3• Peace in Wartime

“In June of 1099,” Yusuf began, “Crusaders from the West laid siege to Jerusalem. After forty days, they penetrated the northern wall and flooded into the city. They slaughtered most of the city’s Muslim population within two days. The last of the survivors were forced to carry the dead to mass unmarked graves, where they piled the corpses in heaps and set them on fire. These survivors were then either massacred or sold into slavery.

“The Jews, although not so numerous, fared no better. In the Jewish quarter, the inhabitants fled to the main synagogue for refuge. The invaders barricaded the exits and stacked wood around the building. They then torched it, burning all but the few who managed to escape. These people were slaughtered in the narrow streets as they attempted to flee.

“The brutality extended as well to the local Christians who officiated at Christian holy sites. These priests were expelled, tortured, and forced to disclose the location of precious relics, which were then taken from them.

“So began nearly two centuries of strife between invaders from the West and the people of the Middle East. In the minds of many in the Middle East, today’s battles are a continuation of this ancient battle for the Holy Land. They view American and European powers as crusading invaders.”

“As the lone European in the room,” Elizabeth spoke up, “would you mind if I addressed the Crusades for a moment?”

“Not at all,” Yusuf said. “Please.”

“I know a little of this history. To begin with, it’s important to understand the history of Jerusalem. It was Jewish through most of ancient times until Rome sacked it in 70 AD. Meanwhile, following the death of Christ, believers began to spread his gospel through the region. Christianity eventually became the official faith of the Roman Empire, and the faith quickly spread through all its territories, including Jerusalem. By 638 AD, the year Muslims captured Jerusalem, it had been a fully Christian city for three hundred years. So when the knights of the First Crusade took Jerusalem, in their minds they were retaking what had been taken from them. They, like the Muslims they were fighting, believed the city was rightfully theirs.”

“That doesn’t justify the atrocities, though,” Pettis interjected.

“No,” Elizabeth agreed, “it doesn’t.”

“Oh, but come on,” Lou said, “the Crusaders didn’t have a monopoly on atrocity. The Muslims’ hands were dirty too.”

“Were they?” Pettis asked. “I don’t know the history. I’d be interested to hear.”

“Lou is right about that,” Elizabeth said. “There is ugliness on all sides of this conflict. Yusuf has already given us an example of atrocities by Westerners. An early Muslim example would be the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, the last Jewish tribe in Medina. In the earliest days of Islam, Muslim armies beheaded the entire tribe.”

“And today they blow themselves up in order to maim and murder innocent civilians,” Lou blurted.

Unhappy with the interruption, Elizabeth’s mouth stretched disapprovingly into a line.

“I agree with Elizabeth that there are sordid details on all sides of this history,” Yusuf said. “What I would like to introduce you to, however, is one not-so-sordid figure.

“After taking Jerusalem in 1099,” he continued, “the Crusaders took control of most of the coastal areas of the Middle East. They continued to hold these regions for about eighty years. They succeeded largely because of infighting between rival Muslim military and political leaders. This began to change, however, with the rise to power of the Turkish sultan Nûr al-Dîn, who unified the various peoples of Syria. The tide turned entirely in favor of the Muslim resistance under his successor, Yûsuf Salâh al-Dîn, or simply ‘Saladin,’ as he is known in the West. Saladin united all the Muslim peoples from Syria to Egypt and mobilized their collective resistance. His armies recaptured Jerusalem in 1187.

“Militarily, politically, and in every other way, Saladin was the most successful leader of the period. His successes were so surprising and total that historians sometimes invoke luck and good fortune to explain them. However, as I have studied Saladin, I am convinced he succeeded in war for a much deeper reason; a reason that won’t seem at first to be related to war at all.”

“What?” Pettis asked. “What reason?”

