career fighting against other muslims. he would say, ideally i don t want to fight you. you should come on my side. we need that combined strength to take on the christians, throw them out of jerusalem, and recover it for islam. but many choose war. so one of the tensions in saladin s life is the tension between saying i m the hero of sunni islam, and the fact that he spends quite a long time fighting his fellow sunni muslims in creating that empire. he said to his son later, don t get used to killing. don t get into killing. don t believe in killing because blood never sleeps. we shouldn t confuse our desire to transform saladin into this middle eastern sage.
against the british government policy in palestine. we are the only people in the world homeless and stateless. for israelis, the creation of the state of israel is seen as a miracle. and of course for the palestinians, it s a great disaster. the history of jerusalem, a very complicated story. and if you don t know it in its complexity, it s very hard to understand what s going on there today. the past is never dead. and if there is a city in the world to which that applies, it s jerusalem.
once saladin has crushed the crusaders at the battle of hattin, the way to jerusalem is open. saladin waited a few days before he moved into the city because he wanted the symbolism of a specific day, that is the 2nd of october, 1187. it happened to be the anniversary of the prophet muhammad s night journey into jerusalem. but at the moment that saladin emerges victorious at the battle of the horns of hattin, anyone living in the city of jerusalem must have feared for their lives because throughout the period of the crusades, there had been a number of sieges, battles, and even mass slaughters. so there was definitely fear of retribution and that any transfer of the city from one power to the other would be accompanied by mass bloodshed. the classic story is the first crusader of 1099 burst into the city, and they did an astoundingly terrible thing to the muslims. they killed every man, woman, and child in an orgy of destruction.
he s incredibly energetic. he s efficient, and he s a flamboyant character. he has the irony of being a bad son, a bad brother, an absent king, but a brilliant military strategist. richard was much more a kind of person who would react on the basis of instinct rather than thinking. this is why he s called lionhearted. he fights brutally and ruthlessly. when king richard arrives in palestine, he was a very, very powerful figure. king guy essentially became a footnote. nobody bothered about who he was, what he was doing, because it didn t matter. both saladin and king richard believe that jerusalem belongs to their faiths. for christians, jerusalem is a place of pilgrimage. for muslims, jerusalem is a place of pilgrimage.
after all is said and done, after all the bloodshed, we re going to have to agree to share the city of god. and that s what they settle on. an agreement is made. the treaty of jaffa. saladin and richard realize both that there is a limit to power and to war. the treaty of jaffa guaranteed that whatever the muslims at that time had in their control would remain in muslim hands. and whatever the crusaders had in their control would remain in crusaders hands. the christians get jaffa and acre and the coast, and the muslims keep jerusalem and the inlands. the treaty of jaffa is the first official partition of palestine in history. after the treaty of jaffa,