Hattin Still Resonates After Eight Centuries

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press
 

Why does the memory of a battle fought more than eight centuries ago near Tiberias  in present-day Israel still resonate among Middle East Muslims?

The Battle of Hattin, on July 4, 1187, was a victory by the Muslim general Saladin over the Christian armies that had conquered much of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, including Jerusalem, in the first two Crusades. 

Precise casualties for the battle are not known, but it resulted in the destruction of the majority of the Crusader army. Quickly advancing in the wake of his victory, Saladin captured Acre, Nablus, Jaffa, Toron (now Tebnine), Sidon, Beirut, and Ashkelon in rapid succession. Jerusalem was finally surrendered on Oct. 2.

Pope Urban II was said to have died of shock upon hearing the news.

Though it did not end warfare between Christians and Muslims – there were many more Crusades to come, including the third, led by England’s King Richard the Lionheart – Jerusalem was never again in Christian hands. Hattin was to be forever connected with the loss of the Holy City. 

Yet in medieval Christian literature, Saladin’s victory and supposed leniency towards the defeated Crusaders became romanticized, demonstrating his supposedly shared code of chivalry.

This attitude remains the case to this day. Indeed, I can still remember an episode of the 1950s British television show The Adventures of Robin Hood – scripted by blacklisted American writers who had fallen afoul of McCarthyism -- where Richard and Saladin met and admired each other’s cultures. (Of course this never happened.)

In Muslim accounts, Hattin provided a different message: It proved that Christians could be beaten. In Muslim memory Saladin is the hero who freed Jerusalem, which had been in the hands of the Crusaders for almost 90 years.

In recent decades, Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, have integrated the victory into their own quest to drive modern western powers out of the Middle East, destroy Israel, and liberate Jerusalem, as Saladin had done.

The 1988 charter of Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, also looks to Hattin for inspiration. It quotes and glorifies Saladin, who is regarded as a committed believer, and therefore, a man above doubts. 

Saladin, it asserts, won the battle in the name of Islam and hence Muslims have to return to their faith in order to triumph. Islam must play a role in the struggle for liberation, it states, “just as it played a role in vanquishing the crusaders.”

Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, was interviewed by a British journalist in 2006. “Remember Hattin,” Meshal told the Spectator’s Julian Manyon. “The Crusader State lasted 88 years,” Meshal observed. “Inshallah the Jewish state will not last that long.”

Fathi Hamad, since April 2009 the Hamas interior minister in the Gaza Strip, made similar statements in December 2013. “Gaza and the West Bank will fuse together, along with our brothers within the 1948 borders, in a second Battle of Hattin, in order to uproot the Jews.” 

As the American novelist William Faulkner wrote in his 1951 book Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”