The Book of Saladin (2 page)

For over three score years we, who had always lived in this region, and the Franj, who came across the water, had been at each other’s throats. Jerusalem had fallen to them in 1099. The old city had been shattered and ruined, its streets washed in Jewish and Muslim blood. Here the clash between the barbarians and our world had been more brutal than in the coastal towns. Every Jew and Muslim had been killed. Congregations in mosque and synagogue had risen in horror as news of this atrocity spread through the land. They had cursed the barbarians from the West, and pledged to revenge this ignoble deed. Perhaps the time had now come. Perhaps the quiet confidence of this man was justified. My heart quickened its pace.

“My friend, Ibn Yakub, whose home Your Excellency has privileged this night, is one of the most reliable scholars of our community. I could think of none better than him to be your scribe. He will not breathe a word of it to anyone.”

The Sultan looked at me for a long time.

“Are you willing?”

“I am at your service, Commander of the Loyal. With one condition.”

“Speak.”

“I have read many books about the kings of old. The ruler is usually portrayed as god or devil, depending on whether the account is written by a courtier or an enemy. Books of this sort have no value. When truth and untruth lie embracing each other in the same bed it is difficult to tell them apart. I must have Your Excellency’s permission to ask questions which might help me to clarify the meaning of a particular episode in your life. It may not be necessary, but we all know the cares which rest on your shoulders and I...”

He interrupted me with a laugh.

“You can ask me whatever you wish. I grant you that privilege. But I may not always reply. That is my privilege.”

I bowed.

“Since you will come to the palace regularly, we cannot keep your appointment secret, but I value discretion and accuracy. There are those in my circle, including our much-loved Kadi, al-Fadil, who will envy you. After all, our al-Fadil is a gifted writer and much admired. He could certainly write what I dictate, but his language is too ornate, too precious for my taste. He clothes the subject in so many fancy words that it is sometimes difficult to perceive his meaning. He is a word-juggler, a magician who is the master of disguise.

“I want you to take down what I say as exactly as you can, without embellishments of any sort. Come to the palace tomorrow and we will make an early start. Now if you will excuse me for a few moments, I wish to consult Ibn Maymun on a personal matter.”

I left the room.

An hour later, as I went to inquire whether they were ready for another bowl of chicken broth, I heard the loud and clear tones of my friend.

“I have often told your Kadi that the emotions of our soul, what we feel inside ourselves, produce very major changes in our health. All those emotions that cause Your Highness upset should be smoothed out. Their cause should be uncovered and treated. Have you told me everything?”

There was no reply. A few minutes later, the Sultan left my house. He was never to return. His retainers would arrive at regular intervals with gifts for my family, and sheep or goats to celebrate the Muslim festival of al-Fitr, that commemorates the sacrifice of Abraham.

From that night till the day he left for Jerusalem, I saw the Sultan every single day. Sometimes he would not let me return home, and I was assigned my own quarters in his palace. For the next eight months, my life was taken over by the Sultan Yusuf Salah-ud-Din ibn Ayyub.

I
BN MAYMUN HAD WARNED
me that the Sultan was an early riser. He woke before dawn, made his ablutions, and consumed a cup of warm water before riding to the Mukattam Hills on the outskirts of the city. Here the citadel was being built. The Sultan, a keen student of architecture, would often overrule the chief builder. He alone knew that the reason for the new structure was not to defend Cairo against the Franj, but to defend the Sultan against popular insurrection.

The city was known for its turbulence. It had grown fast, and attracted vagabonds and malcontents of every sort. For that reason, Cairo frightened its rulers.

Here, too, the Sultan tested his own skills and those of his steed. Sometimes he would take Afdal, his oldest son, with him. Afdal was but twelve years old, and this was his first extended stay in Cairo. The Sultan would use the time to train the boy in the arts and the politics of war. Dynasties, after all, are made or lost on the battlefield. Saladin had been taught this by his father Ayyub and his uncle Shirkuh.

When the Sultan returned that morning, I was waiting for him. I touched my forehead in silent greeting.

“You have arrived at exactly the right moment, Ibn Yakub,” he said, leaping off his horse. He was flushed and sweaty, with his eyes were shining like those of a child. Happiness and satisfaction were written on his face.

