New review below added to Youssef Chahine director page.
Saladin the Victorious
Director: Youssef Chahine
Year: 1963
Country: Egypt
One of my main motivations for watching old films is not only to better understand the past, but also to discover parallels with the present. Watching the newly restored version of Egyptian master Youssef Chahine’s sweeping epic on the Great Crusades (now on the Criterion Channel), one such parallel struck me. Here in England, far-right protests have been held almost daily outside hotels housing asylum seekers processed through the slow machinery of the immigration system. Setting aside for now the deeper causes of these protesters’ anger, channelled towards the easiest of scapegoats, I thought how enduring the Crusades remain as an ideological touchstone for such groups. In their iconography, the Knights Templar often appear in their social media posts; in their misguided beliefs the medieval era represents a racially homogeneous ethno-state to return to; in their rhetoric, the supposed ‘clash of civilisations’ between Christianity and Islam is an ongoing battle. For the far-right, the Crusades still function as a potent myth, shaping identities centuries after the events.
What then can Chahine’s epic, told from the other perspective, with the revered Muslim leader Saladin as the central hero, teach us? To be clear, Saladin the Victorious is far from a work of strict historical accuracy. It carries its own political agenda, which I will say more about below. But Chahine appropriates the legacy of the Crusades to advance a very different message: one of pluralism, inclusion, and diversity, condemning only those who invade and dominate other lands, just as the British once did to Egypt from the 1880s to the 1950s, controlling its politics, economy, and resources¹. A stark contrast to the narrow, exclusionary mythmaking of a few self-styled crusaders today, whose slogans and symbols serve only to justify hostility towards vulnerable people with minimal rights.
Chronicling the efforts of Saladin, 12th-century sultan of Egypt and Syria, to defend Jerusalem from invading Crusader armies, the film partly stands as a riposte to decades of Hollywood epics in which Arabs and Muslims were, at best, ornamental and, at worst, dehumanised. Even Lawrence of Arabia, released only the previous year, offered little more than a refined version of the same Orientalist gaze, and had Alec Guiness and Anthony Quinn in facepaint play lead Arab characters. Chahine inverts the tropes of the Eurocentric epic: Arab actors, in pale make-up and dyed red hair, play the Europeans; the moral axis shifts from Richard the Lionheart to Saladin; the Christian leaders are cast not as noble crusaders but as political schemers. Most treacherous among them is Renaud, aka Reynald of Chatillon, Prince of Antioch, a Crusader who in the film orders the massacre of unarmed pilgrims on their way to Mecca, an act that wantonly flouts the very treaties Saladin honours in protecting Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem.
It is in this guardianship of Jerusalem that Saladin’s symbolic resonance comes through. In Chahine’s vision, Saladin is no mere military genius, he is the embodiment of Pan-Arab unity, a larger-than-life leader whose charisma commands complete loyalty from his generals, and whose inclusive vision gathers Muslims and Christians, Arabs of different backgrounds, all united under the same banner. Chahine goes further, complicating the usual binaries of Christian vs. Muslim, East vs. West. Later, the film’s first battle scene is disorienting, the violence abstracted, our ability to tell the opposing sides apart reduced, suggesting both the disorienting nature of battle as well as the truth that in the end everyone’s blood is the same colour whichever side they fight for. A bit like the torrential rain in Akira Kurosawa‘s Seven Samurai merging samurai, peasants, and bandits into one indistinguishable class.
Later still in the film, Chahine (who had trained in theatre in California as a student) pushes the mise-en-scene possibilities of his filmmaking to the limit. If the battle and the massacre sequences suggest the rapid movement of a zoetrope, what Chahine does in staging the parallel trials in the Arab and Crusader camps evokes experimental theatre. In the Christian camp, Louisa is put on trial for helping a wounded Arab escape; in the Arab camp, a traitor is interrogated by Saladin himself. Instead of cross-cutting between these, Chahine physically built the two sets side by side and filmed them simultaneously, from different angles and distances. Through careful lighting and blocking, he choreographs a visual dialogue between the two camps: two trials, two ideologies, two moral universes, held in tension and up for comparison through the very structure of the frame. It is a remarkable feat of mise-en-scene.
