by A R Azzam
to all except the elite amirs and the ulama. After the midday prayer the body
was washed and shrouded. A jurist named al-Dawlai washed the body, but
when Ibn Shaddad was asked to supervise he found that was unable to bear
the sight and excused himself It was then discovered that money could not
be found to buy the shroud or the straw with which to line the coffin and
it was al-Qadi al-Fadil who, on that day, covered the funeral costs. And that
was perhaps the final paradox in a life full of paradoxes. The most powerful
man in the Islamic world, Saladin died effectively penniless. Most famous
for his victory at Hattin, he was not a great general. The ruler of a vast
empire, he was a poor administrator. The champion of Islamic orthodoxy,
his theology was a simple one. When times dictated quick decisions, he was
cautious. These are not the ingredients for greatness, but there can be no
dispute that there was a genius to Saladin and the outpouring of grief which
surrounded his death is proof that his contemporaries recognised a quality
which we - standing on the shores of history and gazing over an ocean of
words and events - can only glimpse at. 'Men grieved for him as they grieve
for prophets', wrote a contemporary of Saladin. 'He was loved by good and
bad, Muslim and unbeliever alike.' As for Ibn Shaddad, he had been won
over by Saladin's qualities and his heartfelt words have the power to move
us with their sincerity:
I had heard from some people that they were desirous of ransoming those
dear to them with their own lives, but I only ever heard such an expression
as a sort of exaggeration or poetic licence until this day, as I know for myself
and for others that, had the purchase of his life been acceptable, we would
have paid for it with our own.
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Saladin: an assessment
When all the myths and legends are stripped away, when all the sound and
fury of sieges and wars pass, we are left with a profoundly simple man - and
therein lay Saladin's greatness. A simple man but certainly not a simpleton
nor a fool, for he would have hardly sumved if he had been. He was a
child of the Sunni Revival, and he was a faithful and loyal child. As Cahen
concludes, Saladin was inconceivable without Nizam ul-Mulk.^ As a young
man Saladin had been taught a creed by al-Nishapuri, and he taught it
to his children. He had understood that the building of madrasas was a
manifestation of the new orthodoxy, and he built many madrasas. He
believed that the holy war was an incumbent duty, and he pursued it with
a doggedness and resoluteness which saw him pleading and cajoling for
one final assault on Jaffa; a doggedness which made him refuse to leave
Jerusalem until he was certain that Richard had finally departed. And
perhaps the greatest reflection of what his contemporaries felt about him
was, as Gibb noted, that year after year the Mosul contingents, who detested
Saladin for being an Ayyubid usurper, returned for active service, even if
they sometimes lingered on the way.® Saladin could not have forced them
to come, nor could he have restrained them if they had chosen to depart.
There can be no explanation of this except that there was a feeling of per-
sonal loyalty to Saladin and to the ideals and vision in which he so sincerely
believed. Jerusalem had come to symbolise this ideal and vision; its capture
had legitimised his claim to be the champion of the holy war and had
silenced - pardy at least - those who had accused him of being an Ayyubid
usurper. But more than the capture of Jerusalem, it was Saladin's dogged
and determined defence in the face of Richard's encroachment, and at a
time when he could have chosen to retire to Egypt, that demonstrates his
sincerity. Saladin was not a deep thinker but what he believed in he believed
in deeply and with great sincerity. In ordinary people such a quality would
be admirable, but in men of great power it becomes an irresistible force that
drags people with it in its tide.
And yet moral sincerity is not enough in itself to explain Saladin's success,
nor is it enough to account for the 'glue' which held his empire together.
Sincerity and a vision, no matter how profound, cannot fully explain how it
was that Saladin maintained the loyalty of those around him and over whom
he had littie control. The fact was that he was gifted with a geniality and
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SALAD I N
a remarkable ability to win people over, often to the astonishment of his
advisers. Unlike Zengi, Saladin did not rule by fear, in fact people often
wearied him with their demands, and on more than one occasion his
cushion was trodden on as those in his audience jostled him with petitions.
He may not have possessed the austerity of Nur al-Din - though he shared
his ascetic nature - and that was to his advantage, since austerity rarely wins
people over. Nur al-Din's court was a solemn one, while Saladin's was a
noisy rambunctious affair. On one occasion a jurist visiting Saladin's court
was so offended by the noise and familiarity with which people addressed
each other - including Saladin himself - that he took his leave, only to be
persuaded to return on the promise that a better decorum would be kept.