“To understand it,” Yusuf answered, “we need to get a better feel for the man. Let me tell you a story. On one occasion, an army scout came to Saladin with a sobbing woman from the enemy camp. She had requested, hysterically, that the scout take her to Saladin. She threw herself before Saladin, and said, ‘Yesterday some Muslim thieves entered my tent and stole my little girl. I cried all through the night, believing I would never see her again. But our commanders told me that you, the king of the Muslims, are merciful.’ She begged for his help.

“Saladin was moved to tears. He immediately sent one of his men to the slave market to look for the girl. They located her within the hour and returned her to her mother, whom they then escorted back to the enemy camp.”

Yusuf paused for a moment. “If you were to research Saladin, you would discover that this story is characteristic. He was renowned for his kindness toward allies and enemies alike.”

“I’m not sure those who died at the end of his army’s swords thought him kind,” Elizabeth interjected. “But I agree that in comparison to others of the period, he did shine a little brighter.”

Lou was unimpressed. His mind drifted back to Vietnam and to all the dead young men his regiment had to carry out of the jungles. When he had returned from Vietnam, Lou made a personal point of visiting the mother of each soldier who had lost his life under his command. Over a period of two years, he visited fifty-three towns, from Seattle and San Diego in the West to Portland, Maine, in the East and Savannah, Georgia, in the South. He sat in the living rooms of the homes these men never returned to and held their grieving mothers in his arms as he told them of the heroic deeds of their sons. He loved his men. To this day, he still dreamed of ways he could have saved more of them. Being kind and merciful is well and good, he thought, but they are traits that are poorly rewarded in wartime.

“With that bit of background,” Yusuf continued, “let me contrast Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem with the Crusaders’ initial invasion. In the spring of 1187, after the Crusaders had broken a truce, Saladin called upon the forces of Islam to gather in Damascus. He planned to march against the occupiers in a unified effort and drive them from their lands.”

“If I might,” Elizabeth stepped in once more, “who was occupying whom was not entirely clear. As I mentioned before, each side viewed the other as an occupying force.”

“Right,” Yusuf said. “Sorry for the imprecision.” Resuming, he said, “Saladin sprung a trap on the occupying—err, rather, Western—forces near the Sea of Galilee. A few escaped, including a leader named Balian of Ibelin. Balian escaped to Tyre, where via messenger he made a surprising request of Saladin: he asked whether he could go to Jerusalem and fetch his wife and bring her back to safety in Tyre. He promised he would not take up arms in defense of Jerusalem. Saladin agreed.

“However, upon arriving in Jerusalem and finding there was no one to lead its defense, Balian begged Saladin to let him out of his commitment. He wanted to stay and lead the resistance against Saladin’s army. Saladin not only allowed it, he sent an escort to lead Balian’s wife from Jerusalem to the safety of Tyre!”

Lou let out an audible harrumph.

“Yes, Lou, kind of hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

“She must have been a looker, that’s all I can say,” Lou said, looking around for a laugh. Miguel obliged him, his eyes dancing with mirth as his broad shoulders rolled with laughter, but for the rest the joke fell flat. Carol shook her head ever so slightly and fought to remember that Lou was better on the inside than his outward bravado sometimes suggested. She knew that his behavior was being exacerbated by the stress he was feeling from having to be away from work when so much was going wrong there.

“The siege of Jerusalem began on the twentieth of September,” Yusuf continued. “Nine days later, Saladin’s men breached the wall close to the place where the Crusaders had flowed through almost ninety years earlier. Saladin put his men under strict order not to harm a single Christian person or plunder any of their possessions. He reinforced the guards at Christian places of worship and announced that the defeated peoples would be welcome to come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage whenever they liked.

“As a way to restock the treasury, Saladin worked out a ransom structure with Balian for each of the city’s inhabitants. His men protested that the amounts were absurdly low. But Saladin was concerned for the poor among them. So much so, in fact, that he let many leave without any ransom whatsoever. He sent widows and children away with gifts. His leaders objected, saying that if they were going to let so many leave without any compensation, they should at least increase the ransom for the wealthy. But Saladin refused. Balian himself was allowed to leave with a rich sum. Saladin even sent an escort to protect him on his journey to Tyre.”

