Islam. 93profound level. Muslims had responded to what might have
been a political disaster with a vast spiritual renewal, which
reinterpreted the faith to meet the new conditions. Islam was
now thriving without government support. Indeed, it was the
only constant in a world of political flux.THE CRUSADES
The new order of politically autonomous amirs, which had
come into being under the Seljuk Turks, continued after their
empire had begun to fall apart at the end of the eleventh cen-
tury. The system had obvious drawbacks. The amirs con-
stantly fought one another, and found it very difficult to band
together against an external foe. This became tragically ap-
parent in July 1099, when the Christian Crusaders from west-
ern Europe attacked Jerusalem, the third holiest city in the
Islamic world after Mecca and Medina, massacred its inhabi-
tants and established states in Palestine, the Lebanon and
Anatolia. The amirs of the region, who were fighting each
other as the Seljuk Empire declined, could make no united ri-
poste, and seemed powerless against this aggressive Western
intrusion. It was fifty years before Imad ad-Din Zangi, amir of
Mosul and Aleppo, was able to drive the Crusaders from Ar-
menia in 1144, and almost another half-century before Yusuf
ibn Ayyub Salah ad-Din, the Kurdish general who is known as
Saladin in the West, was able in 1187 to take Jerusalem from
the Crusaders, who managed, however, to retain a foothold in
the Near East along the coast until the end of the thirteenth
century. Because of this external threat, the Ayyubid dynasty
founded by Saladin lasted far longer than the more
ephemeral states of the amirs in the Fertile Crescent. At an
early stage of his campaign, Saladin had defeated the Fatimid
dynasty in Egypt, incorporated its territory into his growing
empire and returned its inhabitants to Sunni Islam.