Kurd and gent
Anthony Blond
Saladin in his Time P.H. Newby
(Faber and Faber £10.95)
Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah al-Din Abu 1-Muzaffer Yusuf ibn Ayyub ibn Shadi (Saladin) was a jumped-up Kurd who became the most powerful man in the Moslem world of the 12th century. He was also, spectacularly, a gent and it is for his reputation rather than for his achievements — like the invention of the Damascus/Cairo axis which crumbled after his death — that he is known in the Western World. This must be why the elegant and talented Mr Newby has chosen to write this new biography.
His publishers are oddly reticent, inciden- tally, in the blurb on this book and do not mention more than four of the author's 20- odd publications, one of which, Something To Answer For won the Booker prize, nor that he was Controller of the Third Pro- gramme and is now Chairman of the English Stage Company; also there is one mingy map and no genealogies.
In his day, Saladin was famous for his generosity and courtesy, and unique for his lack of avarice and vengefulness. This earned him a cool spot in Dante's Divine Comedy and a cameo part in Walter Scott's The Talisman. The Arabs then and now were not so impressed; he was never forgiven for being an upstart who used his campaigns against the Infidels to establish a Dynasty. (At the time of writing this review I happen- ed to find myself in the hands of a Lebanese dentist in East Grinstead. Seeking to in- gratiate myself I mentioned Saladin and asked if he were not one of my potential torturer's heroes; I was surprised by the speed and ferocity of the answer: `No, he is not one of our heroes'.)
Whereas the Celts, the Angles, the Sax- ons and indeed the Normans are in this country happily mingled in the same pot, their distinctions evaporated, the same is not true of the Moslem World. Although Mr Newby adds nothing to our knowledge of Saladin which cannot be got from, say, Sir Steven Runciman, he does help us with our perceptions of the Arab World which is today much as it was then. Orthodox Islam (Sunni) and the sect (Shia) are still with us and still warring; they differ in the same way in their interpretation of the Koran and of the wishes of the prophet Mohamm- ed, founder of the Theocratic State. Islam (like Judaism of which it could fairly be said to be an offshoot — we share Abraham as the first prophet and Moslems originally turned to Jerusalem not Mecca) is a reveal- ed religion with 'commandments' or rules for every human predicament, from the treatment of prisoners of war to the dump- ing of cheap merchandise. Orthodox Jews still believe in the commandments drawn up by Maimonides, medical consultant to Saladin and doctor to David, one of his 17 sons, and Orthodox Moslems still believe that the Koran has the answer to everything. The Moslem World has no other statutory regulations and if the Koran had been seen as an absolute code of con- duct, and if the Ayatollah had been recognised as its chief interpreter, the Americans would not have misplayed their hand so dangerously over the hostages in Iran.
Saladin's world is frighteningly similar to King Hussein's or Arafat's and it is not fan- ciful even to see the suicide bombers of October this year in the Lebanon as the spiritual descendants of the assassins loyal to the death to 'The Old Man of the Mount- ain', the only person of whom Saladin was scared. The spirit of course was the same essence of Cannabis resin, the root of assassin, hash.
The place names even are the same as a thousand years ago: Tripoli, Acre, Aila (Elath), Damascus, Baalbek. Then and now Jerusalem had no strategic, only for all sides religious, importance but there was a difference: the existence of a Frankish, Kingdom stretching thinly down the East- ern littoral of the Mediterranean from An- tioch to Aila. The Franks or Normans were, as Mr Newby points out, rather like the Turks. Both were iron-clad brutes who had come from somewhere else to conquer, and had taken over the religions they found, Christianity and Islam, and given them a savage twist. The Crusaders were better armed, better disciplined and they had the crossbow, the Exocet of the mediaeval world, and were considered so dangerous that when Saladin captured some he had them, contrary to his usual rule, executed. Mr Newby is particularly illuminating on what we would now call ethnic attitudes ob- taining between Christians and Moslems in the 12th-century Levantine scene. To the Moslems, the Christian knight, including, and especially, Richard Coeur de Lion, was a barbarous infidel whose oath even if taken on the Gospel or, when available, the Relic of the True Cross was worthless. The Christians were polytheists because they worshipped more than one God, theTrinity. Although they were, amazingly, monogamists and therefore hen-pecked they broke all the rules by campaigning with their women, their children and their whores, for whose favours on one occasion Saladin's Mameluks broke ranks. Mr Newby illustrates this with an early racist point. A Crusader finds a man in his wife's bed:
'What's that man doing in my bed?'
'It's not your bed, it's my bed and he's cold'. (Crusader thinks) then: 'If it happens again I shall have to recon- sider my attitude towards him'.
Saladin, their 'Noble Enemy', was in Christian eyes quite simply a heathen who must, as a holy duty, be removed from Jerusalem and whose territories were fair game. They thought the Moslems were idolators because they worshipped the Pro- phet Mohammed rather as the British in Ceylon imagined that the Singalese wor- shipped Buddha. The Christians also did not understand that the Koran accepts de facto usurped power; in their own wars they did not move without legal and inherited right. William of Normandy, for instance, would not have invaded England without the backing of the Pope, Harold's oath of fealty and a reasonable dynastic claim. There was no need to behave well to prisoners of war — unless they could be ransomed — so that when Richard captured Acre he felt able to butcher 3,000 Moslem prisoners tied together with ropes together with their women and children in breach of a 'treaty with Saladin. Even after this, Saladin sent him snow to cool his fever and a new mount in the middle of the battle. There was a different rule for kings and Saladin would not have understood the Nuremberg Trials.
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