Saladin was a usurper who had no legitimate right to rule, in fact he had no
better right to rule than any of the amirs who surrounded him, nor any
'claim to their gratitude'.® And yet his amirs served him and he had to face
only a few cases of personal discontent. Even if, as Humphreys points out,
some disgruntled amir had tried to mount a conspiracy against him, the
amir would have found no faction at hand to support him.®
In many ways Saladin was an outsider; he was a Kurd in the age of Turks
and an Ayyubid at a time of Zengids. And yet in an age of self-interested,
ephemeral alliances and perfidious promises he rose to become the most
powerful man in the land and he did so almost seamlessly. He managed to
baffle his enemies, who expected him to be motivated by the same motives
as they were, and were surprised how simple and humble he was. People
wearied him with demands because they loiew he would not turn them away,
and the Franks who came across him were astounded by his generosity. No
reasonable request was turned down and once he gave his word he never
broke it - as Reynald of Chatillon found out to his cost. He used money
to win people's hearts and to cool their anger, and he used it liberally and
his clear disinterest in material benefit for himself won him admiration. But
even money could go so far; Saladin had a genius for winning people over,
flattering them, persuading them, cajoling them until they did his biding. It
was this abifity, coupled with the sincerity of his beUefs, that won the hearts
of those who had sworn never to serve him. The Zengids had viewed him
as a dog that barked at his master, and yet he won the services of both
Aleppo and Mosul, and he did so without the shedding of blood.
There are many examples of how Saladin soothed the ire of an amir and
; won him over, but the best example is probably that of Ibn al-Muqaddam.
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15: D E A T H I N DAMASCUS: S A L A D I N ' S LAST DAYS
As we have seen, he had been faced by a triclcy situation when his brother,
Turan Shah, had insisted on being given Baalbek after Saladin had had him
removed from the governorship of Damascus. Ibn al-Muqaddam, however,
refused to budge. This posed a serious challenge for Saladin; on the one
hand he could not permit any amir to oppose his authority; on the other,
he could not be seen to be penalising a man to whom he owed so much and
who was merely defending his rights. Had he failed in either respect, as
Humphreys concludes, he would have lost the loyalty of the hereditary
amirs at least and perhaps of any who were in some sense independent of
him.'' All eyes were on him, but Saladin did not fail. Having marched his
army to Baalbek as a show of force, he spent his time hunting, before sitting
down with Ibn al-Muqaddam. The interesting point is that though Ibn
al-Muqaddam was compelled to surrender Baalbek, he neither fled to the
sei-vice of another sovereign nor stood trial as a rebel.^ On the contraiy, not
only did he continue to serve Saladin with great loyalty, but, following the
death of Saladin's nephew, he was appointed as governor of Damascus,
a post which had to date been exclusively held by Saladin's relatives.
However, a diplomatic and conciliatory nature should not be mistaken for
weakness, and on occasion Saladin's amirs needed to be kept in place. For
example, he severely punished his Kurdish troops after the defeat of Mont
Gisard; while his son, al-Zahir, feared his father so much on the day the
Muslims had failed to attack a defenceless Richard that he was convinced
that any of the amirs who crossed Saladin's path that day would have been
crucified.
In his biography of Saladin, Ehrenkreutz challenges the reader with a
hypothetical question in which he asks them to assume, 'for the sake of
argument',' that Saladin had died from a serious illness that struck him in
1185. What then, he writes, would have been his historical legacy? Putting
aside the fact that to understand a man's life one needs to study it in its
totality, there is in Ehrenkreutz's question an implicit assumption, one that
partly reflects the West's obsession with the Crusades,^" which confuses
fame with achievement. Largely a Western phenomenon, it is not surprising
that, to date, most scholarship on the subject of the crusades has been
unabashedly eurocentric,'^ and from that springs the natural assumption
that Saladin's greatest achievements occurred when he was in direct con-
frontation with the West. He is therefore best remembered for the Third
Crusade and his war of attrition with Richard, even though this period
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SALAD I N
actually reveals very little that we did not know about him. A more subtle
reading of his life supports Gibb's claim that it is natural, when a man
accomplishes some great work, to imagine that this was what he had set as
his goal.'^ Gibb writes of a 'distant goal' on which Saladin's eyes were fixed,
which allowed him to achieve as much as he did and which later generations
assumed to have been his whole purpose. Above all, that goal was the
upholding of Sunni orthodoxy and the combatting of religious heresy, and
it was inward-looldng within the Islamic fold. A traditional focus on the
Crusades - which has been the case with all the biographies of Saladin - can-
not give a full picture of his historical legacy, which is far more enduring
than the one with which he is more famously associated. Certainly it can be
argued that Saladin's greatest achievement was his defeat of the Franks
and his conquest of Jerusalem, and it can be equally argued that a greater
achievement was his defence of the same city and his holding together of his
demoralised army. But in truth his greatest achievement lay elsewhere,
and that was in his restoration of Sunnism in Egypt. This was not simply a
political and military restoration but a theological and ideological one, as
represented in the dynamic programme of madrasa building, which moved
the country firmly into the Sunni orbit and which produced armies of
madrasa graduates as comfortable in the pulpits as they were in administra-
tion. And proof that this was ultimately his greatest achievement was that it
was those Franks who loiew the region best and who were the most sincere
in their crusading zeal - the Hospitallers and the Templars - who constantly
urged their Idngs, Amalric, Baldwin, Richard, that though the prize of the
struggle was Jerusalem, the key was Egypt.
