HE is a romantic historical figure and an acclaimed Muslim general. Nasim Hijazi’s novels, once a staple diet of Urdu readers, vividly depict his era of romantic and battle ground exploits. In fact, some of his most ardent admirers have been his Christian biographers. They have made a myth of him, and what always attracted Europeans to him was his almost perfect sense of enlightened moderation and cultured chivalry.
European historians admit that the crusader knights learned a great deal about chivalry from him. According to them, when the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 they murdered virtually all of its inhabitants, boasting that parts of the city were knee-high in blood. When he retook the city in 1187, he spared his victims, giving them time to leave and safe passage.
In fact, despite his fierce opposition to Christian powers, he acquired a great reputation in Europe as a chivalrous knight, so much so that there existed by the 14th century an epic poem about his exploits, and Dante included him among the virtuous pagan souls in Limbo. His relationship with King Richard I of England, who managed to repel him in a battle in 1191, was one of mutual respect as well as military rivalry. When Richard was wounded, he even offered the services of his personal physician. But, according to historians of the West, when the French General Henri Gouraud entered Damascus in July 1920, he went to the tomb of Saladin. After kicking Saladin’s tomb, Gouraud exclaimed, “Awake Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent.”
Salah al din Yousuf Ibn Ayyub (meaning righteousness of faith, Joseph, son of Job), better known in Western history as Saladin, which we will also use for the sake of brevity, was born in 1138, in Tikrit into a prominent Kurdish family. It is said that on the night of his birth, his father, Najmad Din Ayyub, gathered his family and moved to Aleppo. There, his father entered the service of Imadad Din Zangi ibn Aq Sonqur, the powerful Turkish governor in northern Syria.
Saladin’s formal career began at the age of 14 when he joined the staff of his uncle Asadad Din Shirkuh, an important military commander under Nural Din, the ruler of Damascus and Aleppo. In 1169, he became second to the commander-in-chief of the Syrian army, his uncle Shirkuh.
During three military expeditions led by Shirkuh into Egypt to prevent its falling to the Latin-Christian (Frankish) rulers of the states established by the First crusade, a complex, three-way struggle developed between Amalric I, the Latin king of Jerusalem, Shawar, the powerful vizier of the Egyptian Fatimid caliph, and Shirkuh.
In the last of these military expeditions, together with his uncle, Saladin approached the walls of Cairo on January 2, 1169 at which point the Franks, who had the city of Cairo under siege, retreated. Six days later, after allowing the Franks to evacuate unopposed, his troops reached the walls themselves.
When his uncle Shirkuh, governor of Egypt died, Saladin was appointed the next governor. Saladin suppressed the Fatimid rulers and united Egypt with the Abbasid caliphate. He was young — in his early thirties. Quickly, he would become one of the most famous figures, but one of the few commanders in history who are respected by their friends and enemies alike.
Unlike his successors, he did not seize the wealth of former rulers, nor did he occupy their palaces. Like a caring ruler, he opened the gates of Cairo and allowed Egyptian citizens to live within the city walls in areas which had been exclusively occupied by royalty.
Because of his sincerity and kindness, he became popular among citizens of all religious backgrounds and even had a Jewish personal doctor. And when he later fought Richard the Lionheart, legend goes that Saladin ordered his horsemen to carry ice down the mountain to comfort the British king when he was sick.
Saladin brought an entirely different concept of a city to Cairo. He wanted a unified, thriving, fortified place, protected by strong walls and impregnable defences, but functioning internally with a great deal of commercial and cultural freedom, and with no private or royal enclaves and no fabulous palaces. He wanted a city that belonged to its inhabitants even though he would be its absolute ruler.
Saladin had what would now be called a world view. He was, in fact, trying to defend a whole culture as well as its territory, an ideology as well as a religion. He looked on Egypt as a source of revenue for his wars against Christian and European encroachments, and against the dissident Muslim sects. Apparently, he wanted Cairo to be the organizing centre for an orthodox cultural and ideological revival. He sought to re-educate populace in orthodoxy rather than simply crush other sects.
In Cairo, Saladin built mosques, palaces (and not a single palace for himself), colleges, hospitals and a fortress, the citadel, which still remains one of Cairo’s landmarks and is his most famous creation. Within the citadel his greatest architectural contribution was probably the madressah, a college mosque where the interpretive ideology of religion and Islamic law could be taught. However, they taught more than religion, with studies in administration, mathematics, geodesy, physics and medicine. He imported professors from the East to staff his new schools. In 11 years he built five such colleges as well as a mosque. One of the schools that he built was near the grave of Imam el Shafi’i.
Within the citadel he also built a hospital, who his secretary, Ibn Gubayr, described almost in terms of any good modern clinic today.
However, all did not go well. Saladin replaced the elaborate bureaucracy with a feudal system that gave his military officers direct control over all Egypt’s rich agricultural lands, an act that has been blamed for a very sever famine which occurred during his successor’s reign.
In 1175, the Syrian assassin leader Rashideddin’s men made two attempts on the life of Saladin. The second time, the assassin came so close that wounds were inflicted upon Saladin. Next year Saladin besieged the fortress of Masyaf, the stronghold of Rashideddin. But, after some weeks, Saladin suddenly withdrew, and left the assassin in peace for the rest of his life.
In 1182, Saladin marched to Palestine and Syria and never returned to Cairo. For the next 10 years he fought the crusaders and managed to end their presence in the region. It was at the Battle of Hattin (where he captured Jerusalem) in 1187, he dealt the crusader kingdoms a blow from which they never recovered. By the time he died in Damascus in 1193, he had liberated almost all of Palestine from the armies of England, France, Burgandy, Flanders, Sicily, Austria and, in effect, from the world power of the pope. In his battles against these European crusaders, he often had the aid of eastern Christians, who were as much the victims of the western armies as anybody else in the eastern lands. The Proud Georgians, for instance, preferred Saladin to the pope, and so did the Copts of Egypt.
When he died, he had almost no personal possessions, but had earned himself a remarkable place in history.
