Muhammad West – The Revival #16
AI: Summary ©
The history of the Fatrais dynasty in Syria, including the rise of the new ruler and the collapse of the older Habs Empire, is discussed. The conflict between Islam and Syria, the rise of the new ruler's army, and the fall of the first crusade have caused the loss of the first Checktower and the second Checktower. The conflict has also caused the loss of the first Checktower and the second Checktower, leading to war and destruction. The conflict between the royal family and the new Empire, the fall of Jerusalem, and the fall of the city have caused war and destruction, leading to war and destruction, and the need for peace. The redeeming of Jerusalem by the new United States of America is also discussed.
AI: Summary ©
My beloved brothers and sisters
Hope you're well.
Today, we'll do
a a quick rush through the crusades and
speak about Salahuddin.
So quick summary.
The 1st crusade is called,
and this crusader army comes through the entire
of Europe into the Middle East. They don't
have much of resistance, and they capture a
a
number of cities,
and they enter Jerusalem
11,
11,
99.
Sorry. 10/99,
the last year of 11th century, and they
commit this massive genocide
in Jerusalem that till today, it's one of
the worst acts of of, a city being
sacked in in history. And they carve out
4 Crusader states, 4 countries, or 4 states
that are ruled within the Muslim land. And,
you know, we have to reflect on this.
We look back and we said, you know,
the the they're surrounded by a Muslim,
continent. They're surrounded by Muslims all over. Why
can't the Muslims get their act together? And
that's why it's so much resonates with us
today. A tiny little state in the heartland
of Islam, and the Muslim Muslim could Muslims
can't get their act together. And it takes
them a long time, 50 years before a
a a response happens where a warlord called
Imad, he conquers one of these crusader states
and the 2nd crusade begins. So the pope
calls a 2nd crusade which goes and it
fails miserably.
The 2nd crusade comes and it fails. This
warlord, Imad, has a son, Nur Nurudeen Nurudeen,
who is nothing like his father and is
a man of absolute piety. And we spoke
about how the historians mentioned that they had
not seen an amir like,
of his like since Omar ibn Abdul Aziz.
His justice, his sense of iman and taqwa
was something truly,
inspiring,
and he made it his mission. He was
given a tiny city. He wasn't the elder
brother. He was the younger brother, and he
was given a, a Aleppo, which is a
big city, but he was given an Aleppo
is on the border with the crusaders,
and he made it his mission to unite
the different warlords and cities as a united
front against the against the Crusaders. This was
his mission. He didn't want a big empire.
He wanted to remove and liberate Jerusalem. This
was his his his dream.
And
what showed his, we mentioned yesterday, what really
showed his true,
you know,
the quality of the man was when Damascus,
who was an ally of the Crusaders,
when they had turned against Damascus, when the
Crusaders turned against Damascus and went to invade
their own ally,
even though the Damascus had been fighting Aleppo
for years, he came to the rescue. He
came to rescue his enemy from the Crusaders,
and this endeared him to the Muslims. And
I and I think imagine
imagine a you have in our time, a
Muslim country, a tiny Muslim country
who does something for the sake of Islam,
who turns against, you know, against their own
interest to benefit the Ummah, how the Ummah
would feel for this. So that's how the
Ummah felt when they saw this man doing
something for the sake of the Ummah instead
of his own well-being. And then subhanahu wa
ta'ala and this is this is what shows
when Allah the prophet says when Allah loves
you, he gives you the dunya without you
trying. Without him even trying,
his brother passes away and he inherits Iraq.
The city of Damascus overthrows their own government
and they give it to him. So he
without fighting, he gets control of the region.
And now he's the most powerful man in
the in in the area, and now he
takes on the crusaders. And he's able to
to to push them back and really,
start
winning victories against them.
He then we mentioned he went on Hajj,
and as he went on Hajj, he had
this amazing
vision where he saves the the the prophet's
grave from being ransacked by Crusaders.
And it also happened that the king of
of Jerusalem, the Crusader king of Jerusalem, he
passes away. So now
there's a lot of instability within the Crusader
states,
and
they realized that
expanding further into Syria was not not possible.
The Nur Udine is there. It's a very
strong Amir. We can't do anything but
south. Now you all know Gaza. We all
know now. Gaza,
the bottom of the Rafa crossing. Who's on
the other side of the Rafa crossing? Egypt.
Egypt and Gaza are connected. The Crusaders are
ruling, basically, Gaza.
