I forced my reluctant, bone-chilled body out into a frozen London night to head over to Woolwich. What induced me to leave my warm flat to head all the way over the river to zone 4? Fireworks. Pure and simple – I love fireworks. Maybe it is because I didn’t get to go to many bonfire nights as a kid or maybe I just love the […]
Daily Archives: February 3, 2012
Two names are synonymous with the Crusades – King Richard of England and Saladin. But Saladin is simply a western corruption of an Arabic honorific (akin referring to Richard as the Lionheart). The great ruler’s personal name was Yusuf, or Joseph. Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn is a laqab, a descriptive epithet that means ‘Righteousness of the Faith’. This was easily compressed and corrupted into Saladin. His name was […]
Righteousness and the Lionheart
In a perfect monarchical system, the king or queen will be the personal embodiment of a country’s sense of identity. If monarchy stands for anything, it is tradition and history – a personal and unbroken link to centuries past. Of course, the reality is often quite different. The House of Windsor has a quintessentially English ring to it, but this was the intentional First World War […]