Welcome to Ramadans That Changed The World! A series of stories about Ramadan moments that shaped the course of history, and the lessons we can take from them today!
July, 1187
Finally, they had them cornered.
Through the scorched hills near the town of Tiberias, towards the Sea of Galilee marched an army, 60,000 strong, the most formidable force assembled by the Crusaders, with the single aim of destroying the Muslim army and their leader, the Kurdish Sultan of Egypt and Damascus, who had been a thorn in the side of their kingdom for years.
This was their moment, here at the horns of Hattin.
The Muslims forces were stationed up against the sea, with nowhere to turn, the army of Guy De Lusignan could not let such an opportunity pass them by… and that’s exactly what the Muslims wanted them to believe.
13 years of battle and yet they hadn’t learned. This was not a rag-tag band of barbarians. This was the army of Salahuddin, and Salahuddin always plays the long game.
This wasn’t an ambush, this was a trap set in motion in the prior Ramadan, and what would follow is one of the most decisive military victories in the history of this ummah, and that would pave the final stone Salahuddin’s long road to Jerusalem.
But it didn’t start here; rather, it began in the darkest hour this ummah had seen in generations, and understanding that darkness is what gives this story its power.
The Ramadan That Changed Everything
The year is 1099.
Pope Urban II “guarantees” paradise to anyone who joins the Crusade to “reclaim the Holy Land.” He has told the people of Europe that Muslims have been persecuting Christians there, which is a lie.
From the time of Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه, Muslims, Christians, and Jews had lived in Jerusalem in relative harmony for centuries. None of that matters to the army marching toward it.
As the Crusaders move through the Muslim lands, devastation follows. In a town called Marra, they kill every man, woman, and child. They boast about it in letters home. In 1099, they reach Jerusalem, lay siege for 40 days, and when they finally break through the walls, the massacre is almost beyond description.
The historian Ibn al-Athir رحمه الله records that around 40,000 people were killed in the courtyards of Masjid al-Aqsa alone. He writes that blood ran through the streets up to the knees of men and their horses. What remained of the masjid was turned into a bathroom and a stable for pigs.
The news sent shockwaves through the Ummah, but the reaction?
Silence.
No army mobilized, no king or caliph moved to reclaim the sacred city. The ruling classes were engulfed in their own feuds and schemes at the time.
The first move did not come from a king or general, rather it came from a scholar one fateful Ramadan.
A judge from Damascus named al-Qadhi al-Harawi had witnessed the massacres with his own eyes. He fled to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, and arrived during Ramadan. On a Friday, in front of a fasting crowd, he ate. Publicly. To force them to listen.
When the crowd erupted at his audacity, he said: you are upset that I violated the sanctity of this day? What about the sanctity of your brothers and sisters in al-Aqsa?
The Khalifa himself wept at that statement, but again, nothing happened, because by 1099, the Abbasid Caliphate was a hollow symbol.
Real power had splintered across 22 warring city-states, each led by men more interested in their own territory than in the fate of Jerusalem. Some Muslim leaders had even struck agreements with the Crusaders, accepting humiliating terms, putting crosses on their masajid, all to preserve their own grip on power. The historian Ibn al-Jubayr surveyed the Muslim east around this time and wrote that it was as if the Muslims were living in the age of Jahiliyyah.
The fall of Jerusalem was the consequence of a rot that had already been eating the ummah from within for decades.
Division, corruption, love of the dunya over everything else.
The loss of al-Aqsa was a symptom, and regaining it meant to first address the disease.
So, the question then arises: how do you cure the disease?
Planting Seeds You Will Never See Bloom
The revival did not start with an army. It started with a school.
A Seljuk minister named Nizam al-Mulk understood something that many leaders miss: you cannot rule bodies if the hearts inside them are dead.
So he built. Across every major city in Iraq and Sham, he established the Nizamiyyah schools; full campuses with dorms, kitchens, and hospitals, offering free education to anyone who came.
