Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani

Also known as Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Hamid al-Katib, 'Imad al-Din al-Katib

Saladin's Persian-born chancery secretary and panegyrist; his al-Fath al-Qussi fi'l-Fath al-Qudsi is the closest surviving inside account of the 1187 campaign and the recovery of Jerusalem.

Imad ad-Din was born in Isfahan in 1125 to a family of Persian scholar-officials, and studied law in Baghdad before being drawn into the Zengid administration of Nur al-Din. After Nur al-Din's death he transferred his service to Saladin in 1175, and for the rest of his life accompanied the sultan on virtually every campaign, drafting state correspondence in the magnificent rhymed prose for which his Arabic was already famous.

Of his many works, two stand at the heart of crusading studies. The Barq al-Shami ('Syrian Lightning'), a contemporary diary of Saladin's wars in seven books, survives only in fragments — but those fragments contain Imad ad-Din's own eyewitness description of the Battle of Hattin, the negotiations for Jerusalem in October 1187, and the entry of the sultan into the city. The al-Fath al-Qussi fi'l-Fath al-Qudsi ('The Eloquent Conquest of the Conquest of Jerusalem'), written in the months immediately after, expands those passages into a sustained, ornate, sometimes bewilderingly elaborate official history of the campaign.

His chancery prose can frustrate modern readers — he loved a triple synonym and a buried Quranic allusion — but the Fath al-Qussi gives us the recapture of Jerusalem in the words of the man who wrote Saladin's letters.

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