June 2, 2002

The second millennium began with the tumultuous European/ Christian onslaught against the Muslim control of Palestine. That event was celebrated in the Christian world as the beginning of the Crusades. Their target was to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Arabs who had ruled there since its Muslim conquest in the seventh century. But to the Arabs it was the invasion of the “Franj”, the barbarians from the north who sought to desecrate the first qibla of Islam. It was the most deserving case for a jihad in defence of their faith.

The Crusades threw up the legendary figure of Salahuddin Ayubi, the valiant soldier-statesman-conqueror, who came down from the mountains of Kurdistan and stemmed the tide of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. He was a noble adversary to the Crusaders, so noble and dignified that he would never stoop down to the level of the enemy even after routing him and taking a firm control on the outcome of the battle.

To the European invaders of Palestine, Saladin’s — as they described him — generosity and magnanimity was an extraordinary feat of a warrior’s greatness and humanity. They were used to the justice of the sword: all spoils to the conqueror and only indignity, infamy and death to the vanquished. They had put every Muslim to the sword after over-running Jerusalem in 1099. The Holy city was witness to a horrendous carnage (akin to what the Israelis are doing there currently). But Saladin caused no harm to civilians, not even to Christian soldiers who surrendered to him, when he retook Jerusalem in 1187.

How was it that Saladin, their nemesis, could rise to those heights of morality commonly associated with saints, savants and prophets. To them, Saladin embodied the essence of Christian morality. His adversaries respected and eulogized him. Saladin became a thing of the Christian folklore.

The legend of Saladin has lived on in the West despite the attrition of centuries of cultural and religious misunderstandings, prejudices and animosities. The Western domination of the east under long centuries of ruthless colonialism and wanton exploitation has produced many demons in both camps. And yet the saga of Saladin has remained untainted from this mist of centuries.

In fact the onset of the third millennium has brought Ayubi’s stature as a bridge builder between the East and the West into a sharper relief. All the more so, because Palestine, the Holy Land coveted by all three of the largest revealed and divine religious communities, is still at the centre of the bloodiest, and potentially most explosive, conflict of our age.

The raging dispute for title over the land in Palestine between the Israelis and the Palestinians has made Saladin more relevant to our times than to history of the past. While the dispossessed Palestinians yearn for another Ayubi to rise and liberate their land from the clutches of the usurpers, the west hankers for a soldier —statesman like Saladin to rise above the fray and bridge the great divide with the unsurpassed force of his moral chivalry.

P.H. Newby, a contemporary master-historian of the Arab world, has paid a fresh scholarly tribute to the enduring folklore of Ayubi in Saladin in his time. His painstakingly researched account of the legendary soldier-statesman is a most timely input to remind both friends and foes of the great Muslim hero of his olympian moral stature in that period of greatest turbulence in the Middle Ages.

Newby has not only traced the rise of Saladin from the obscurity of his native Tikrit (made prominent, once again, in our times as the birth place of Saddam Hussain) to the limelight of the Crusades as the great liberator of Jerusalem. But he has also detailed Saladin’s moral authority which forever endeared him to his adversaries and made him the most respected conqueror of the lands from the Euphrates to the Nile.

Ayubi’s decimation of the tottering Fatmid dynasty in Egypt has hung over his name and reputation in a large section of the Muslim world as a dark spot. Newby makes this point in particular that Ayubi’s moral authority amongst the Muslim is not as unblemished and unsullied as it is with the non-Muslims. But much of this taint against him is polemical; a product of the great sectarian schism among the Muslims. The rot had set in with the Fatmids by the time Ayubi appeared on the horizon. It would have collapsed under its own weight. Ayubi only hastened its demise.

Ayubi had the foresight to know that the defence of the Holy Land lay in Egypt. He needed the wealth and resources of the Land of the Nile in order to dislodge the Christians from Palestine. Henry Kissinger, the most notable votary of the Jewish lobby in the U.S., must have studied Saladin thoroughly. He too had the foresight, as Secretary of State, to wrench Egypt from the bosom of Arab unity and pave the way for its peace with Israel-thus weakening the Arab stand against the Jewish State.

Amin Malouf, the reputed Lebanese author of historical novels, has also highlighted the centrality of Egypt in any equation between the Arabs and the current occupier of the Holy Land. In his fascinating book, The Crusades through Arab eyes, Malouf says many in the Arab world likened Anwer Sadat’s separate peace with Israel in 1977 with the negotiated surrender of Jerusalem to the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II in 1229-36 years after Ayubi’s death-by Al-Kamil, the son of Al-Adil, Salahuddin’s brother and successor. Al-Kamil, history tells us, pawned Jerusalem away in order to save Egypt from the marauding Crusaders. History may be treacherous but never fails to repeat itself. Will it, then, spawn another Ayubi? That’s a question reverberating in so many hearts.

Saladin in his time
By P.H. Newby
Phoenix Press, London.
ISBN 1 84212 257 6
210pp. £12.99

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