“This augurs well for our work, my friend. I will take a bath and join you for breakfast in the library. We can have an hour alone before the Kadi arrives. Shadhi will show you the way.”

An old Kurdish warrior in his nineties, his beard as white as the mountain snow, took me by the elbow, guiding me gently in the direction of the library. On the way he talked about himself. He had been a retainer with the Sultan’s father long before Yusuf was born, and long before Ayyub and his brother Shirkuh had moved down to the plains of Mesopotamia.

“It was I, Shadhi, who taught your Sultan how to ride and wield a sword when he was not yet eight years old. It was I, Shadhi, who...”

In more normal circumstances, I would have listened intently to the old man, and questioned him in great detail, but that day my thoughts were elsewhere. It was my first visit to the palace, and it would be foolish to deny that I was in a state of great excitement. Suddenly my star had risen. I was about to become a confidant of the most powerful ruler of our world.

I was being taken to the most celebrated private library of our city. The books on philosophy alone numbered over a thousand. Everything was here from Aristotle to Ibn Rushd, from astronomy to geometry. It was here that Ibn Maymun came when he wanted to consult the medical formularies of al-Kindi, Sahlan ibn Kaysan, and Abul Fadl Daud. And, of course, the master himself, al-Razi, the greatest of them all. It was here that Ibn Maymun wanted his own books and manuscripts to be kept after his death.

Entering the library, I was entranced by its magnitude and soon lost in lofty thoughts. These volumes, so exquisitely bound, were the repository of centuries of learning and study. Here was a special section containing books unobtainable elsewhere, works denounced as heretical. Such books, to put it another way, as might help to unlock closed minds. They were only available in the reading rooms of the Dar al-hikma if the reader was prepared to offer the librarian an extremely generous gift. Even then, not everything was possible.

Abul Hassan al-Bakri’s
Sirat al-Bakri,
for instance, had vanished from the shops and the public libraries. A preacher at al-Azhar had denounced the book, a biography of the Prophet of Islam, as a total fabrication. He had informed the faithful at Friday prayers that al-Bakri was roasting in hell because of his blasphemy.

Here now in front of me lay the offending book. My hands had trembled slightly as I removed it from the shelf and began to read its opening lines. It seemed orthodox enough to me. I was so absorbed that I noticed neither the recumbent form of Shadhi prostrate on a prayer rug in the direction of Mecca, nor the unannounced arrival of the Sultan. He interrupted my private reverie.

“To dream and to know is better than to pray and be ignorant. Do you agree, Ibn Yakub?”

“Forgive me, Your Excellency, I was...”

He signalled that we be seated. Breakfast was being served. The Sultan was preoccupied. I had suddenly become nervous. We ate in silence.

“What is your method of work?”

I was taken by surprise.

“I’m not sure I grasp your meaning, Commander of the Brave.”

He laughed.

“Come now, my friend. Ibn Maymun has told me that you are a scholar of history. He spoke highly of your attempt to compile a history of your own people. Is my question so difficult to answer?”

“I follow the method of the great Tabari. I write in a strictly chronological fashion. I ascertain the veracity of every important fact by speaking to those whose knowledge was gained directly. When I obtain several different versions of a fact, from several narrators, I usually communicate all of these to the reader.”

The Sultan burst out laughing.

“You contradict yourself. How can there be more than one account of a single fact? Surely there can be only one fact. One correct account and several false versions.”

“Your Majesty is talking about facts. I am talking about history.”

He smiled.

“Should we begin?”

I nodded and collected my writing implements.

“Should we start at the beginning?”

“I suppose so,” he muttered, “since you are so wedded to chronology. I mean it would be better to start with my first sight of Cairo, would it not?”

“The beginning, O Sultan. The beginning. Your beginning. Your first memories.”

I was lucky. I was not the eldest son. For that reason not much was expected from me. I was left to myself a great deal, and enjoyed much freedom. My appearance and demeanour did not pose a threat to anyone. I was a very ordinary boy. You see me now as a Sultan, surrounded by all the symbols of power. You are impressed and, possibly, even a bit frightened. You worry that if you exceed certain proprieties your head might roll in the dust. This fear is normal. It is the effect which power has on the Sultan’s subjects. But this same power can transform even the most diminutive personality into a figure of large proportions. Look at me. If you had known me when I was a boy and Shahan Shah was my oldest brother you would never have imagined that I could be the Sultan of Misr, and you would have been right. Fate and history conspired to make me what I am today.