Nizam al-Mulk himself wouldn’t see the extent of this new institution’s impact, as he was soon assassinated in broad daylight by the Hashashin before he saw the fruits of his work. But his legacy outlived his body.
Generations of scholars would be raised through these grand academies, and the crown jewel of them was none other than Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali رحمه الله.
Al-Ghazali had reached the top of the academic world. He had dismantled the philosophers. He had refuted the Ismailis. But he noticed something troubling in himself first. He was preaching things he was not sure he was actually living. The scholars were supposed to be the doctors of the hearts, but many of the doctors were sick themselves.
So he did something radical. He walked away from his prestigious post, went to live in obscurity in Sham, and worked as a janitor in a masjid while he wrote Ihya Ulum al-Din one of the most important books in Islamic history. His message was simple: the ummah cannot be revived by correct bodies with dead hearts.
Around the same time, Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Jilani رحمه الله was bringing the science of tazkiyah to the masses. He spent 50 years in relative silence, ensuring his life matched his words, before he spoke publicly.
Another man named Adi ibn Musafir رحمه الله went further still, as he left the cities entirely and lived among the most marginalized communities, in the mountains, among men considered the outcasts of society. He transformed them. And many of those same men later filled the ranks of the Muslim armies.
None of these men would live to see Jerusalem freed, but all of them were essential to it.
The Bridge Generation
From the scholars came the soldiers.
Imad al-Din al-Zangi رحمه الله inherited a politically reformed landscape and focused on what came next: unity and justice, by force if necessary.
He was hard and strict, but his methods saw results, as his forces gave the Muslims their first major military victory over the Crusaders in over 50 years, and that victory cracked open something that had been sealed shut: hope.
Imad al-Din reignited the Muslim imagination, he showed the Ummah that Al Aqsa was not forever lost, and that the holy land could indeed be liberated…
… and then he was assassinated in his sleep, [yes, there’s a pattern here].
His son, Nuruddin Zangi رحمه الله, is the figure in this story that most people have never heard of, and that is a tragedy.
Ibn al-Athir رحمه الله, a man who witnessed both the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Mongol invasion, who once wrote that he wished his mother had never given him birth because of what he had seen, said this about Nuruddin:
After the Rightly Guided Caliphs and Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, I have not seen a ruler more just, more devout, or more beloved.
Nuruddin was a scholar before he was a ruler. And that made all the difference.
Where his father’s gatherings were full of helmets, Nuruddin’s were full of turbans. He abolished unjust taxes entirely, replacing them with a culture of voluntary sadaqa encouraged by the scholars. He built over 40 schools in Aleppo and Damascus alone. He banned corruption and alcohol from his military camps. His focus was not just on military strength but on justice rooted in the Sharia of Allah, because he understood, as the Quran says, that no human effort alone can unite hearts. Only Allah does that.
When Nuruddin came to Damascus, he did not have to conquer it. The people opened the gates for him, because they had seen what justice looked like in the lands he already governed, and they wanted it.
Nuruddin then set his eyes south. Egypt, still under the crumbling Fatimid dynasty, was in danger of falling to the Crusaders. He sent his best general, Asaduddin Shirkuh, with orders to secure it.
Shirkuh brought with him his reluctant young nephew, a 20-something who was perfectly content with life in Damascus and wanted nothing to do with war.
His name was Yusuf ibn Ayyub, and the world would come to know him as Salahuddin.
The Man Himself
The Fatimids, after Shirkuh died suddenly, looked at this young man of 29 and thought: he is the weakest option. We can control him.
So they made him wazir of Egypt, and that was the greatest miscalculation in their history, because again, Salahuddin always plays the long game.
Salahuddin’s defining quality was not military genius, though he had that. It was not political shrewdness, though he had that too. It was compassion. His advisors reportedly hid his money from him because every time he saw someone in need, he would give. When he liberated Jerusalem and the wealthy paid ransoms to leave while the poor could not, Salahuddin paid the ransom for approximately 20,000 people himself.
