The Kingdom of Heaven: Of the Crusades and true Muslim heroes

The military commander who besieged and re-conquered Jerusalem for Islam, the man of honour who was hailed as a fellow noble knight even by the English King Richard the Lionhearted and the Frankish princes of the Crusader kingdom of Outremer he vanquished, the Kurdish statesman who united Egypt, Syria and Palestine in an empire that was to, fatefully, save both Islam and Christian Europe from the Mongol holocaust a century later.

So you can imagine my delight that the movie Kingdom of Heaven, for all its aesthetic and historical limitations, did not treat Sultan Salahuddin as the stereotypical Hollywood Arab arch-villain. The Battle of Hattin, where the Ayyubid armies trapped and defeated the Crusader knights led by the fanatic Guy de Lusignan (the leprous King Baldwin’s successor as the king of Jerusalem) was depicted with the sort of epic, high tech cinematic sword battles and siege warfare that Sir Ridley Scott, who also directed Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, has made into an art form.

Yet I am more fascinated by the sheer, gut-wrenching relevance of Salahuddin and the Crusades, the East-West battles of nine hundred years ago, to Arab-Islamic world in Year 2005. The Crusades changed both Europe and the Middle East and their echoes, nine centuries later, still resonate in Arab politics.

The Salahuddin legend proved an inspirational ideal of leadership for despots across the Islamic world in our times, as assorted political pygmies scrambled to bask in the giant Sultan’s reflected glory. I remember PPP sycophants used to hail Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as Salahuddin’s successor, though the only wars the Pakistani PM fought (let alone won!) was against Muslim civilians in East Bengal and Baluchistan.

When Colonel Gaddafi showed up in Pakistan, Bhutto hailed him as Saladin because he kicked the Western oil companies out after his coup overthrew the Sanussi King Idriss and named a Lahore sports stadium after the Libyan dictator. Still, destiny demonstrates that Gaddafi’s disastrous intervention in the Chad, Uganda and Sierra Leone tribal wars are hardly in the same giddy history-making league as Sultan Salahuddin’s re-conquest of Jerusalem.

President Nasser’s spin doctors potrayed him as the Misri Saladin after Suez and Sadat tried to compare his trip to Israel and address to the Knesset in 1977 as a diplomatic masterstroke reminiscent of the fateful Salahuddin-King Richard encounter. However, I doubt if Arab historians will juxtapose the Egyptian architects of the Six Day War debacle and Camp David with the halo of our iconic Malik al-Nasir.

The more monstrous the Arab dictator, the greater his eagerness to wrap the historical cloak of the medieval Kurdish sultan. Hafez Assad built giant statues of Salahuddin all over Damascus as his Alawite regime fought for its survival against the militants of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian Sunni heartland. Saddam Hussein (born, incredibly also in Tikrit in 1938 exactly nine hundred years after the greatest military genius of Islam in the Middle Ages) shamelessly linked his Baathist dictatorship to Salahuddin’s victories.

Of course, Saddam built marble palaces while his people starved, looted the petro-wealth of Iraq, sacrificed countless combat troops in wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait he launched and lost. In contrast, Salahuddin united the Arabs and left only forty dirhams for his seventeen sons on his deathbed in 1193. As the descendant of Nizari Ismailis, the fabled Aga Khanis of Sind, I was also intrigued by the role played by the Assassin order of Rashid Sinan — the Old Man of the Mountain in Crusader folklore-in the Sultan’s ultimate victory at the Horns of Hattin. The Assassins, medieval prototypes of the Red Brigades or Al-Qaeda, almost assassinated Salahuddin twice in his own palace.

They were, of course, equal opportunity assassins, having killed the great and the good of the medieval Levant as varied as Turkish atabegs, Seljuk viziers, Abassid princes, Latin knights, Arabian grand qadis and Mongol Khans. But at Hattin, the Assassins joined the armies of Salahuddin and so played a pivotal role in the history of Islam as they would again two generations later at the Persian fortress of Alamut while Halaku’s Mongol horsemen swept through the Abbasid caliphate to sack Baghdad.

The modern Arab world was shaped by the Crusades as surely as the West was. While the Frankish knights and feudal lords squandered fortunes in the Holy Land, the kings of Europe became stronger, the genesis of the rise of the nation state in France that culminated in Louis XIV, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and, later, Algerie Francals. The concept of Arab nationalism, "wataniya", was unthinkable without the Crusades.

The Crusades led to the unification of Egypt and Syria under the Ayyubid sultan, exactly the same geopolitical alliance that sought to wrest Jerusalem from the Zionists in the October 1973 war. The Crusades exposed the lack of a naval tradition in Arab warfare, despite Salahuddin’s best efforts to create a Muslim navy with Venetian help."

“Better the flatulence of camels than the prayers of fishes” is an ancient Arabian proverb from the age of the Jahaliyya that expresses our failure to create a naval tradition which might have restrained European colonisation of Dar al Islam. Meanwhile, the Crusades stimulated shipbuilding in England and the Royal Navy was the sword of the British Empire in the Victorian era.

On a human level, Muslims and Europeans both profited from their epic encounter in Palestine. We taught them to play chess and the Greek mathematics, philosophy and medicine we preserved in the libraries of the Baghdad caliphate as the Dark Ages descended on Europe.

The West learnt the flute and cymbal from Arab music — no Crusades, no Beatles, and no Spice Girls. Europe’s acquired taste for Holy Land spice, silk and sugar stimulated the international trade in luxury goods, made Louis Vitton, Coco Chanel and Parisian haute couture possible. The Kingdom of Heaven was not all war, blood and slaughter. The battles also proved that nobility, reason, and the human spirit transcends all ideological clashes of civilisations, that the line between good and evil cuts across all the religions and tribes of mankind.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker