This is the first serious biography of Saladin in over 20 years and the first ever by a non-Western scholar

Text in Arabic. Saladin was an outsider whose life was filled with paradox. Famous for driving the crusaders out of Jerusalem, and becoming the most powerful man in the Islamic empire, he died penniless, without enough money to line his coffin. In this ground-breaking biography, translated for the first time into Arabic, Abdel Rahman Azzam uncovers the real Saladin, placing him in historical context against the backdrop of the 10th and 11th-century Sunni revival, a powerful sweeping intellectual renaissance that would ultimately transform every field of Islamic thought.