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A man came to Allah’s Messenger and said, ‘guide me to such a deed that equals jihad’.
Muhammad replied, ‘I do not find such a deed’, and then he added, ‘but can you while the Muslim fighter has gone for jihad, enter the mosque and pray without cease and observe a fast and never break your fast?’
The man said, ‘but who can do that?’
From the Hadith, The Book of Jihad.
Buri of Damascus fell to the vengeful daggers of Ismaili Assassins who had worked their way into his close bodyguard. He was stabbed by two of his most trusted men in May 1131, as he was riding back from the baths. He survived the initial attack but succumbed to his wounds a year later.
The political value of the killing to the Assassins was minimal: the Sunni revival that was taking place in Syria was by now unstoppable. Damascus remained thoroughly orthodox in its religion and its politics, and a new Sunni champion emerged from the princes of the Jazira. He would come close to unifying all of Muslim Syria under him and to begin the destruction of Outremer.
Zangi, the Emir of Mosul, was without doubt somewhat unscrupulous and something of an adventurer. His later deeds raised him up to the title of shahid or martyr for the Faith but in his earlier career as the governor of Basra he had made war on the caliph, and had been rewarded by the sultan with Mosul and a free hand in the Jazira. The sultan also gave him diplomas of authority over the whole of Syria. He then moved quickly onto the politically rudderless Aleppo. He married the now thrice-wedded daughter of Ridwan and transferred his father’s remains to the city – a highly symbolic act among Turkic peoples. Every Turkish prince in Syria knew that the union of Mosul and Aleppo under Zangi was a huge challenge to their continued independence.
Just before the Assassins’ attack on him, Buri received letters from Zangi requesting the assistance of Damascus against the Franks. Five hundred men of Buri’s askari were sent and joined the bodyguard of Hama, which was commanded by Buri’s son. Zangi quickly created some trumped-up charges and imprisoned all the men of Damascus and Hama. He then seized Hama and demanded ransom from Damascus. Buri realised that he was dealing with the region’s new strongman and he paid the ransom. The question now was whether Zangi would continue to grab land from his fellow Muslims or would he turn his ambitions to their Frankish neighbours. In truth he was as likely to do both.
In 1130, Bohemond II of Antioch was killed in battle. His widowed princess, despite being King Baldwin’s daughter, then rebelled against a union of Antioch with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Zangi raided Antioch’s territory but he was stymied by the ever-active Baldwin II, who brought an army from Jerusalem to rein in his recalcitrant offspring. Baldwin’s death in 1131 was a heavy blow to Outremer: none of his successors would ever bind the Latin states together as strongly as he had.
Zangi was distracted by Iraqi affairs during the early 1130s as the Caliph rebelled again, and was even able to defeat Zangi at Tikrit, where the atabeg would have lost his life if it had not been for a Kurd of the Ayyubid clan. For a time the caliph ruled over the sultan but by 1135 the scholar al-Ghazali’s political formula of constituent authority belonging to the sultan, who gave only an oath of allegiance to the caliph, had been re-established.
Zangi could return to his designs on Damascus, and perhaps more.
