Authors: Jonathan Phillips
Closely in tune with the president’s aspirations was an epic product of the Egyptian film industry, Youssef Chahine’s
Saladin
(1963).
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The narrative
follows the crusaders’ murder of innocent Muslim pilgrims, through to the Battle of Hattin, the fall of Jerusalem, and the Third Crusade. As a product of its times it takes certain liberties with strict historical accuracy; it also offered a manifesto for pan-Arabism; for example, early on in the film Saladin says: “my dream is to see an Arab nation united under one flag.”
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The Arabs only fought the Christians because the latter had attacked them; Saladin asked: “Since when do aggressors impose conditions on the legitimate owners? You started this war; if you want peace truly, leave my country.” A crusader responded by asking if this was a declaration of war, to which the emir replied: “I hate war. Islam and Christianity condemn bloodshed. Yet we shall fight if necessary to save our land.” By the end of the film there was a clear message: Saladin and his trustworthy allies presided over a cosmopolitan and humane society; they were worthy guardians of Jerusalem and would freely welcome outsiders to visit. Saladin explained: “Christianity is respected here; you know that. Jerusalem belongs to the Arabs. Stop this bloodshed. That would satisfy God and Christ.”
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The film closed with a wholly imagined scene in which Richard and Saladin hold a nighttime pageant with the former invited into Jerusalem (even though in reality he never entered the holy city). As snow falls, a choir sings “Come All Ye Faithful,” interspersed with a muezzin’s call: peace reigns supreme. What takes only a limited role in the film, interestingly, is religion. As we saw earlier, there was a strong spiritual dimension to Saladin’s jihad against the Christians, but for Chahine and pan-Arabism in the early 1960s this was of secondary importance behind the issue of Arab identity. Nonetheless, the history of the crusading age and the importance of Saladin, Egypt, and Syria in resisting the westerners was now clearly established in the public consciousness.
Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat, forged close links with the West, particularly with the United States. Ultimately, this was to cost him his life, but in 1977 when he became the first Muslim leader to address the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), he too invoked the legacy of Saladin. Presumably based on the sultan’s decision to release Christian prisoners after the capture of Jerusalem, Sadat suggested a positive approach: “Instead of awakening the hatreds of the crusades, we should revive the spirit of . . . Saladin, the spirit of tolerance and respect for rights.”
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Nasser and Saladin were the heroes of another Arab nationalist leader—the self-proclaimed “Lion of Syria,” Hafiz al-Asad, president of the country
from 1971 until his death in 2000.
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He was also keen to develop Arab unity and to defeat the “neo-crusaders” in Israel. While he chose to portray himself as a devout Sunni Muslim, some high in the regime shared his roots in the minority heterodox clan of the Alawites, regarded by many Sunnis as heretics. Indeed, in 1983, Asad brutally crushed the potential challenge of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood by killing around thirty thousand of their supporters in the city of Hama. He also encouraged a tremendous cult of personality. On the main coast road north a monumental statue of him welcomes visitors to his home district and countless banners and pictures of him adorned the shops and offices (now often found alongside the image of his son and successor, Bashar). Given this level of self-promotion the creation of other statuary was rare, although a notable exception stands proudly in front of the citadel of Damascus. First set up in 1992 this monument shows a triumphant Saladin on horseback, preceded by a Sufi holy man and a jihad warrior, while trailing behind him slump disconsolate, defeated crusaders.
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The message is clear: just as Saladin defeated the West, so will Asad. He could invoke jihad rhetoric too—in the run-up to the 1973 struggle with Israel he called the conflict a holy war. Saladin’s achievements were of prime interest, however; the anniversary of his death was usually marked with public ceremonies and the castle named Saone (Zion) in the north of the country was renamed Qal’at Saladin in honor of the medieval hero. Visitors to the president were reminded of history because his office was adorned with a massive picture of Saladin’s victory at Hattin. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger went to Damascus in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war and he reflected: “The symbolism was plain enough: Asad frequently pointed out that Israel would sooner or later suffer the same fate.”
