If Saladin Rose Among Us, We Would Kill Him

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

“Had it not been” is a particle of refusal, and a refusal it shall remain: Saladin will not appear, and that historic Islamic phenomenon will not repeat itself. Many are those who beseech God to send a man like Saladin to save the nation, especially from the pulpits on Fridays. Perhaps the Friday preacher feels despair, and does not know how to set the affairs of the Islamic nation right, so he calls on God to prepare for the nation a man like Umar ibn al-Khattab or like Saladin al-Ayyubi. And as usual, the worshippers erupt in a chorus of “amen.”

But the question is: what would we do if Saladin arose among us? Would we leave him to his own devices, or would we follow him and support him? Surely the Lord of the Worlds will send a new Saladin for the purpose of saving the nation, and that requires people who believe in work and in exerting the effort necessary for change, and in committing to everything that the matter of change requires. The new Saladin will ask people to sleep early and wake early to go to work, to the sites of production: to the farm, the factory, the workshop, the office. He will ask us to hold ourselves to a lofty moral standard, so that we do not lie, do not swindle, do not deceive, do not betray, do not backbite, do not squander time, and do not use connections and favoritism to devour the money and rights of others; and he will demand that we respect others and stop conspiring and finding fault with one another, and that we respect the child and the woman. Will we accept these demands? And what will we do if he lays down laws holding us accountable for moral deviation, for laziness, and for fatalistic dependency?

The very one you asked God to send you. And if you want money and financial stability, and you are cooking up your feast, then you must get rid of him. Israel and America will find a vast Palestinian public rallying to their support, and will begin to threaten Saladin. And in the end a Palestinian faction will decide to be rid of Saladin once and for all, and will kill him. This faction will say it killed him for the sake of the people who cannot find anything to eat, whose lives have become unbearably hard. And what matters more — liberating al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, or the feast? The feast matters more, and the house has a lord to protect it. And if the Lord of al-Aqsa does not move to save al-Aqsa, then the people ought not to bear a responsibility that falls upon the Lord of the Worlds. And we will say behind them: amen.

The prayer that God prepare us a Saladin is not a real one, and it is out of step with the collapsed state of Palestinian cultural reality. The West, with the help of the Palestinian Authority, has brought us to worship the penny, and to abandon our sacred duties and our responsibilities toward liberating our homeland. We do not need a Saladin; we need instead a treacherous leader who refuses Israel and America nothing, and who keeps the Palestinian people beneath the boots of the Zionists. This is, practically speaking, the leader we are actually looking for. And everyone now sees that no Palestinian government can be formed unless treason is the basis of its formation. Every government that comes commits itself to recognizing Israel and committing to security coordination with it, and if it does not do so, it will never see the light of day. Our lord now is money, and the lord of that lord is America and the European Union, and the lord of the lord of that lord is Israel. This is why we must not lie to ourselves, and perhaps we can hold fast to this one virtue and find relief from the deception some of us practice against others. And perhaps, in doing so, we open a path to the paradise whose gates we ourselves have closed off.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “لو ظهر من بيننا صلاح الدين لقتلناه” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.