by John Man
In the real world, Islam and Europe were largely apart still. Arabs ignored Saladin and Europeans admired him, without much interaction. That was changing, even as Henty and Haggard were writing. European powers sought to increase control over the decaying Ottoman Empire, particularly Germany, with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s state visit in 1898, during which he flattered the Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid by implying that he was Saladin resurrected (and placed the funereal wreath with which this chapter began).
During the First World War European powers fought across Muslim lands, and then imposed themselves in a final outburst of imperialism – no crusade, but comparable in the exercise of power and influence. From Lawrence of Arabia’s dream of Arab independence sprang kingdoms that were new colonies, under the thumbs of Britain and France and Britain’s protégé, Palestine. Islam remained divided, theologically by its sects, strategically by its new borders. No wonder that Arabs hoped for a new resurrection, a new Saladin who would unite all Arabs, perhaps even all Muslims.
For a while, it seemed to many in the 1950s that they had one. The creation of Israel in 1948 focused Arab discontent. While Israel developed fast, new Arab nations did not. Oil revenues flowed into the pockets of ruling elites. Ordinary people remained poor. The Suez Canal stayed in British hands. To many, the whole region was ripe for revolution. So when a young nationalist named Gamal Abdul Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1954, he seemed like Saladin reborn. He certainly acted the part, seizing the Suez Canal, drawing Britain, France and Israel into a disastrous invasion to seize it back, speaking up for the poor and dispossessed, promising Arab unity, and then, like Saladin, linking up with Syria to make the United Arab Republic.
Yes, the new Saladin, despite supposedly being above religious disputes (his wife was a Shi’ite, but he avoided commitment). Nasser ignored Saladin as a religious leader and explicitly co-opted him as an Egyptian nationalist – which is arguable, since Saladin was a Kurd first, then Syrian, and Egyptian only as a conqueror. There is on the walls of Cairo’s citadel, rebuilt by Saladin from 1176 onwards, a stone bas-relief of an eagle, now headless. Known as the ‘Eagle of Saladin’, it was taken by Nasser as the nation’s emblem and it remains on the flag today. (It was also adopted as a symbol of Arab nationalism by Palestine, Yemen and Libya, and appears in some of their past flag designs.) In 1963, Nasser promoted a film that made the same point – Al Nasser Salah Ad-Din (The Eagle Saladin) – because ‘Nasser’ was not only his father’s name, but also means ‘eagle’.77
Its English title is Saladin the Victorious.
In the end, it all amounted to not very much. Egyptians resented being shoe-horned into union with other Arabs (indeed Egyptians don’t necessarily always identify themselves as Arabs). The United Arab Republic collapsed after three years, though Egypt still called itself the UAR for another twelve years. After Egypt was humiliated in the 1967 war against Israel, pan-Arabism foundered, honoured at best as wishful thinking.
What of Syria, the rump-state of Nasser’s dream, the home of Saladin, which fell to the Assads? The current Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, identified with Saladin as much as Nasser did, which is also a bit of a stretch, considering that he was an Alawite, a branch of Shia Islam, the minority denomination suppressed by the Sunni Saladin. He, like Nasser, called himself ‘the new Saladin’ and summoned his hero’s shade whenever he needed support. Behind his presidential desk he hung a picture of Saladin, victorious after the battle of Hattin. As the conqueror of Jerusalem, Saladin was an obvious symbol for a president who said his main purpose was to destroy Israel, that latter-day Crusader state. But Saladin, the anti-Crusader, had a wider religious and political agenda, which made him extremely useful to Assad as a symbol: a pan-Arabist when it suited, or – since he was not an Arab at all, but a Kurd – a pan-Islamist. As Christopher Phillips says, ‘His achievements were so wide that the regime could interpret them as they wished’78 – though not
Everyday Arab Identity: The Daily Reproduction of the Arab World, p. 54.
so wide that they are of much use to the current Assad, fighting for survival in a kaleidoscope of sects and interests.
It continues, this belief in Saladin’s virtues, increasingly shared between the two worlds, Islam and the collection of peoples that used to be just Europe and is now what is vaguely known as ‘the West’.
In the 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven, Saladin comes over as tough, smart, magnanimous and gracious. The film is a Hollywood blockbuster, which has to create its own internally consistent universe, part of which involves a claim to be historical. It’s not. The claim that it is ‘true’ is part of the fiction. Like many films, it uses history when it suits and distorts it or discards it at will. Websites are dedicated to pointing out the distortions, but they miss the main point. The prime question for a Hollywood blockbuster is: does it work? Or in other words, will it put enough bums on seats to repay the investment? The director, Ridley Scott, knows his business, and the answer is yes. Cost: $130 million. Revenue so far: over $200 million, and rising.
And yet the history does matter, because films reflect attitudes and fashion opinions, and sometimes influence events in the real world. As I write, a mild comedy about assassinating the dictator of North Korea has sparked a small-scale international flurry, which may yet escalate into something large scale. Kingdom of Heaven highlights Crusader brutalities and prejudices, which tap into public antipathy towards the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, easily seen in the world of Islam as an anti-Muslim ‘crusade’. The original Crusaders came up against Saladin, played in the movie by the Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud. It certainly mattered to him that his part had some authenticity. As he says in one interview, ‘Everything in Saladin’s own life is also my philosophy. My culture is that of Saladin. He has been a role model for us since our youth. Saladin was an example of a Muslim hero who returned to Arabs and Muslims their pride and their dignity. He is an example for our people, our leaders, our society.’
And more. He was an example, it seems, for all times and all seasons both in Europe and across the Muslim world. An exemplar of Islam, Christianity, both, and then in the eighteenth century neither, but of revolution, conservatism, refinement, even the noble savagery of pre-Islamic tribesmen or Highland Scottish tribes. He is a mirror in which we can all see ourselves.