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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Asad in 1984 and wrote: “As Asad stood in front of the brilliant scene [the picture] and discussed the history of the crusaders and the other ancient struggles for the Holy Land, he took particular pride in retelling tales of Arab successes, past and present. He seemed to speak like a modern Saladin, feeling that it was his dual obligation to rid the region of all foreign presence, while preserving Damascus as the only focal point for Arab unity today.”
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One further example of a nationalist leader who embraced the legacy of Saladin and also invoked jihad is Saddam Hussein.
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The Iraqi president made much of the fact that he shared Saladin’s birthplace, the village of Takrit. Given Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds, presumably no one felt inclined
to point out that Saladin himself had been of Kurdish stock but, that historical inconvenience aside, the president emphasized the emir’s recovery of Jerusalem and his resistance to the West. Saddam’s methods of making these connections ranged from a colloquium—“The Battle for Liberation—from Saladin to Saddam Hussein”—to a children’s book on the two men (although Saladin’s career was dealt with in a perfunctory fashion) in which the modern-day leader was called Saladin II Saddam Hussein. A mural on his palace wall depicted the medieval sultan watching his horsemen, while next to him Saddam admired his tanks rolling forward—in both cases, the onlooker imagines, to victory against the West. In the course of the First Gulf War and the coalition invasion of Iraq, Saddam was able to argue that—like Saladin—he was engaged in a defensive jihad. In the context of Muslim history and culture, this was understandable, although to the West it may have seemed cynical for such a secular ruler as Saddam to invoke religion. Even after his defeat in Kuwait, Saddam was able to claim that, in ghazi tradition, he had attacked Israel and had managed to hold on to power, showing he possessed some aspects of baraka (divine blessing).
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The liberation of Palestine was a prominent motif in Saddam’s political discourse and in 2001 he announced the creation of a “Jerusalem army” to take back the city and claimed that huge numbers of recruits had been trained for this purpose. In the buildup to the Second Gulf War he again brought up the defeat of the crusaders, although a mention of the Mongols—who devastated Baghdad in 1258—proved prescient if, from his perspective, ultimately inappropriate.
If the predominantly secular principles of Arab nationalism dominated relations with the West during the latter decades of the twentieth century, in the new millennium, religion and jihad have stepped up the agenda considerably. Jihad is a concept with a wide spectrum of interpretations and meanings. As we saw earlier, its origins lie in the Koran and it stands, therefore, as a fundamental tenet of Islam. There is the greater jihad for purity of the soul and the lesser jihad to fight in the world, although some fundamentalists dispute this hierarchy. Just as crusading can be used in a more secular sense, jihad can also be linked to good causes; thus a jihad al-tarbiya for education. An emphasis on the defensive aspect of the jihad formed an integral part of Islamic holy war. Saladin used such ideas in the medieval age and this defensive duty, as stated in the Koran, has been frequently invoked by nationalists and Islamists alike. If Muslim lands and/or Islamic belief
were attacked, then it is a religious duty to resist—if too few of the faithful are present to do so, then neighbors should assist: “Yet if they ask you for help, for religion’s sake, it is your duty to help them” (Koran 8:72).
More radical Muslims, however, hold that jihad should be expansionist and, at its most extreme, must bring the entire world under sharia law; jihad is a permanent revolutionary struggle for the sake of mankind. This would not require forced conversion, but would topple regimes that were un-Islamic and followed man-made laws. If there was a situation in which Muslims were endangered it would be justifiable to remove such an authority and to bring about a moral regeneration from within. Some Islamists fear that one day their lands will become secularized and their faith as marginalized as Christianity has become in Europe. They argue that proper religious practice will bring God’s blessing, military success, and a change for good.
One country where such a drastic program surfaced was Egypt, where radical thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, exerted a huge influence—hence his execution by the government in 1966. Egyptian defeat in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war advanced the fundamentalist cause and, to some extent, discredited the ruling nationalist and socialist regimes because it was possible to argue that poor religious observance had brought about divine disfavor. After the 1973 war a paradox emerged: more religious imagery was used to encourage a sense of Muslim fraternity in Egypt, yet for wider political reasons President Sadat engaged ever more closely with the United States. One consequence of this was President Carter’s Camp David agreement, a peace accord between Israel and Egypt, which marked the most serious attempt to date to bring lasting solution to the troubles in the Middle East.