So the next
country is Egypt, and we said the Fatima
dynasty
was basically at its end. It is on
the verge of collapse. It is on the
verge of collapse. Civil war had gone, you
know, rampant, and the Crusaders,
this,
saw that Egypt was a potential
easy win for them to extend their control
and from there as a base of operations.
And so the,
the ruler of Egypt, or the the vizier
of Egypt, he gets coud, he gets thrown
out, and everyone's favorite guy when you're in
trouble is Nurudeen. So he rushes to Nurudeen,
and he says, save me, help me, put
me back in charge. Nur ad Din basically
says, I have no interest in in Egypt.
I'm fighting a war with the Crusaders. Why
must I help you? And this guy basically
says the the the vizier of of Egypt
says, you go. I'll help you. Send me
an army. Put me back in charge, and
I'll be your ally. Fatimid,
whatever he is. And so Nuruluddin says, no
problem. I'll assist you. Nuruddin sends his army.
Now his army is a Kurdish army. It's
it's from Iraq, basically. And they have,
the general is is name well, the general
of their family name is Ayub.
Just keep that in mind. And so this
Ayubid army under Nur Ud Din is sent
to Egypt to help re put the governor
back in in charge, and they do that.
The army puts him back in charge. And
instead of fulfilling his his mandate, he said,
look. I'll pay you guys money. I'll support
you. The minute he's back in charge, he
signs an agreement with the crusaders and say,
help me kick Nur ad Din's army
out.
He signs an agreement with the king of
Jerusalem. Help me kick Nur ad Din's army
out. So Nur ad Din is in a
big trouble. His army is in Egypt. The
crusaders are coming to help,
with Egypt to kill his own army. What
does he do? And like a game of
chess, he says, well, if the kingdom of
Jerusalem sends its army to Egypt, then I
will attack the crusader states directly. And he
sends an army against them and wins a
major victory, and this gives his own army
a chance to attack
to
to to to Syria.
And so,
this
this this sort of saves his army. Egypt
is aligned with the Crusaders,
and Nur Ud Din is, reestablishing his power
base. A few years later, the Crusaders had
enough of
indirectly ruling Egypt. They wanted to directly rule
it. So when they send an army a
second time to conquer Egypt, the same governor,
he contacts Nur Ud Din and say, help
me, please. They're coming to invade me. Nur
ad Din says, no problem. I'll help you.
He sends the same army,
and they defeat the Crusaders. And this time,
he takes care of the governor properly. They
get rid of that governor, and this Kurdish
army, the Ayyubid army, takes control of Egypt.
And the Ayyubid general, he's got a young
nephew called
Yusuf. Ibn Ayub, we know as Saladin.
He's a young general. He comes with his
uncle. They come to save Egypt. And once
they had,
saved Egypt from the Crusaders, the people of
Egypt willingly and, like, for example, Alexandria again,
they willingly give their support to Nurudeen. During
this fight, it's obviously a fight between the
Egyptians, the Crusaders, Nurudeen's army, Alexandria openly sides
with Nurudeen, and the Ayyubid army, the Kurdish
army under Nurudin's flag, they are ruling Egypt
now. And so the man has done what
no one has done for the last 300
years. Egypt, Syria, Iraq is under one person,
Andaluruddin.
He's,
young he has a young general, Salahuddin.
He's in charge,
and they basically make Salahuddin like the vizier.
And they choose him because he's young, he's
inexperienced.
Nur ad Din feels everyone feels like he's
someone that we can easily manipulate.
He will take he will take orders, and
Salahuddin slowly begins to administer and change Egypt.
He removes the Fatimids, and this is actually
the end of the Fatimid dynasty. So remember
in the time of Ghazali, the Fatimids were
this massive threat to the Khalifa.
Now they are completely gone. They disappear. Who
ended them? Salahuddin basically ends them under Nurudeen.
And,
Salahuddin,
a bit of his backstory. So as we
can see, he's he's very closely connected to
the the rulers. You know, his family are
the
generals of the rulers, and he grows up
with them. And initially, it mentions that like
any young man that has power, he enjoyed
himself as his youth. He,
but he once he started becoming closer to
Nurudeen,
Nurudeen became like his mentor
and advised him that there's bigger stuff we
need to do, that we are yes, you
are like a royalty in their terms, but
we have a job to do. And he
gives himself to this grand plan of conquering
Jerusalem once again. It's also self to this
grand plan of conquering Jerusalem once again. It
also mentions that he studied in the Nizami,
yeah, had a great love for Imam Ghazali's
books. And so you can see the seeds
of of of that effort beginning to to
show. So so Salahuddin,
young man, is in charge of Egypt, and
he's a very good administrator.
