Saladin ( c.
1138-1193 ) " The Kurdish Adventurer proved to the Crusaders the God had no trouble favoring an "infidel"
When Dante Alighieri compiled his great
medieval who's who of heroes and villains, the Divine Comedy, the
highest a non-Christian could climb was Limbo. Ancient pagans had
to be virtuous indeed to warrant inclusion: the residents
included Homer, Caesar, Plato and Dante's duide, Vergil. But
perhaps the most surprising entry in Dante's catalog of
"greathearted sould" was a figure "solitary, set
apart" That figure was Saladin. It is testament to his extraordinary stature in the Middle Ages that not only was Saladin the sole "modern" mentioned- he had been dead barely 100 years when Dante wrote-but also that a man who had made his name successfully battling Christianity would be lionized by the author of perhaps the most Chris-centered verse ever penned. When slah al-Din Ysuuf ibn Ayyub was born in
1138 to a family of Kurdish adventurers in the ( now Iraqi ) town
of Takrit, Islam was a confusion of squabbling warlords living
under a Christian shadow. A generation before, European Crusaders
had conquered Jersualem, massacring its Muslim and Jewish
habitants. The Franks, as they were called, then occupied four
militarily aggressive states in the Holy Land. The great Syrian
leader Nur al-Din predicted that expelling the invaders would
require a holy war of sort that had propelled Islam's first great
wave half a millennium earlier, but given the treacherous
regional crosscurrents, such a united front seemed unlikely. Saladin got his chance with the death, in 1169,
of his uncle Shirkuh, a one-eyed, overweight brawler in Nur
al-Din's service who had become the facto leader of Egypt. A
seasoned warior despite his small stature and frialty, Saladin
still had a tough hand to play. He was a Kurd (even then a
drawback in Middle Eastern politics), and he was from Syria, a
Sunni state, trying to rule Egypt, a Shiite country. But a
masterly 17-year campaign employing diplomacy, the sword and
great good fortune made him lord of Egypt, Syria and much of
Mesopotamia. The lands bracketed the Crusader states, and their
combind might made plausible Nur al-Din's dream of a Muslim-
Christian showdown. That encounter took place near Hattin , within
sight of the Golan Heights. Saladin had assembed a pan-Islamic
force of 12,000 cavalry near Lake Tiberias. The Christians were
lured on a long July march across Galilee's parched Plain of
Lubiya. Saladin had the right bait-he had besieged the lakeside
town in which a knight's wife was staying-and the Crusader force,
frying in heavy armor and unable to fight its way to the water,
was overwhelmed by the Muslims.
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Both Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assed have at times invoked Saladin against Israel, the new "crusader." However, they seem unlikely to attain either the military triumph that safeguarded one world or the nobility that endeared him to another. By David van Biema
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