The legend of Saladin

Saladin, the Kurdish warlord who recovered Jerusalem for Islam in 1187 and provoked the Third Crusade (the one in all the movies), is really famous in our time as a great and admirable Muslim leader. And he was famous in medieval times, too. In the chivalry seminar, we saw him used by an anonymous French writer -- in the Ordene de Chevalerie -- as a demonstration that even a great and admirable warrior can't be a real knight unless he was a Christian. (Lull believed that only good Christians qualified as real knights.)

But has Saladin always been famous? On MEDIEV-L this morning Andrew Larsen said no:

I think it’s important to realize that Saladin’s name has not continuously carried resonance for Muslims ever since his life and career. Saladin appears to have been largely forgotten within a few generations of his death. The main reason for this seems to have been the career of the Mamluk Sultan Baibars, who successfully defeated the Mongol threat in 1260 at the battle of Ain Jalut. As a consequence of this, he became a major Muslim folk-hero and remained such down into the 19th century, overshadowing Saladin as a great Muslim warrior.

I suspect that Saladin’s eclipse was also do to his failure to create a lasting Ayyubid state. When he died, his empire was virtually bankrupt and his sons and nephew and brother immediately fell to fighting for control of the state, rapidly dismembering it.
I also suspect that it might also be evidence that Saladin was not universally hailed even in his life. His ‘official’ biographer Baha-ad-Din has to spend a good deal of effort explaining why Saladin failed to perform basic Muslim duties such as the Hajj and fasting during Ramadan. Saladin put a great deal of effort into propagandizing the Muslim world to accept him as a great defender of Islam, but it must have been obvious to many Muslims that he was trying to justify his aggression against other Muslim states.

As a result of all this, Saladin was essentially forgotten for most of the period from c.1300-c.1850, at least in the Middle East. He was not a culturally significant figure. The recovery of the memory of his character seems to have a great deal to do with Muslims who traveled to western Europe for educational purposes in the later 19th century, and there discovered the medieval European version of Saladin, a great and noble warrior with sincere religious convictions. (But see below!) When they returned home, they brought the memory of Saladin as well as the memory of the Crusades back with them. The earliest Arabic history of the Crusades was only published in 1898 (if I remember the date correctly). Soon after that, ‘Saladin’ was adopted as the pen name of a Syrian writer opposed to European imperialism in the Middle East, and Saladin was transformed into an anti-imperialist warrior who rose up to defend Muslims out of sincere religious conviction (instead of the political ambitions that seem to have truly motivated him). The modern Muslim world has enshrined him as a (if not the) prototype of the mujaheed, the Jihad warrior. Political leaders such as Hafez al-Asad and Saddam Hussein sought to maintain his memory for political purposes, and Hussein actively depicted himself as a second Saladin (somewhat ironically, given that he actively persecuted Saladin’s people, the Kurds). Similarly, Muslim terrorists have found Saladin an extremely useful figure for their own purposes.

My point in all of this is that Saladin is not an example of the Muslim world having extremely long memories. Rather, the figure of Saladin, essentially discarded by the Muslim world, was revived in the 20th century for political purposes and altered to suit the needs of a modern struggle. A rough modern parallel might be the way that certain of the American Founding Fathers have been co-opted by modern American fundamentalists in an effort to prove that America was founded as a Christian nation. This is not an example of the memory of the Founding Fathers as Christian paragons surviving into the 21st century, but rather an example of how modern Americans have sought to recast convinced Deists as passionate Christians for 21st century political purposes. Another example is the Milosevic government’s very successful campaign to revive the memory of the 14th century battle of Kosovo as part of a campaign against Kosovar Albanians.

Andrew wants it pointed out that he's not an expert on Medieval Islam, but that since he teaches the Crusades every year he's done a bit of reading. He refers the curious to the 2nd edition of Jonathan Riley-Smith's Crusades: A Short History as a starting point.

I'll add that if Muslims in the Middle East were mostly forgetful of Saladin before 1850, Walter Scott sure knew who he was. Update: Paul Cobb in his recent narrative history of the Islamic reaction to the Crusades The Race for Paradise cites an article by Diana Abouali ("Saladin's Legacy in the Middle East before the 19th Century," Crusades 10 (2011) as "effectively demolish[ing]""the notion that modern Muslims had to be reminded of Saladin." The article is available on Academia.edu, so you can judge for yourself.