Al-Adil's doubts about al-Afdal were proven correct. His eyes had glazed
over when his father spoke - as he did endlessly - about the holy war; after
all, had the Franks not been pushed back to the coast.> And though he con-
tinued in his father's steps by constructing a madrasa in Jerusalem in 1194,
he was in many ways not his father's son. For example, he dismissed Ibn
Shaddad, al-Isfahani and al-Qadi al-Fadil, the three men closest to Saladin
and the zealous and jealous guardians of his legacy. Perhaps he wanted his
own men around him, but nothing symbolised more the passing of an era
than this act. So what became of the three men? The aristocratic Imad
al-Din al-Isfahani, now an old man, chose to remain in Damascus. More
than anyone he had realised the jurist/administrator ideal that Nizam
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15: D E A T H I N DAMASCUS: S A L A D I N ' S LAST DAYS
ul-Mulk had dreamt of; he had studied at the Nizamiyya in Baghdad and
then served Ibn Hubayra, Nur ai-Din and Saladin. Once he had complained
of his poverty and nov^? poverty would visit him again, and it is said that
he never left his house in his later years. He died in 1201 and was buried in
an unmarked grave in a sufi cemetery, next to Saladin's tomb.
Baha ul-Din Ibn Shaddad left Damascus for Aleppo. He was at a reason-
ably young age when Saladin had died and he went on to pursue a success-
ftil career, and for a period was the chief administrator of Aleppo. His fame
attracted many visitors who flocked to his house, after the Friday prayer, to
study the hadith of the Prophet from him. He suffered the cold badly and
had a blazing brazier burning in his house at all times, which caused great
discomfort to his visitors but to which he appeared oblivious. Ibn Khallikan
gives a touching picture of Ibn Shaddad as an old man, 'as weak as a little
bird just hatched', wearing a ftir lined coat. Ibn Shaddad lived to an old age
- old enough to see Jerusalem handed back to the Franks - and he died
in 1234, in his ninetieth year. In his will he bequeathed his house to a sufi
fraternity.
As for al-Qadi al-Fadil, he returned to Egypt, where he had spent most
of his life and from where he had served Saladin with great loyalty and
wisdom. For a while he served as a senior administrator, before disputes
between Saladin's sons drove him away. He died in 1199, having fittingly
spent the evening in his madrasa. It was al-Qadi al-Fadil who had been the
/>
real brains and the intellectual driving force behind Saladin. Saladin once
claimed that he had conquered the lands not by his sword but by al-Qadi
al-Fadil's pen. And thanks to al-Fadil's skills as a propagandist, he also con-
quered history.
Upon his return to Damascus in 1192, Saladin was greeted warmly by his
family. His sons travelled to be with him, including al-Zahir, his favourite,
who came down from Aleppo. It was the month of Ramadan and the occa-
sion was a joyful one, full of tender moments. After the sun had set and the
fast had been broken, al-Zahir took leave and departed the city. Then for
some reason he stopped and turned back, where he sought another audi-
ence with his father. In the words of Ibn Shaddad, who had accompanied
him, 'It was as though his noble soul felt that the end of the sultan's allot-
ted span was near'. Saladin and his son stayed till dawn talking, and when
finally the time came for al-Zahir to leave, Saladin embraced him and ran
• 241 •
SALAD I N
his hand over his son's face and Idssed him. Then he spolce some words of
advice and, perhaps because they were words spoken by a father to a son,
they were heartfelt:
I char£fe you to fmr God Almi^ihty, for He is the source of all£ood. I com-
mand you to do what God has commanded, for that is the means of your
salvation. I warn you against sheddin£i blood, indulging in it and making
a habit of it, for blood never sleeps. I charge you to care for the hearts of your subjects and to examine their affairs. Tou are my trustee and God's trustee
to guard their interests. I charge you to care for the hearts of amirs and men
of state and magnates. I have only achieved what I have by coaxing people.
Hold no grudge against anyone, for death spares nobody. Take care in your
relations with people, for only if they are satisfied will you be forgiven, and
also in your relations with God, for God will only be forgiving if you repent
to Him, and He is gracious.
• 242 •
Notes
Prologue: Separating the Man from the Myth
1 S. Lane-Poole, Sala,Mn ami the Fall of the Kinj/dom of Jerusalem, London 1898, 399.
2 M. Jubb, The Legend of Saladin in Western Literature and Historiography, New York 2000, xi.