Tariq Ali - The Book of Saladin

I looked at Zainab. She had recovered her composure and was pleased that her story had astonished me. I could also see from Jamila’s eyes that she had now found a replacement for the lost Halima.

Contrary to what is said, Ibn Maymun, the fickleness of a woman’s heart is something we can never match.

My warmest greetings to your family.

Your old friend,

Ibn Yakub.

The Franj plague returns to Acre and Salah al-Din is depressed; he confides his innermost doubts to me

I ENVY YOU, DEAR friend Ibn Maymun. I envy your beautiful home near Cairo. I envy your peace of mind and I wish I had never left the sanctuary that you so kindly provided me in my hour of need.

I am at fault. I have not written to you for many months, but I have been moving all the time in the wake of our Sultan. How everything has changed once again. The fortunes of this war are forever fluctuating. I am writing to you from Acre, which is under siege by the Franj, whose decision to attack the city took us all by surprise. Salah al-Din was two days away, but returned with his soldiers, who were vastly outnumbered by the Franj.

Such is the power of our Sultan that the very news of his approach startled the enemy. They did not put up a fight, but instead withdrew to their camp. We sent some of our soldiers back into Acre and messengers were sent for help. Taki al-Din left his watch outside Antioch and joined us, as did Keukburi. As you know, these are the two emirs who the Sultan would trust with his life, and their arrival cheered his spirits.

The response from other quarters was limited. The in-fighting amongst the rulers of Hamadan and Sinjar and some other towns has meant that their aims no longer harmonise with those of Salah al-Din.

When the Franj finally joined battle the results were not clear. It was neither victory nor defeat for both sides. Our position grows steadily weaker and the Franj grow daily more audacious, but the final victory may belong to our side. The situation as I write is as follows. Picture the Franj trying to besiege Acre and take us by surprise. Now shut your eyes and imagine how our Salah al-Din came up quietly behind the Franj and transformed the besiegers into the besieged. In Imad al-Din’s immortal words, “After being like the brow around the eye, they have now become like the eye surrounded by the eyebrow.” His imagery is powerful, but I think it is designed to conceal the despair that he really feels. We began this year with the Sultan acknowledged as the supreme master of Palestine. Now, once again, we are fighting for our survival, and the Sultan sometimes wishes that he had never left Cairo.

He never pauses for a rest. He usually sleeps no more than two or three hours every night. I wish you were here so that you could advise him on how to preserve his health. Looking at him these days, he is like a candle, which still displays a piercing flame, but which is slowly burning itself out. He is over fifty years old, but he leads his soldiers into battle as if he were twenty, his sword raised and without a care in the world. And yet I know that he is extremely worried about the state of his army. It is beginning to affect his spiritual and physical health. He has not slept at all for the last three days. His face is pale, his eyes, normally alert and lively, are listless. I feel he needs someone with whom he can share all his troubled thoughts. As always I wish Shadhi was here, but even Imad al-Din or your great Kadi al-Fadil would be a useful presence. You might mention my worries to al-Fadil if this letter ever reaches you. I am not a good substitute for any of these three men, and yet I am the only one here who knows him and has been close to him for over ten years. Is it really ten years ago that you recommended me to him, Ibn Maymun? Time is cruel.

He talks to me a great deal these days, and sometimes I get the feeling that he wants me to stop being a scribe. He looks into my eyes, demanding a reply that would comfort him and ease his fears, but as you know well, I have no real knowledge of matters military and my understanding of the emirs of Damascus and their rivalries is, alas, limited. I have never realised my own shortcomings as I have on this particular trip, When Salah al-Din has needed me, I could offer him nothing.

I remember you explaining to me a long time ago that when minds are agitated, all we can offer our friends is to sit quietly and listen to their tales of woe. People in such a state rarely follow anyone’s advice and can even become resentful if one says something that they do not wish to hear. You said all this in relation to love, but the emotion that is plaguing our Sultan is indecision in the face of the enemy. He thinks of two or three alternatives but cannot determine which to follow.

I sit and listen to his sad voice. Yesterday I was summoned to his tent when the full moon was at its zenith. I had been fast asleep, but as I walked to his tent, the cool air refreshed my brain. These were the exact words spoken to me by the Sultan.

Hardly a night goes by, Ibn Yakub, without my feeling that Allah is beckoning me. I am not long for this life, scribe. I have spent fifty years in this world, which is a blessing from Allah. A strange thing happens to a man after he reaches fifty. He stops thinking about the future and spends more and more time thinking about the past. He smiles at the good memories and cringes all over again at the foolishnesses of which he was guilty.

These last few weeks I have been thinking a great deal of my father Ayyub. In the course of his life my noble father, may he be happy in Heaven, never had occasion to fall on his knees in order to gratify a ruler. He always held his head high. He disliked hearing his virtues praised and he was deaf to the coarse flattery that is part of everyday life in the citadel. It always gave him pleasure to oblige others.

He was a generous man. Shadhi must have told you all this, but he had a real weakness for maidservants. You look surprised, Ibn Yakub. Do I take it that this fact was kept from you by the ever-indiscreet Shadhi? Allah protect me! I’m amazed. It wasn’t much of a secret. Whenever a new maidservant approached my father used to feel the sap rise in him, and he never wasted his seed. Once my mother reproached him for this and he hurled a hadith at her head, according to which, if it is to be believed, “the share of a man to copulate has been predestined and he will have to do it under all circumstances.” My mother, who was a plain-speaking woman, after a few sentences of the choicest Kurdish abuses which I will not repeat, then asked him how it had come about that men could find a hadith to justify everything they did to women, but the opposite was never the case. Why am I talking about him in this fashion? I had called you in to discuss more urgent matters, but your presence always reminds me of old Shadhi, and I find myself talking with you as I used to with him, in a way I could never do with al-Fadil or Imad al-Din, and not even my own brothers.

Most of my emirs and soldiers imagine I have the solution to all our problems, but we know better. A ruler may be strong or weak, but he is always lonely. Even the last Fatimid Caliph in Cairo, surrounded by eunuchs and addicted to the banj which kept him remote from reality, even he once wept in my presence and confessed how the lack of even a single true friend had brought him more grief than anything else, including the loss of real power.

I have been lucky. I have had good friends and advisers, but this war has being going on for far too long. I do not deny my mistakes. We should have taken Tyre after al-Kuds. It was a grave error on my part to move down the coast, but that was not an insurmountable problem. I am beginning to think there is something that goes deep in all those amongst us who believe in Allah and his Prophet. It is almost as if this creed is so strongly rooted in us that we do not feel an obligation to believe in anything else. How else can one explain the degeneration that has taken place in Baghdad? Not even the Commander of the Faithful himself would dare compare himself to the first four Caliphs.