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Sadat persuaded religious scholars to issue fatwas that declared the agreement legitimate in Islamic law to try to assuage concern over a deal with Israel and the West. Yet wealth within Egypt was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small elite and western culture had become ever more invasive; fertile ground for radicals. Islamic groups had, to some extent, been tolerated because they offered ties with other Arab countries (the oil states in particular) but in the circumstances outlined here, several of the Islamist parties became radicalized.
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Some groups were outlawed but the Jihad Organization set out to assassinate President Sadat. Their aims were laid out in a document,
The Neglected Duty
, in which they argued that while the Jews were the more distant enemy, the rulers of Egypt were closer and, in accordance
with the Koran, should be dealt with first.
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Egypt needed an Islamic ruler rather than an impious one, and the existence of Israel was the fault of bad Muslim rulers. The text used the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), a Syrian theologian and jurist whose fundamentalist views brought him into trouble during his own lifetime. Ibn Taymiyya stressed the moral duty of the jihad and the need for a ruler to govern according to sharia law. He had issued fatwas against the Mongol rulers of Persia, who, although they professed to be Muslims, continued, he believed, to venerate Chinggis Khan, their world-conquering ancestor; they also made alliances with unbelievers and preferred the Mongol legal code, the yasa, to sharia law.
The Neglected Duty
drew attention to the similarity between Mongol rule and modern Egypt: “Therefore the rulers of these days are apostates. They have been brought up at the tables of colonialism, no matter whether of the crusading, the communist or the Zionist variety. They are Muslims only in name, even if they pray, fast and pretend to be Muslims.”
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Sadat was an apostate and according to sharia law had to be killed; thus the deed was justified and in October 1981 the assassins struck, although they proved mistaken in their belief that his murder would be followed by a popular revolt.
In recent times Osama bin Laden’s pronouncements have emerged as the most powerful, notorious, and strident condemnations of what he regards as anti-Islamic policies by the West. He has reached out to the umma, the Islamic community across the world, particularly in Palestine and Kashmir (and briefly in Chechnya too), and urged Muslims to stand up to the humiliations he claims have been imposed by Israel, the United States, and Britain. Other targets of his anger are the Saudi authorities, whom he regards as having “desecrated their own legitimacy” through the “suspension of Islamic law and replacement thereof with man-made laws . . . and allowing the enemies of God to occupy it in the form of the American crusaders who have become the principal reason for all aspects of our land’s disastrous predicament.”
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Bin Laden is a polemicist of the first order whose canny use of Internet and satellite television technology has enabled him to reach an audience no previous antagonist of the West could have dreamed of.
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His language is laced with texts from the Koran, with Hadith, and statements by authoritative scholars, including Ibn Taymiyya.
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Bin Laden’s allure is also based upon his personal piety, generosity, and the sharing of hardships with his men—qualities that, as the former head of the CIA unit hunting him wrote,
make him “an Islamic hero, as the faith’s ideal type, and almost as a modern-day Saladin.”
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For many years bin Laden has consistently referred to a Judeo-Crusader alliance against Islam, or a fight between the people of Islam and the global crusaders.
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The religious edge this language provides is important to him and, crucially, signposts the ultimate failure of his enemies—and a parallel to the defeat of the medieval crusaders. Bin Laden has viewed the struggle as a war of religion, rather than one of imperialism, which is a concept rarely mentioned in his speeches. When President Bush so disastrously used the word “crusade” in his unscripted response to the 9/11 atrocities he simply fulfilled the claims bin Laden had been making for years: “So Bush has declared in his own words: ‘crusader attack.’ The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouth.”
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He neatly turned Bush’s words against him: “So the world today is split into two parts, as Bush said: either you are with us, or you are with terrorism. Either you are with the crusade or you are with Islam. Bush’s image today is of him being in the front of the line, yelling and carrying his big cross.”
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