But Why Saladin? The West’s Low Standard Bar for Islam
We recently discussed the concept of Fake History in the context of Saladin (1137-1193), the Muslim hero who conquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders. We saw how, on the one hand, Westerners have long presented him as a paragon of virtue, moderation, and magnanimity; on the other — and in reality — he was the quintessential “Muslim extremist”: Saladin oppressed and persecuted the Christian minorities under his rule, tarred and destroyed their churches, and did everything that modern “radicals” do. Indeed, the choreographed videos of ISIS members carving off the heads of their victims is straight from Saladin’s playbook.
In short, we saw that Saladin is a prime example of the way Fake History is used to obfuscate: If, as many Westerners are led to believe, Saladin was moderate and magnanimous, then clearly ISIS and other “radicals” are the aberration to the religious norm. (Conversely, if you know the truth about Saladin then, ISIS appears rather mainstream for Islam — hence why so much Fake History is promulgated.)
Yet one question remains: Why Saladin? Of all the Muslim sultans that the West could have heroized, why him?
As we shall see, the answer to this question is important above and beyond the person of Saladin, as it reveals the West’s desperate approach of always trying to find the good in Islam.
Baybars the Barbarian
First, the reason Saladin is extolled in the West is simply because he was better than most other Muslims. Although Saladin did engage in “radical” and “extremist” behavior, he also regularly kept his word with the Crusaders and sometimes behaved magnanimously (for example, by allowing old and decrepit Christians to go free without a ransom first being paid). Such behavior is a far cry from that of other Muslim sultans, who regularly broke their word and never showed mercy.
Take Baybars (1223-1277), the Mamluk sultan whom most Muslims see as a second Saladin: both popularized the cause of jihad and scored several important victories against the Crusaders, coming very close to completely ejecting them from the Holy Land.
Not only was Baybars responsible for the greatest atrocity to occur during the Crusades’ two-century-long history in the Holy Land — the sack of the kingdom of Antioch in 1268 — but he gloated over it in a letter to the Christians:
You would have seen your knights prostrated beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters…your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your [own] money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests, and deacons upon the altars… You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned… [and] your churches pulled down and destroyed.
Like many other sultans — but unlike Saladin — Baybars also regularly employed treachery against the Crusaders. On multiple occasions, after besieging Crusader fortresses he would offer peaceful terms only to renege once the Christians accepted. He did this in 1265 and 1266 when besieging the fortresses of Arsuf and Safad, respectively. In both cases, the defending knights were vastly outnumbered and, in order to save the panicked civilians holed up alongside them, accepted Baybars’s terms of surrender, which included the safe evacuation of the Christian population.
And in both cases, once the Christians emerged, the treacherous sultan double-crossed and had everyone either slaughtered or enslaved. An account of what happened in Safad follows:
The knights accepted [Baybars’s terms] and opened the castle gates, whereupon the sultan offered them a choice of Islam or death. Next morning, when they were paraded outside the walls to give their answer, the castellan stepped forward, begging his brethren not to apostatize. Baybars had him skinned alive and the brethren decapitated, after which he decorated his new possession with their rotting heads.
As for the Christian civilians holed up in Safad, Baybars ordered all 2,000 of them ritually slaughtered. The Templar of Tyre offers more details on this breach of trust:
[Baybars] swore to conduct them in good faith to Acre, safe and secure, so they came out of the castle … [at which point] he had them all seized and conducted some distance from Safad, to a small hillock about half a league away, and there he put them to death, beheaded. Then he had a circular wall erected around them, and their bones and heads may still be seen.
Such was the conduct of the Muslim world’s “second Saladin” — the one you probably never heard of (and for obvious reason).
The Bar Is Lying on the Ground
And therein lies the answer to the Saladin riddle: Because he did not behave this way, but rather kept his word with the Crusaders, Saladin has become something of an anomaly in the Western consciousness — a paragon of Muslim virtue, an example of hope for the Muslim world.
In reality, of course, and compared to many a Christian leader, Saladin’s behavior was not all that remarkable. Countless Crusaders and others made — and kept — pacts with Muslims and others, though they are little remembered for it. After all, among Christians, keeping one’s word was expected and a societal norm.
But because so many Muslims did not keep their word, behaving more like Baybars than Saladin, the latter, though still “radical,” was catapulted in Christian eyes, becoming something far greater than he really was. Indeed, in the Christian imagination, desperate as it was (and still is) to find Muslims to extol, this same Saladin who ordered the beheading of Christians who would not embrace Islam was eventually seen and presented as a “chivalrous knight.”
Now, consider how this phenomenon is still at work. Western people regularly point to this or that Muslim person or institution as an example of “moderation,” when in reality, their supposed moderation is a matter of degree: by Western standards they are still “radical”; but because they are less radical than, say, ISIS, they have become, for the desperate West, paragons of moderation.
One need look no further than to the Muslim world’s most prestigious institution of learning, Al Azhar in Egypt, and its sheikh, Ahmed al-Tayeb, to see this at work. Although that university and its head have said and promoted much of what ISIS says and does, they have also made some diplomatic overtures — for example, hosting and signing papers about “fraternity” with Pope Francis. Because of this, they are hailed as “moderates.”
In short, the bar has been set so low for Muslims that standard social behavior has become cause for celebration.
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2024/12/24/but-why-saladin-the-wests-low-standard-bar-for-islam/
