Saladin: hero or infidel?

In Baghdad in the 1980s there was a children’s book published called The Hero Saladin. The cover bore an image of Saddam Hussein, identified, in what his biographer drily describes as ‘the second and longer part’ of the book, as ‘Saladin II Saddam Hussein’.

Given that Saladin was actually Kurdish — and knowing what we do about Saddam’s respect for that section of his population — the gesture seems even more crass and insolent than it might otherwise. But then, it’s also absolutely standard. Jinnah was Saladin. Assad was Saladin. Saladin is, in modern Arab and Muslim political mythology, more icon than historical figure. If the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Arab street in the 20th century were the sentimentality of English football fans, he’d be Bobby Moore.

Anne-Marie Eddé remarks in a punchy moment that she prefers to ‘use the term “myth” rather than “legend” ’ of these representations — because the Western Saladin is at least a distortion of actual history, whereas ‘the Saladin myth in Arab countries is closer to a political construction that freely and subjectively interprets a historical reality to adapt it to a given situation’.

That’s not such a clear distinction as she makes it sound, perhaps; but it nods to how live an issue this is. Our Saladin — chivalrous, honourable, near-as-dammit Christian and (in the providential apologetics of the Crusades) an instrument of God’s will — gets his start in medieval chansons de geste. He’s the worthy opponent of Richard the Lionheart. The Eastern myth of Saladin gets going much later — with the rise of Arab nationalism in the 19th century. And it is — which I guess is Eddé’s point about myth versus legend — not the stuff of romance so much as of propaganda.

So this fastidious and superbly well researched book is, in some ways, the biography of an idea.