Every week, we shall take a leaf from one such book and treat you to a little taste of history.
BOOK NAME: Saladin & the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
AUTHOR: Stanley Lane-Pool
PUBLISHER: G. P. Putnam & Sons Ltd - London
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1926
The following excerpt has been taken from Page: 104
The crusader “movement,” as it is sometimes called, stretched over a period of two hundred years, unleashing a frenzy of hate and violence unprecedented before the advent of the technological age and the scourge of Hitler.
The madness was initiated in the name of religion by a Pope of the Christian Church, Urban II, in 1095 as a measure to redirect the energies of warring European barons from their bloody, local disputes into a “noble” quest to reclaim the Holy Land from the “infidel.” Once unleashed, the passion could not be controlled. The violence began with the massacre of Jews, proceeded to the wholesale slaughter of Muslims in their native land, sapped the wealth of Europe, and ended with an almost unimaginable death toll on all sides. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great propagandist of the Second Crusade, would lament that he left only one man in Europe to comfort every seven widows.
There were five major crusades (and a handful of minor eruptions bred of the same instinct). Only the First Crusade was “successful,” in the sense that it managed to capture Jerusalem and in the process make the streets of the Old City run ankle deep with Muslim and Jewish blood. All the others were failures. Three of the five got close to the object of the enterprise, the Holy City. Only because of the disunity of the Arab world did the First Crusade succeed in capturing Jerusalem.
Precisely because of the unification of Egypt and Syria into a united Arab empire, the Third Crusade failed to capture it. In the Fifth Crusade, Frederick II of Germany negotiated his way into the Holy City, only to leave Palestine weeks later, pelted with garbage by his own people.
The Third Crusade, spanning the years 1187-92, is the most interesting of them all. It was the largest military endeavor of the Middle Ages and brought the fury of the entire crusading movement to its zenith. Perhaps most important, it brought two of the most remarkable and fascinating figures of the last millennium into conflict: Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia; and Richard I, King of England, known as the Lionheart.
That conflict of giants in a grand holy tournament still resounds in the modern history and modern politics of the present day Middle East. Indeed, its resonance is even broader: with conflicts between (Christians and Muslims wherever they may exist in the world, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Chechnya to Lebanon to Malaysia to Indonesia.
Until this day Saladin remains a pre-eminent hero of the Islamic world. It was he who united the Arabs, who defeated the Crusaders in epic battles, who recaptured Jerusalem, and who threw the European invaders out of Arab lands. In the seemingly endless struggle of modern-day Arabs to reassert the essentially Arab nature of Palestine, Saladin lives, vibrantly, as a symbol of hope and as the stuff of myth. In Damascus or Cairo, Amman or East Jerusalem, one can easily fall into lengthy conversations about Saladin, for these ancient memories are central to the Arab sensibility and to their ideology of liberation.
On the bars of the small, dimly lit cell in the Old City of Jerusalem where Saladin lived humbly after his grand conquests is the inscription, “Allah, Muhammad, Saladin.” God, prophet, liberator. Such is Sal-adin’s relation to the Muslim God.
The Arab world, it seems, is forever waiting for another Saladin. At Friday prayer, from Aleppo to Cairo to Baghdad, it is not unusual to hear the plea for one like him to come and liberate Jerusalem. His total victory over the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin is held up today as the everlasting symbol of Arab triumph over Western interference. In Damascus, near the entrance to the central Souq al-Hamadiya, a heroic equestrian statue of Saladin graces the main plaza of the city. When protests take place, as they did recently over the renewed negotiations between Israel and Syria about disputed lands, the gathering place is Saladin’s heroic statue. In the office of the late president of Syria, Hafez Assad, an epic painting of the Battle of Hattin covered an entire wall, and Assad was fond of taking Western visitors over to it, as if to say chat just as another Saladin will someday come again, so someday there will also be a second Battle of Hattin. Assad’s death and funeral in June of 2000, when tens of thousands of Arabs filled the streets of Damascus, provided a pale reflection of what Saladin’s funeral must have been like in March of 1193.
But it is not only for his military prowess that Saladin is venerated. He is also remembered for his humility, his compassion, his mysticism, his piety, and his restraint.
EXTRACT
“Jerusalem is ours as much as yours,” Saladin replied. “Indeed, it is even more sacred to us than it is to you, for it is the place from which our Prophet [PBUH] accomplished his nocturnal journey and the place where our community will gather on the Day of Judgment. Do not imagine that we can renounce it or vacillate on this point. The land was also originally ours, whereas you have only just arrived and have taken it over only because of the weakness of the Muslims living there at the time. God will not allow you to rebuild a single stone as long as the war lasts. As for the Cross, its possession is a good card in our hand. That Jesus died on the Cross is a falsehood for us. The Cross cannot be surrendered except in exchange for something of outstanding value to all Islam.”
— salimansar52@yahoo.com