In the heart of Damascus, just beside the revered Umayyad Mosque, lies one of the most sacred monuments in Islamic and Kurdish history: the Tomb of Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb - known to the world simply as Saladin.
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Born in Tikrit in 1137 to a noble Kurdish family from the Rawadiya tribe, Saladin would rise from modest origins to become one of the greatest leaders the Islamic world has ever known. His tomb is not just the burial site of a man - it is the symbolic resting place of Kurdish dignity, courage, and leadership.
Saladin founded the Ayyubid dynasty, ruled vast territories across the Middle East, and led the historic liberation of Jerusalem in 1187 after the Battle of Hattin, defeating the Crusader forces with military brilliance and unmatched mercy. His character earned the admiration not only of Muslims but even his Crusader foes - including Richard the Lionheart, who famously respected him as a noble adversary.
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
After his death in 1193, he was buried in Damascus, the city he had fortified and beautified. His tomb, completed in 1196, features Ayyubid-era architecture, with both a simple wooden sarcophagus and a marble one given centuries later by the German Emperor Wilhelm II, a sign of how far his legacy reached.
For Kurds, the Tomb of Saladin holds a deeper meaning: it is a national shrine, a place of ethnic as well as religious pride. At a time when Kurdish identity is often denied or erased, Saladin’s legacy stands as a reminder of Kurdish achievement. He was a Kurd, not an Arab, a Turk or a Persian, and he led an empire.
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
His values of justice, tolerance and unity reflect the best of Kurdish leadership traditions, shaped in the mountains of the Zagros, refined through centuries of resistance and remembered in stone. His tomb is a place of remembrance and defiance; its message to every visitor is that a Kurd changed the world.
Even foreign occupiers recognized his power. In 1920, when the French general Henri Gouraud entered Damascus after the First World War, he is said to have visited the tomb and declared: “Nous voilà de retour, Saladin!” (“We have returned, Saladin.”) Yet Saladin’s memory lives on, in the hearts of Kurds, in the pages of history and in the stones of the mausoleum.
For Kurds today, visiting the Tomb of Saladin is an act of pilgrimage and pride: a reminder that Kurds have led empires, won battles and inspired the world, and that, whatever borders divide them, their legacy, like Saladin’s, endures.
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Well-known people who visited the Tomb of Saladin
President Nasser of Egypt visited Saladin’s tomb during his first visit to Damascus in 1958, when he came to sign the Syrian-Egyptian Union.
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
“We have returned O' Saladin” is what the French general Henri Gouraud is said to have declared when he entered the Kurdish warrior’s tomb beside the Umayyad Mosque in August 1920, after the French had seized Damascus.
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
The famous revolutionary Che Guevara visited the Tomb in 1959
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
During his second state tour of the Middle East, Kaiser Wilhelm II paid gushing tribute to the medieval hero of Islam and had described him as “One of the most chivalrous rulers of all times, the great Sultan Saladin a knight without fear or fault”. He gifted the shrine a bronze wreath and a carpet. The bronze wreath, frontal inscription saying “This crown was presented by His Majesty, the Emperor of Germany his presence Wilhelm the Second in memory of his pilgrimage to the tomb of his presence Salah el Din el Ajubi.” It also bears the dedication, “From one great Emperor to another”, and on the obverse the Qur’anic verse “Surely, God loves the doers of good” (Maidah 5:13) in German and Arabized Turkish. He also reacted on seeing the humble state of the tomb, how it was a neglected, crumbling, and forgotten wooden tomb tucked away in a small outbuilding of a garden beside the Great Mosque of Damascus. He paid for a new mausoleum out of his own pocket, a beautiful marble tomb in the medieval style with scrollwork that has a Byzantine flourish. On a bronze wreath he inscribed, “From one great emperor to another.”
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
The wreath gifted to Saladin by the Kaiser
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
The same wreath was presented to T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in Damascus by Sherif Feisal on October 1, 1918, upon their entry into the city. This wreath had originally been placed on the tomb by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898. Lawrence later donated the wreath to the Imperial War Museum
Posted by Zagrosian · 9 June 2025
Between the 1980s and 1990s, during his residence in Damascus, Abdullah Öcalan - the Kurdish political leader and founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) - is reported to have visited the tomb of Saladin to pay his respects.
Posted by Zagrosian · 20 June 2025
Saladin, 1972, Ehrenkreutz, Andrew S, p.1
Posted by Zagrosian · 20 June 2025
Engraving of the tomb of Saladin in Syria
Posted by Zagrosian · 20 June 2025
Painting of the tomb of Saladin
Posted by Zagrosian · 20 June 2025
Arabic text written on the Tomb of Saladin (transliterated and translated):
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم | نصر من الله و فتح قريب
In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful | Victory is from God and a near conquest
فقد مات السلطان الأعظم الملك الناصر صلاح الدين يوسف بن أيوب في دمشق في قلعة دمشق سنة 589 و نقلت رفاته إلى هذا المكان المبارك.
Indeed, the great sultan, al-Malik al-Nasir Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Saladin), died in Damascus, in the Citadel of Damascus, in the year 589 AH [1193 CE], and his remains were transferred to this blessed place.
وتوفي السلطان الملك الصالح نجم الدين أيوب بن الكامل في القاهرة سنة 647 و دفن في التربة الصالحية.
And Sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ Najm al-Dīn Ayyūb ibn al-Kāmil died in Cairo in the year 647 AH [1249 CE] and was buried in the Ṣāliḥiyya Mausoleum.
Posted by Zagrosian · 20 June 2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Saladin
Posted by Zagrosian · 20 June 2025