Slaleebi Jangon Ki Tareekh (Salahuddin Ayubi) is an Urdu Translation of The Crusades, The Flame of Islam . Harold Lamb captures as well or better than any you have ever read the sweep and scope of the Crusades, the Crusaders, and the land they went to reclaim for the Cross. One is caught up in wave after wave of freebooter, noblemen, knights and peasants that took up the challenge of the Bishop of Rome and pledged all to cleanse the Holy land of the unbeliever. When Baldwin finally takes the City of Jerusalem and storms the Temple Mount, one is left with a feeling of exaltation seldom felt in modern literature. He is equally gripping in his accounting of the excesses of the Knights, Templers and others, against which Salah ud din (Saladin)rose up in righteous indignation. Saladin drove the invaders who had come from Europe from the Lands of the Prophet, and cleansed the "land" from the infidel. Altogether one of the most memorable books on that period of history that I have read. His descriptions of ancient warfare are, factual, captivating and superb. He gets to the underlying motives on both sides. Why the Crusades were successful for a time, and why they were doomed to ultimate failure. He also shows why there is such undying animosity between the followers of the Prophet and the followers of the Nazarene.
Lamb has his personal favorite hero: Saladin, the most chivalrous of enemies, very intelligent and skillful men, with good warfare knowledge, quite learned and, by far, the most important Islam's defender of the Faith. The brilliancy of the exposition of Lamb, his excellent use of terms, and his profound knowledge of the East provides the ambience.
Lamb's books are all factual as he visited each area he writes about. The Crusades is a fast moving novel that underlines the different movements of Europe and Asia fighting. Showing the heroes and villians from both sides. Lamb has the skill to keep himself neutral; nevertheless he gives us the facts and gives the reader the golden opportunity: the possibility to make their own judgment, based in, more or less, non-fictional facts. And that's Lamb's greatest achievement. He novelizes a subject, but finally it is only a very valid literary resource to lead us to the precise point of human History where the author wants us. From title, "The flame of Islam", we understand that greed, false piousness, false pride, ignorance; the arrogance of the self-conceited Christian warriors, lustful, bored -perhaps with a tint of real faith-, made the Europeans cross the seas and barren lands to get to Jerusalem, the three-times blessed City. But, from the pages of Lamb we may be able to point out that failure of the enterprise was due, from the 1st Crusade, to jealousy, envy, and the search of personal success. It was not their main goal to recover The Holy Land. If it had been true, they would have succeeded.