His,
his his taqwa, his ethics, his integrity is
something which people admire,
and he's able to transform Egypt,
and rebuild it. Now as he's rebuilding Egypt,
it's becoming stronger and stronger. He's getting an
army of his own. Nur ad Din
is feeling a bit
insecure in Syria,
and he feels that Egypt is becoming an
independent power base under Salahuddin.
And, here you see, sometimes we romanticize our
history, and we think this is all fun
and game, fun. You know, people are all
pious and and, buttaqeen.
It's quite clear that Nur ad Din started
asking Salahuddin, when are you gonna hand Egypt
over to me? You are still under mine.
You're still my general. And Salahuddin says, you
are the Amir and I support you, but
he made every excuse not to go to
Syria.
And he made every took every opportunity. He's
building up this army in Egypt
aligned to him and not aligned to Nurudeen.
And it appears,
eventually, Nurudeen says I had enough of this.
You're either going to come to me or
I'm going to invade Egypt, and he raises
an army and he actually marches on Saladin.
It appears that these 2 men are gonna
go to war as will.
Nur ad Din
dies of a throat infection
on his way to Egypt.
And with that, Salahuddin takes the opportunity. He
rushes to the Janaza of Nur ad Din,
and he, you know, proclaims, you know, this
is our leader, our Amir. We love him
and we
respect him, and everything was done for him,
and this is all his kingdom, Egypt and
Syria, all of it is his, and I
have come to,
support him. Nanuruddin had a a young son
of 11 who basically inherits the kingdom, and
he says, I will be there to run
the the kingdom in
in charge with to get until the son
is ready to take over, will be like
his vizier. And he marries Nur ad Din's
wife. So there's other ways of politically
these guys are political also. Besides Thaqq, there's
other ways of doing it. So he marries
Nur ad Din's widow
and because he's well liked, he's well known,
he's done a good good job in Egypt,
the the the Nurudeen's
entire empire that he built over his life
sort of falls in the lap of Saladin.
And
he he basically now is in charge
of Nur ad Din's Syrian empire and his
own Egyptian empire, and for the first time,
we have a united front and the this
is the this is where the Crusaders realize
that time is up. For the first time,
we have all of,
you know, the Middle East under one ruler.
The king of, and this is sometimes you
watch the movies, you know the king of,
the the crusader at this time was a
young boy who had leprosy. So if you
like, at this time, just so so be
the the crusade has also lost the king
of Jerusalem and, sort of a 16 year
old boy becomes the new king, and he's
a a man of licorice. And so it
appears like, look, everything is going against him.
Salahuddin takes his first stab at them, and
he has a massive war against the Crusaders,
and he loses a massive battle. He loses
badly against this young Crusader king who has,
this leprosy. And this forces
Salahuddin to re go back. It sets him
back 10 years, and he needs to rebuild
again his army. And for 10 years, there's
this tug of war between Salahuddin and and
the king of Jerusalem,
and no one is able to to sort
of win each other out, and so there
is a truce. Both sides said, look. Let's
just agree to, have a truce. And for
a number of years, there's truce between Salahuddin
and and the Crusaders.
Now
what breaks the truce and really what's going
to,
eventually cause the crusaders to collapse was one
of the generals
or one of the warlords of the crusaders,
a fanatical. You can imagine this ultra religious
bigot, hated
Islam.
He does many things to really,
go against the truce. He he establishes a
fleet to go and attack Makkah to burn
the Kaaba down, and Salahuddin has to stop
him. He also continues to harass the pilgrims,
the the the the Hujaz because now there's
a truce. People are now making Hajj again.
Remember, while there's a war, no one is
making Hajj because no one can travel during
the warfare. So now that there is a
peace between the Crusaders, and the Muslims, people
are going on Hajj. And this warlord
attacks this caravan of Hajjis
and kills them, and in this caravan is
Salahuddin's sister. And so Salahuddin says sends a
letter to the king of Jerusalem. He's like,
what's up? You know, we have an agreement.
