearance, he was gentle, kind, merciful, and generous; tolerant and forgiving, courteous but firm; hardheaded, prudent, patient and persevering; courageous and chivalrous; competent planner and strategist.

He was a keeper of his covenants, and straightforward in that he said what he meant and meant what he said. He was pious and, according in some vesions, he may have damaged his health by excessive fasting. He was strictly honest; huge amounts of public revenues remained at his disposal but he took none of them. He gave away to the poor and the needy much of any salary that he may have drawn. His family and friends found upon his death that his “treasury” (more like a small cash box) contained no more than one gold piece, which would not be enough to meet his funeral expenses.

It appears that he did not care much for hierarchical distinctions. His subjects were free to sue him. He would not tolerate cruelty on the part of his functionaries, and forbade beating of servants. He banned exclusive enclaves or mansions for the wealthy in Cairo. He made it a thriving city in which commerce and cultural freedom flourished. He tended to treat his subordinates with respect and as near equals.

It has been reported that his secretary was once riding alongside him, and as they came to a muddy patch, his mule splashed mud on Salahuddin’s garment. He pulled back to ride behind the Sultan to avoid his mule’s mud-slinging. The Sultan is said to have laughed and told his secretary to ride alongside, not behind, him, for a bit of mud would not hurt him any.

One afternoon Salahuddin was resting in the opening of his tent when a servant brought him a document to sign. He told the servant to bring it back later because he was extremely tired at that time. The servant said the matter would brook no delay, and that he must sign the paper right away. Salahuddin then pleaded that he did not have an inkwell on hand. The servant retorted that an inkwell sat on a table at the back of the tent, implying that not he but the sultan himself should get up and fetch it. Believe it or not, that is exactly what the sultan did, and the servant got away with behaviour that in most quarters would have been regarded as gross and intolerable impertinence.

Salahuddin was a friend to learning. He established six colleges (seminaries) that taught not only religion but also mathematics, physics, geodesy, medicine, and administration. He recruited professors and scholars from all over the Muslim world to teach at these institutions and to undertake scholarly writing. He built a spacious hospital in Cairo that provided clean beds, free food and medicines, and employed physicians, druggists, and other needed helpers. It maintained a separate ward for women. Next to this hospital he built a facility that cared for mentally disturbed persons, treated them in a humane fashion, and employed experts to discover what had driven the inmates to their respective states of mind.

Salahuddin was a devout Sunni Muslim, apparently of the Shafi’i persuasion. He hoped to diminish any lingering Shia influence in Egypt, left by the long Fatimid rule, not by coercing but by “re-educating” the people. To this end he brought in quite a number of appropriate preachers, and hoped to re-establish Egypt as a stronghold of Sunni Islam.

He was zealous but by no means a fanatic. In his struggle against the European invaders he had the support of eastern Christians — the Georgian orthodox and the Egyptian Copts, who preferred him to the pope in Rome.

On the negative side, it may be noted that he dismantled the elaborate bureaucracy the Fatimids had maintained, appointed fellow-Kurds to high offices, gave many of his officers control over large tracts of fertile land, and thus furthered, if not introduced, feudalism in Egypt.

He died in Damascus on March 4, 1193. He was buried in the grounds of the Umayyad mosque and his tomb remains one of the most frequently visited in the Muslim world.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

IF there is one lesson that General Musharraf must carry into his second term as president starting in 2008 (he sounds fairly sure of this) it is that it is not possible to administer a country and that too with a reformist agenda and in turbulent times without an organised political party and a neutral bureaucracy.

If the politicians who wish to deny him a second term have a lesson to learn (though, as a class, they hardly ever do) it is that they have to rely on their own party cadres instead of alliances which break up sooner than later under threats or inducements. Further, the “million-man march” or “siege of Islamabad” may dislodge the general from power but the politicians, belonging to one alliance or the other, wouldn’t be succeeding him.

Today, six and a half years after General Musharraf assumed power with some politicians supporting him and others opposing him, the government and the opposition both appear to be in a state of disarray. When and where did both sides went wrong? The answer to this question with the advantage of hindsight is at the very beginning.

Musharraf erred in assuming that he could create a durable popular base for himself with the help of disgruntled or defecting politicians. The political parties, chiefly the Muslim League (N) and the PPP, on their part erred in challenging the legality of Musharraf’s take-over despite the precedence of the doctrine of necessity and, later, by confronting the command and entrenched interests of the armed forces.

Left to face the painful consequences of the bad judgment of Musharraf’s government and the parties opposing him are the people of Pakistan. To them, the economic boom has brought no relief and “enlightened moderation” has led only to more acts of extremism. This has been the fundamental failure of the government. The bigger failure of the opposition is that most people have come to believe that if the political parties of yesterday were to come back the situation on both counts — economic inequity and a liberal society — would only get worse.

In the public estimation, the credibility of the Islamic parties has suffered more than the mainstream, regional or nationalist parties. The deals with the Musharraf regime, bribery in elections to the Senate and the extravagance of ministers in the NWFP and Balochistan have given the lie to pretensions of the clerical cadres’ honesty and austerity in public life. They have displayed religiosity without devotion to the principles of Islam in statecraft. The roving Taliban-like vigilantes harassing ordinary citizens were nowhere to be seen when their leaders pocketed millions in the senate ballot.

If recent press reports are to be believed the political alliance the religious parties had been able to preserve so far, albeit shakily, is now on the verge of a split on the question of mounting an agitation against Musharraf or striking a deal with him. As of now it appears the religious parties may pose some threat to the government on the streets but none at the ballot.

The alliance that Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have been trying to forge might prove as shaky and vulnerable as their parties have been all along. The draft of their charter of democracy is an uninspiring and unnecessary document. In fact they need to regret their arbitrary, corrupt and wasteful governance in the past and bring forward leaders who are better remembered, or at least loathed less, by the people. One change on which there could be near-unanimity is that Nawaz Sharif should leave the business of government to his brother Shahbaz while he himself remains the guide or ‘rehbar’ of his faction of the Muslim League.

The mainstream parties should seek an alliance not with each other but with nationalist and ethnic groups that have a following but which are confined to urban pockets or thinly scattered in rural Sindh and Balochistan. The chances of their coming into power nationally are, thus, nil and remote in the provinces. Aligned or better merged, the mainstream, nationalist and ethnic parties could become a force formidable enough to stem the rising tide of religious extremism as well as to check federal incursions into provincial spheres.

The elements defecting from various parties and clustering around Musharraf have neither a sense of purpose nor discipline. Imagine, the chief whip of the ruling Q League publicly accusing Avais Leghari, a minister and son of former president, of sabotaging the party. This is an instance of lack of discipline. Then we hear the new railways minister talking about a railway line to China and another to Central Asia. To the people it is no more than empty rhetoric when they see the sorry state of the existing rail system which not long ago was our pride and a national asset and now is a shame and a liability. It shows lack of purpose.

Looking back, it would have been good both for Musharraf and the people had he chosen to administer the country impartially with the help of experts drawing on the goodwill of the common man. His involvement in the politics of hate and revenge has enormously damaged the institutions of the state and, worse still, the people have come to believe that, notwithstanding the assurances and safeguards, the next general elections will not be free or fair. The future of democracy, and of decency, in the country remains uncertain.