The just sultan who prepared Salahuddin

For 28 years, from Aleppo, Nur ad-Din Zangi unified the fractured Sunni Muslim world of Syria, defeated the Crusaders repeatedly, and sent to Egypt the small army in which a young man named Salahuddin was serving. He died before he could take Jerusalem. Salahuddin would do it in his name thirteen years later.

Nur ad-Din Mahmud ibn Zangi was born in 1118 CE in Aleppo, second son of the Turkic warlord Zangi. Zangi ruled Mosul and Aleppo as an atabeg, nominally a subordinate of the Seljuk sultan, effectively an independent king. Zangi was killed in 1146 by a drunken slave while on campaign. The territory was divided between his two sons: Sayf al-Din got Mosul, and Nur ad-Din got Aleppo. Nur ad-Din was 28.

He inherited a fragmented Sunni Muslim world in Syria. The First Crusade had taken Jerusalem in 1099 and had established four crusader states along the coast: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the County of Edessa. Muslim resistance to the crusader states had been sporadic and factional. Damascus was ruled by its own dynasty and often allied with Jerusalem against Aleppo. The Fatimid caliphate ruled Egypt as a Shia counter-caliphate to the Sunni Abbasids in Baghdad. Baghdad itself was politically inert under the Seljuq sultans. The ummah was in pieces.

Nur ad-Din spent 28 years, from 1146 to his death in 1174, reassembling the Sunni Muslim world of Syria. His first great victory was the recapture of Edessa in 1146, only weeks after his accession. Edessa had been the first crusader state; its loss to Nur ad-Din triggered the Second Crusade under Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany.

The Second Crusade was catastrophic. It besieged Damascus in 1148, pushing the Damascus Burid dynasty into Nur ad-Din's arms, and was routed. Damascus, in gratitude, opened its gates to Nur ad-Din in 1154. The two great Muslim cities of the Levant were now under a single Sunni banner for the first time in the crusader era.

In 1164 Nur ad-Din sent an army to Egypt under his Kurdish general Shirkuh. Shirkuh brought his young nephew Salahuddin Yusuf ibn Ayyub, then in his mid-twenties, as an assistant. The Egyptian expedition took four campaigns and ten years. Shirkuh was killed in 1169. Salahuddin, still only in his early thirties, was appointed vizier of Egypt by the Fatimid caliph, as a Sunni Kurd, technically the last vizier of a Shia caliphate.

Two years later, in 1171, Salahuddin, nominally still Nur ad-Din's subordinate, formally abolished the Fatimid caliphate. The Friday khutba in Cairo was said in the name of the Sunni Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, not the Shia Fatimid. Nur ad-Din had achieved what no Sunni king had achieved in two hundred years: the reunification of the Muslim world of Egypt and the Levant under one confessional banner.

Salahuddin's growing power in Egypt made Nur ad-Din anxious. The classical Muslim historians preserve their tense correspondence. Nur ad-Din suspected Salahuddin was building an independent Egyptian power base. Salahuddin sent his father Ayyub to Damascus as a hostage of loyalty. Nur ad-Din was on the verge of moving against him in early 1174 when he died suddenly of a throat infection at 56.

Salahuddin was thus freed of Nur ad-Din's suspicions. He inherited the political geography Nur ad-Din had built. He unified Egypt and Syria under his own hand over the following decade. In 1187 he took Jerusalem back for Islam at Hattin, the goal Nur ad-Din had aspired to for 28 years.

Nur ad-Din's personal reputation among the classical Muslim scholars is exceptional. He lived austerely. He wore rough wool. He ate simple food. He administered justice personally in his court in Damascus every Friday, hearing petitions from any Muslim who came, without intermediaries. He revived Sunni Hanafi jurisprudence in Aleppo through the great madrasas he endowed. He built the mosques, hospitals, and caravanserais that still shape the medieval fabric of Damascus and Aleppo.

He was known as al-adil, the just, an epithet Salahuddin's Ayyubid successors would explicitly claim as their descent. When Nur ad-Din's tomb was visited by the great historian Ibn Athir a generation later, Ibn Athir wrote: "After the Rashidun caliphs, I know of no ruler whose conduct was more excellent than his."

What the story teaches

Nur ad-Din Zangi is remembered because he is the ruler who did the unglamorous, decades-long work that Salahuddin then completed in a single afternoon at Hattin. He unified factions. He built madrasas. He revived Sunni jurisprudence. He negotiated the political geography of the Levant. He fought the Crusaders in a dozen small engagements over three decades. He never took Jerusalem himself. He died in Damascus of a throat infection with the goal still unmet. And Salahuddin, his subordinate general, freed from his suspicions only by his death, inherited every piece of political preparation Nur ad-Din had made and completed the work in his name. The classical Muslim historians take from this a lesson about how great deeds are usually done: not in a single generation, not by a single hero, but across two or three generations of patient unglamorous administrative work that finally makes the single moment of victory possible. Nur ad-Din made Hattin possible. Salahuddin won it. Every Muslim who honours Salahuddin's name is, whether they know it or not, honouring Nur ad-Din by the same act.