Where now are his ideals – of Arab and Islamic unity, of freedom from outside interference, of a peaceful life under Islam? Never realized by him, and today more tattered than ever, torn by all the elements Saladin despised: sectarianism, civil war, exploitation, foreign intervention. The parallels between then and now are obvious, ripe for comment. London’s Globe Theatre staged David Eldridge’s Holy Warriors in 2014, in which the past, in the form of Richard I and Saladin, informs the present – Bush, Blair and other foreign meddlers.
It goes on. Islam tears at its own flanks, offering openings for foreign alliances here and extremism there, with all hope shattered by civil war, bombs and the grotesque barbarities of the so-called Islamic State, destroying the ideals of Islam in the name of Islam. They even blew up the citadel of Tikrit, birthplace of Islam’s greatest hero.
There is no sign of a new Saladin, nor any vision of what he might achieve, let alone how. Saladin’s dream is for the past, or a very distant future.
Bibliography
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Photographic Acknowledgements
Credits read clockwise from top left
Saladin, c. 1180: drawing after a contemporary miniature: Print Collector/Getty Images; bronze equestrian stature of Saladin and his warriors by Abdullah al-Sayed, 1993: © Corbis
Nur al-Din, pursued by Godfrey Martel and Hugh de Lusignan, miniature from Histoire d’Outremer by William of Tyre, 1232–1261, British Library, Yates Thompson 12 f.132: © The British Library Board; castle, Eilat, gulf of Aqaba: © Kim Briers/Shutterstock; Kerak castle, Jordan: © dbimages/Alamy; the citadel, Cairo, aerial view: © AGF Srl/Alamy
The citadel, Aleppo: © Anton Ivanov/Shutterstock; siege of Belina, miniature from Gran conquista de ultramar, 13th century, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid: Bridgeman Images; crusaders besieging a city, miniature from Histoire d’Outremer by William of Tyre, 1232–1261, British Library, Yates Thompson 12 f. 75: © The British Library Board; siege of Nicaea, miniature by the Master of Fauvel from Le Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon, 1337, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms. fr. 22495 f. 30: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Horns of Hattin, Lower Gallilee: Duby Tal/Albatross/TopFoto; Saladin with Christian prisoners, miniature by the Master of Fauvel from Le Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon, 1334, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms. fr. 22495 f. 215 v.: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; Richard Lionheart watching the beheading of Muslim prisoners after the capture of Acre in 1189, miniature by Jean Colombe from Les Passages d’outremer faits par les François contre les Turcs depuis Charlemagne jusqu’en 1462 by Sébastien Mamerot, c. 1475, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms. fr. 5594 f. 213: akg-images/Erich Lessing; death of Reynald, miniature from Le Livre intitulé Eracles . . . by William of Tyre, 15th century, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, ms. fr. 68 f. 399: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; defeat of Guy de Lusignan and the loss of the Holy Cross, miniature from Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum by William of Tyre, c. 1480, British Library MS Royal E. I f. 433v.: © The British Library Board
Mausoleum of Saladin, Damascus: © Peter Horree/Alamy; presentation wreath in bronze gilt from Saladin’s tomb: Imperial War Museum/EPH 4338; Palestinian demonstration in Nablus on the West Bank marking the anniversary of the Second Intifada, 29 September 2001: © Ricki Rosen/Corbis; poster for Saladin, directed by Youssef Chahine in 1963 starring Ahmed Mazhar: Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images; obverse of Syrian banknote, 1991: DEA/A. Dagli Orti/Getty Images
Index
Abaq, sultan of Damascus 40–1
Abbas (Prophet’s uncle) 7
Abbasid Empire/ dynasty 2, 7–8, 48, 56, 69, 81, 138, 185
Seljuks and 21
Abd al-Latif 132
Abdul Hamid II, sultan of Turkey, on Saladin 250–2
Abu Shama (historian) 39, 52, 70, 74–5
Abu’l-Faraj, Syrian bishop of Edessa 23–5
Acre 46, 48, 213, 218, 221, 252
bishop of 152, 155, 159
Philip, Count of Fland
ers at 103–5
Saladin takes 170–1, 186
siege 192–208, 210–11, 214, 219, 224
Guy of Lusignan besieges Muslims 192–3
Saladin surrounds Frank beseigers 193–204
capitulation 204–8
Crusaders kill Muslim prisoners 206–8, 210
Adrienne of Brienne 196
Aga Khan (Ismaili leader) 85
Agnes (Baldwin IV’s mother) 140
Aintab plateau 101
al-Adid, Egyptian caliph 52, 53
and Saladin 61–2
and Shirkuh 59, 60–1
deposed 68–71
al-Adil (Saladin’s brother) 141, 174, 203, 216
governs Egypt 79, 82
takes southern Christian cities 170
al-Afdal (Saladin’s son) 215
and Syrian emirs loyalty oath 233–4
at Acre 195
embassy to al-Nasir 235–6
given Acre 170, 171
on defeating Franks 160–1
al-Aqsa mosque 106, 177, 181–2
al-Athir, Ali ibn (chronicler) 19, 22, 26–7, 35, 73–4, 90, 126, 153, 159, 160, 171, 177
criticises Saladin 186
al-Azhar university, Cairo 48
al-Fadil, Qadi (Saladin’s secretary) 68, 70, 72, 79, 126, 144, 147, 148, 233
al-Husain (Ali’s son) mausoleum 253
al-Jazira 135
al-Mustadi (Baghdad caliph) 60
Saladin 82
replaces al-Adid 68–71
dies 121