The project was the brainchild of Turkey’s state-run broadcaster, TRT, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Culture. The goal was unambiguous: to reclaim the narrative of the 12th-century Kurdish-Muslim leader who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. In a decade marked by President Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy, Saladin was the perfect icon—a unifier of fractured Muslim lands, a chivalrous warrior, and a merciful conqueror.
There is no standalone major feature film titled simply Saladin from 2017. The most significant 2017 film featuring Saladin as a central character is the Russian historical epic “The Conquest of Crimea” (Крым) ? No. Actually, the most prominent is the Kazakh-Turkish film “The Diamond Sword” ? No. saladin film 2017
More significantly, the film became a political football. In 2018, during Erdoğan’s election campaign, clips of Saladin’s speeches were aired on state TV as analogies for standing up to the West. The film was screened for Turkish troops in northern Syria. A line from the movie—“Jerusalem is not a city, it is a wound in our chest”—became a trending hashtag after Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The project was the brainchild of Turkey’s state-run