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Today's Featured Biography
Saladin
 There are two great names in the tangled and somewhat tedious story of Islam which stand out, deathless, from the crowd of sultans, viziers, and Moslem conquerors-the names of Haroun al Raschid and Saladin. The former has become the accepted type of a good and just despot; the latter is the Bayard of his religion, the knight and captain, king and magistrate, sans peur et sans reproche; whose enemies respected and trusted him as much as his own people loved him. His conquest of Jerusalem and overthrow of the Latin kingdom were but episodes, and from his point of view, not the most important episodes in his thirty years of war and victory. The History of Egypt, the History of Syria, the History of the Mohammedan faith, contain more pages filled with the achievements of Saladin than even the History of the Crusades. Everyone has read of the battle of Hattin;[14] but of the healing of the great schism and the restoration of Egypt to orthodoxy-a step thought to be impossible and of the highest importance to Islam-very few know anything. Let us endeavor to present the history of this great man with some attempt to show the true proportions of his achievements in the eyes of the East, if not the West.
Yussuf ibn Ayub-Joseph the son of Job-was by descent a Kurd. His father was a retainer or follower of the celebrated Nur-ed-Din (Light of Religion), Sultan of Syria, the prince who, after many years of humiliation, recovered some of the lost prestige of the Mohammedan name, wrested ...
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