The only person who saw something in me was my paternal grandmother. When I was nine or ten years old, she saw me and a group of my friends trying to kill a snake. As boys we would compete with each other in these foolish things. We would try and grab a snake by its tail and then swing it, before crushing its head on a stone or, as the braver ones among us did, stamping on its head with our feet.

My grandmother, having observed this scene carefully, shouted at me.

“Yusuf! Yusuf ibn Ayyub! Come here at once!”

The other boys ran away, and I walked slowly towards her, expecting a blow around my ears. My grandmother had a legendary temper and, so Shadhi had once told me, she had struck my father across the face when he was a grown man. No one dared to ask the cause of such a public display. My father had left the room and, so they say, mother and son did not speak to each other for a year. In the end, it was my father who apologised.

To my amazement, she hugged me and kissed me in turn on both my eyes.

“You are fearless, boy, but be careful. Some snakes can strike back, even when you have them by the tail.”

I remember laughing with relief. She then told me of a dream she had experienced before I was born.

“You were still inside your mother’s belly. I think you kicked a great deal. Your mother used to complain sometimes that she felt she was going to give birth to a colt. One night I dreamt that a large man-swallowing snake was crawling towards your mother, who was lying uncovered in the sun. Your mother opened her eyes and began to sweat. She wanted to move, but could not lift her body. Slowly the snake crawled towards her. Then suddenly, like the door of a magical cave, her belly opened. An infant walked out, sword in hand, and, with one mighty blow, decapitated the serpent. Then he looked at his mother and walked back into her stomach. You will be a great warrior, my son. It is written in your stars and Allah himself will be your guide.”

My father and uncle laughed at my grandmother and her foolish dreams, but even at that time this interpretation undoubtedly had a positive effect on me. She was the first person to take me seriously.

Her words must have had some effect. After this incident, I noticed that Asad al-Din Shirkuh, my uncle, was beginning to watch me carefully. He took a personal interest in my training as a horseman and sword-fighter. It was he who taught me everything I know of horses. You are aware, are you not, Ibn Yakub, that I know the complete genealogies of all the great horses in our armies? You look surprised. We will talk about horses another day.

If I shut my eyes and think of my earliest memories, the first image that fills my mind is the ruins of the old Greek temples at Baalbek. Their size made one tremble in admiration and awe. The gates leading into the courtyard were still intact. They were truly built for the gods. My father, as representative of the great Sultan Zengi of Mosul, was in charge of the fortress and its defence against the Sultan’s rivals. This was the town where I grew up. The ancients named it Heliopolis, and worshipped Zeus there, and Hermes and Aphrodite.

As children, we used to divide into different groups at the feet of their statues, and hide from each other. There is nothing like a ruin to excite the imagination of a child. There was magic in those old stones. I used to daydream about the old days. Till then the world of the ancients had been a complete puzzle. The worship of idols was the worst heresy for us, something that had been removed from the world by Allah and our Prophet. Yet these temples, and the images of Aphrodite and Hermes in particular, were very pleasing.

We used to think how exciting it would have been if we had lived in those times. We often fought over the gods. I was a partisan of Aphrodite, my older brother, Turan Shah, loved Hermes. As for Zeus, all that remained of his statue was the legs, and they were not very attractive. I think the rest of him had been used to build the fortress in which we now lived.

Shadhi, worried at the corrupting effect of these remnants from the past, would try and scare us away from the ruins. The gods could transform humans into statues or other objects without their losing their minds. He would invent tales of how djinns and demons, and other ungodly creatures, would gather at these sites whenever there was a full moon. All they discussed was how to grab and eat children. Hundreds and thousands of children have been eaten here by the djinns over the centuries, he would tell us in his deep voice. Then, seeing the fright on our faces, he would qualify what he had said. Nothing would harm us, since we were under the protection of Allah and the Prophet.