You need to reign in your guy,
and and and and the crusaders basically says,
there's nothing we're gonna do
about it, and now he says the truce
is over and we declare war. And all
of this, subhanAllah, is very the way in
which he's conducting himself is very much with
honor and chivalry, decency. We have a a
truce you you we we promise to honor
each other's pilgrims, we promise to not hurt
civilians, you guys have crossed the line and
it once again shows, you know, in in
in Time Magazine at the end of, you
know, the the millennium, the last millennium, the
man on the front cover, the back cover,
the the inside cover was because
he really had he's a general. He doesn't
mind playing the game, but there are limits
to the way we play this game. And
there is a type of of honor and
decorum in how we do this. And so
when the Crusaders break their their their treaty,
he says, now we declare war.
And he he's been mobilizing, building his army
for 10 years, and he sends it against
against the crusaders. And long story short, there's
a massive battle, and this battle is important
to know, the battle of Hattin,
very clever battle. So what he did was
he sends his army against a little fortress,
not against Jerusalem, against a fortress. And he
chose this fortress because it's kind of in
the middle of nowhere. To get there, you
have to cross sort of harsh desert terrain,
and his hope was, look, so the Crusaders
have one one option is we leave it
and we let the the city fall. You
can take it. Or we have to send
our army to liberate the the fortress.
And,
the this generation of crusaders are quite quite
dumb, and so they take the bait. They
send their army
through this harsh terrain, and all the water
wells along the way,
so Saladin has them as a as a
poison, so they have no water. And he
manages to put obstacles, so they are walk
marching for days without any water. And then
when they finally
are in at extreme exhaustion and dehydration, he
has the fields burned. He surrounds them. And
this is the,
you know, final defeat of the crusaders. He
captures
of Jerusalem. He captures this warlord who had,
who had who had, killed his sister, and
the the the Crusader army is destroyed. All
the heads of the Crusader states are taken
captive and in his decorum so this is
always to show now how does he deal
with with them. He offers
the soldiers of the king of the crusaders.
He offers them, you know, ice water and
even says to this guy, this warlord,
Reynaldo Chaitin,
who he hated so you know, desperately hated
him. He said, you are in my tent.
I am obliged to give you water. So
have your sip, and then I'm gonna kill
you. Execute you. So on the one hand,
on I have to honor my guests, so
I will do so. And when you're done,
then I'll take my I have to, Indu.
And he says it's not it's not right
for one ruler to kill another ruler, but
really you've crossed all all bounds. It also
mentions, Subhan, this is something about about the
kind of way in 40 4 jihad. When
he was besieging
this city,
there was a wedding going on, and the
mother of the bride sends him a letter
and says, my white daughter's getting married. Can
you not can you just hold your siege
for a few hours so that they can
conclude the wedding? And he says, okay. I'll
do so. He holds the cat catapults. I
mean, these things are, like, unbelievable.
Anyway, so he destroys the Crusader army, and
now there is no army left to defend
Jerusalem.
And so he marches his army on Jerusalem
1187. So this is like 88
years. 88 years. So just to think about
it as, you know, when we are sad
about Gaza, and we're sad about Palestine, They
took longer. We haven't yet gone to 87
years, I believe. How long? How many years
now? It's not yet been it's 78 years.
Right? It's 78 years. SubhanAllah. So it's 87
years before the Muslims can really return to
Jerusalem. And now he comes to Jerusalem, which
has no defenders,
and
he demands the city be handed over. The
defenders are convinced. Look. If we hand you
hand the city over, you're going to repay
us for what we did to you guys
90, 87 years ago. You're gonna kill every
single Christian. You're going to burn every church.
You're going to do all of that.
And after a few days of negotiations,
he said he gave them unbelievably
fair terms. The terms are anyone who wishes
to remain in the city, Muslim, Jew, or
Christian, can remain in the city at peace.
Whoever wants to leave will will be left.
I will escort you to Europe. You can
take whatever property you want, and there will
be no harming.
And he reaffirmed,
there was remember when Sayidina Umar conquered Jerusalem,
he had this constitution drawn up where everyone
was in they're gonna live in peace, every
Jew, every Muslim, any pilgrim. Say Na'omun's constitution
of Jerusalem, say, takes
it out and says we will reaffirm this.
As as say Na'omun had done, this will
be how Jerusalem will be will be mandated.
And this really this is why he is
who he is. He's like the the Nelson
Mandela, if you would, of of that time.
This is where he could really have taken
there was nothing to stop him, to take
complete he could have massacred everybody in there,
and it would be par for the course.