And Chahine goes further still in bringing both sides together. One of Saladin’s most trusted generals, Issa, is a Christian Arab who is at the centre of the film’s most affecting arc: Issa falls mutually in love with a Crusader, a Knight Hospitaller named Louisa (played by the luminour Nadia Lutfi, a great star of Egyptian cinema). Below is a screenshot from their first encounter. Before they fully digest their feelings, they confront each other as enemies — Louisa’s surprise at finding a Christian fighting alongside Saladin mirrors what many Western audiences might (then and now) feel when met with the fact that many Arabs are Christian. Issa answers with a reply that might address enduring centuries of ignorance and bigotry: “The Arabs are my people. I will not stand for the Cross being used as an excuse to invade our land.”
However, Issa is not a historical figure; Saladin had no Christian generals. Chahine invented him to convey his message of Pan-Arab inclusivity, of Christian-Muslim solidarity, a theme with personal resonance for the director as a Coptic Christian in Egypt. Another obvious historical liberty: Saladin was not an Arab, but in fact a Kurdish Muslim. Why then recast an ethnic Kurd as a symbol of Arab glory? Here the film’s deeper political currents emerge. With its record budget and state backing, Saladin the Victorious served as propaganda for regime of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1963 still celebrated across the Arab world for defying British and French economic interests in nationalising the Suez Canal in 1956. Nasser was thus himself a beacon of Pan-Arab glory. Fifteen years after the Nakba, when hope remained that the land and rights taken away from Palestinians could be restored and Jerusalem returned to Muslim guardianship, the chief vessel of that hope was Nasser himself. Chahine himself, sorely aware of decades of humiliation and subjugation carried out by imperialist forces against Egypt, wanted to believe in this hope. So Chahine transposes this dream of Nasserism onto Saladin and, in turn, elevates Nasser into a modern-day Saladin. The Arabic title, El-Nasser Salah el-Din, pointedly contains Nasser’s name, meaning ‘the bringer of victory.’
This cinematic Saladin, played with unswerving dignity and verve by Ahmed Mazhar (who incidentally had gone to military academy with Nasser), is thus far too flawless to ever allow his character or the film to move beyond hagiography. He is noble in intention, shrewd in strategy, humble in diplomacy; he is a man of science who spends his free time experimenting in his personal chemical laboratory (see above). One rare crack in his sheen of perfection comes when his beloved son is killed in battle: we feel his inner grief yet he suppresses all his emotion, and returns to experiment with his chemical solutions rather than grieve openly. Yet, this too is for the wider good; he cannot show outward emotion because of his duty to be a leader to others. Chahine’s Saladin is thus less a fully-fleshed human character than an ideal: he represents a larger-than-life hero figure which a people needs to believe in, in order to believe in itself, and to believe in national projects being built. A heroic figure that brings people together with a vision of inclusion, not exclusion. The kind of unifying figure we sorely lack in our societies that have given up on idealistic notions.
But for all its grandeur, Saladin the Victorious also foreshadows the darker historical shift in which idealistic notions perish, even if it does so unknowingly. Another parallel reverberated while I watched, this time with a later work in Chahine’s filmography. The death of Saladin’s son triggers a very different response from Issa, Saladin’s loyal Christian general. Issa vehemently refuses to believe the death of his close friend, Saladin’s son, insisting that he will show up safe and sound. How eerily this resonates, I thought, with the behaviour of Bahiya refusing to believe the announcement that the Arab forces have lost the Six Day War in the iconic ending of The Sparrow (1973), running through the streets shouting that it isn’t true². It is that humiliating defeat in 1967 which crushed the belief that Pan-Arabism and Nasser could bind and replenish the Arab world towards a better future. Nasser may have temporarily given his people hope, but was imperfect in a way the movie version of Saladin could never be. Hence there is in Chahine’s career, just as in the wider Arab world, a before and after 1967. Where Saladin was full of hope and naive idealism, The Sparrow would be a dark mirror of those feelings, suffused with disillusionment. (August 2025)
Notes:
- A colonial history which of course the far-right is all but deaf to, and which engaging with the films of Chahine or of any postcolonial nation can be a useful primer in.
- There’s another fascinating aspect of The Sparrow, which is that in that later film, Chahine zeroes in on misinformation, state lies, and the betrayal of ideals by directly pointing the finger at the Nasser regime. It was Egyptian state media’s propagandistic coverage of Middle East politics that made Egyptians certain of victory in 1967 — defeat was to them completely unexpected, let alone a rout in six days, for they did not have any sense of how vastly ouranked they were by Israel’s military. In this sense, The Sparrow might be seen not just as a reflection of disillusionment, but also as Chahine’s mea culpa for himself having believed in and supported the Nasserist project.
Cinescope 