He was also patient in a way that is almost difficult to comprehend.
When Nuruddin pressed him to move toward al-Aqsa, Salahuddin said “we are not ready,” and he was right. What he had inherited in Egypt was catastrophe. Two hundred years of Ismaili rule had left the country in ideological, economic, and social ruin. People were so poor they were eating cats and dogs, and the Ismaili’s were mainly concerned with propagating their deviant theology.
So Salahuddin spent a decade rebuilding Egypt before he ever marched toward Jerusalem.
He turned the Fatimids’ largest prison into a school. He transformed al-Azhar, then the primary college of Ismaili heresy, into a bastion of Sunni scholarship standing to this day. He built a navy from nothing. He strengthened every coastal city, thinking not just about taking Jerusalem but about the European counter-attack that would inevitably follow. He disbanded and rebuilt the Egyptian army. He even launched a program where dedicated teachers would walk blind community members from their homes to the masjid to learn Quran recitation. His own sister trained as a pharmacist and distributed medicine for free.
He rebuilt the rituals of Egyptian society around the Quran, replacing the habits the Ismailis had ingrained over two centuries. Many scholars believe this is the origin of Egypt’s famous culture of Quran recitation that endures even now.
Only when Egypt was strong, unified, and spiritually rooted did Salahuddin turn north.
Return to Hattin
Which brings us back to that July morning in 1187.
The Crusaders’ downfall at Hattin was not an accident. Salahuddin had studied them. He knew how they thought. He knew that if he threatened Tiberias, the Crusader leadership would feel obligated to march out and relieve it, even in the brutal summer heat, even if it meant crossing waterless terrain.
He sent cavalry to harass them constantly as they marched, preventing rest, draining morale, and he had ensured that every water source along their route was cut off.
By the time the Crusaders arrived near Hattin, they were delirious with thirst. Their horses were dying. Their army of 60,000 was already broken in spirit before the battle even began. Salahuddin then split them, allowing the strongest portion to push toward water while cutting them off from the rest of the army.
The battle was, in truth, already over.
The Muslims made quick work of their counter attack, and soon enough the last tent of the Crusader camp collapsed, and Salahuddin fell into sajdah out of gratitude to Allah.
The aftermath was mercy, as captured leaders were treated with honor, and within months, on the 27th of Rajab, Salahuddin entered Jerusalem.
What Salahuddin Left Behind
When Salahuddin was dying, he gave his son a final wasiyya. Given everything he had sacrificed — ten years without sleeping in his own bed, decades on the battlefield, the weight of an ummah on his shoulders — you might expect his last words to be about strategy. About holding Jerusalem. About power.
He said: Have taqwa of Allah. Protect the hearts of people. Be careful of what lies between you and people, for it will not be forgiven except by them. As for what lies between you and Allah, He is the Most Forgiving.
The key to everything, even at the end, was the heart and its connection to Allah.
Ibn Shaddad closes his biography of Salahuddin with words for us to ponder over:
Their long years now seem like a few moments. Their endless struggles feel like a dream that passed in the blink of an eye. Their hardship ended, but their reward and their remembrance never will.
Lessons from 88 Years of Hardship
We may not see the liberation we are working toward in our lifetime, but neither did Nizam al-Mulk, neither did Nuruddin, neither did al-Qadhi al-Harawi, who ate publicly in Ramadan just to make people listen.
What we do, in our homes, our masajid, our communities, will either contribute to the revival of this ummah or delay it.
We may not be the generation that gains all the glory, praise, and adoration, but we can be the bridge generation, the generation that may not enjoy the fruits of their efforts in this life, but will enjoy endless reward in the next, in sha Allah, for the seeds of change they planted.
The ball is in our court, and so if you want this Ramadan to change your world, start planting those seeds today.
As Ibn Shaddad said: Their hardship ended. Their reward never will.