But he enters and he conquers Jerusalem in
such a peaceful manner.
The same way, Rasulullah conquers Mecca, such a
peaceful manner, and an opportunity to repay them
for that 100 years of persecution.
And he gives over the city freely,
to the to the people and to the
pilgrims, and he says to the crusaders as
they leave that you are always guests in
my land. You will always be guests in
this land. If you guys wanna come back,
then you know you are our guests. So
if you wanna come to worship, no problem.
After everything that they had been through and
so the city falls peacefully,
in 11 87,
and,
this is he had,
given back all the holy relics to the
Christians. They could take their crosses and whatever
they wanted, and, of course, then the masjid
is is is reestablished. The adhan is given
once again from the Dome of the Rock.
And this is sort of, where he
he becomes the legend Salahuddin. What would happen
is a 3rd crusade would happen. And even
though the 3rd crusade is very popular, this
is where the king of England, Richard the
Lionheart, comes and he's very famous,
a dashing, you know, military genius. The whole
of Europe now comes together to to recapture
Jerusalem. You can imagine Jerusalem has just fallen,
so now there's a a a third crusade
that is called. But for our purposes, really,
the 3rd crusade, as romantic as it was,
and there's a great amount of respect between
Richard and and and and Salahuddin,
these 2, you know, England's great hope or
Europe's great hope against Salahuddin,
ultimately,
they were unable to recapture Jerusalem. And,
the 2, you know, go head to head
in multiple battles,
but ultimately, Richard and the kings of Europe
failed to recapture Jerusalem, and he, defends
he defends the lands against the might of
of of Europe. And finally, at the age
of 57,
he's been fighting jihad for the last pure
40 years. From when he was a teenager,
he's been going 40 years nonstop, one battle
after the other. He he when he finally
dies,
the
when they distributed his will, his personal property,
he had no property.
He had no assets. He had no wealth.
He was the most powerful man in the
world, but he actually had zero items to
his name. He was constantly on the move,
loved most of his life in a tent,
most loved the most of his life on
the battlefield.
Service of the Ummah. And as we said,
what it wasn't just a reconquering
Jerusalem. It was the way in which he
reconquered Jerusalem.
That if we would have all been ashamed,
we would have all, as Muslims, been ashamed
that our we talk about the context of
Gaza now. The tables are turned. What's gonna
happen? You're gonna do to us what your
did to us? No. We will do to
you exactly like the prophet did say,
did. This is our legacy. This is our.
And it gives,
once again, it was
this act of kindness and this act of
how true jihad needs to be fought that
gave the ummah again its spirit of Izzah.
It gives the ummah a a sense of
what we stand for and why we do
things. And so, Rahimullah he passes away,
as I said, with very little,
to his name. He had become you know,
because of all the years of fighting and
harsh living, he died relatively young, and that
is sort of the end of of of
of of salahuddin
and we had reconquered Jerusalem, and just to
think about it, from Salahuddin
until
1948.
It has been under Muslim control, and it's
only in our generation that it's lost. So
really,
you must think of Salahuddin growing up. You
know, when he was born, he would have
been born after Jerusalem had fallen. He would
have been born learning about in the madrasah,
what they did to us. And everyone everyone
is talking about, like, we are growing up,
making dua. Yeah. Allah help us. Help us.
Everyone say, when is the next you know,
we're looking for the next reviver, the next
person, and it he had it in his
we must do it. In fact, before him,
Nur Ud Din said, we're not gonna wait
for some Imam Mahdi to come. We're not
gonna wait for for some
savior to come. We need to get our
own act together. And he took from Nizam
al Mulk,
Ghazali,
Nuruddin, it took a 100 years of everyone
chipping in little bit little bit until the
pinnacle, Salahuddin gets to to do what entire
Ummah was waiting to do. And so maybe
something for us to think about.
Last night's question,
we asked, who was the father of Nur
ad Din? He was, of course, Imarud Din
Zingi. Imarud Din Zingi.
And the winner is Ismael.
Ismael here? I'm there. Ismael not here? Okay.
Okay.
That's the thing I can break my wrist.
And then auntie Anisa Sali.
Auntie Anisa?
Marshall auntie Anissa Sali. And then, tonight's question,
how old was Salahuddin when he passed away?
He was 57 years old. Tomorrow, we'll talk
about the final fall of Granada.
Oh, sorry.
He was
tonight, inshallah, we'll talk about, tomorrow,