Yusuf looked around at the group.

“He sounds disturbingly weak to me,” Lou said.

“Yes,” Yusuf said, “so weak that he was the most successful military leader of his era and remains revered to this day.”

“He’s still weak,” Lou insisted. “And soft.”

“Why do you say that, Lou?” Elizabeth interjected.

“Well,” Lou began, “you heard what Yusuf said. He let all those people take advantage of him.”

“You mean because he spared their lives?”

“And let them make off with the treasury.”

“But they weren’t in it for the treasury,” she answered. “They were trying to establish a lasting victory.”

“Then why not get rid of their enemies?” Lou objected. “Let them walk away and you just allow them to fight another day. Trust me, I fought in Vietnam. We would have been massacred there if that’s what we had done.”

Pettis spoke up. “We were massacred in Vietnam, Lou.”

Lou’s back went rigid. With eyes smoldering, he turned hard on Pettis. “Listen Pettis, why don’t you stick to what you know, hmm? You have no idea what Vietnam was about—or about the heroism our men showed there.”

“Air force,” Pettis responded. “555th Tactical Fighter Squadron. Two tours.” He looked calmly at Lou. “You?”

Lou was taken aback and muttered incomprehensibly under his breath before hurriedly saying, “Four years in ‘Nam. Second Battalion, Ninth Marines—’Hell in a Helmet’ as we called ourselves. Sorry,” he added, nodding to Pettis.

Pettis nodded back. “No apology necessary.”

“Two veterans in the group,” Yusuf smiled enthusiastically. “Splendid!

“Lou,” he continued, “you mentioned that Saladin sounds weak or soft.”

Lou nodded, almost meekly this time.

“Do you suppose, however, that the defenders of the cities he captured one by one thought him weak? That rival Muslim leaders he subdued thought him weak? That those who had been defeated by no one else thought him weak?”

Lou hesitated momentarily. “No,” he said in a more subdued tone. “I suppose not.”

“No, they surely wouldn’t have. And the reason why is simple: he wasn’t weak. He was, in fact, remarkably and unfailingly strong. But he was something more than—or perhaps more accurately, deeper than—strong. And this extra something is what set him apart from all the others of his era who, although strong, were unsuccessful.”

Yusuf paused.

“What was it?” Pettis asked. “This something extra, this something deeper.”

“The most important factor in helping things go right.”

“Which is?” Pettis followed up.

“The secret of Saladin’s success in war,” Yusuf answered, “was that his heart was at peace.”

This was too much for Lou. “‘Heart at peace’ you say, Yusuf?” he asked with an edge to his voice. “That’s your secret—that Saladin’s heart was at peace?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, looking first at Pettis and then at the others, with mocking eyes that culled for allies. He thought he found what he was looking for in Pettis, who seemed lost in thought, his brow deeply furrowed.

Lou then glanced at Elizabeth but couldn’t read her countenance. He dug in once more, keeping her in his sight as he spoke. “So the secret to war is to have a heart at peace?” he asked mockingly, turning back to Yusuf.

“Yes, Lou,” Yusuf answered unflinchingly. “And not just in war. It is the secret to success in business and family life as well. The state of your heart toward your children—whether at peace or at war—is by far the most important factor in this intervention we are now undertaking. It is also what will most determine your ability to successfully maneuver your company through the challenges created by your recent defections.”

This comment knocked Lou completely off his stride. He was not accustomed to people standing up to his sarcasm, and Yusuf’s even bolder development of his thesis and his pointed comment about Lou’s corporate troubles caught Lou off guard.

He looked sideways at Carol, whom he surmised to have been the source of the inside information. She stared stiffly ahead, not acknowledging his gaze.