Najm ad-Din Ayyub, Saladin’s father and Shirkuh’s brother, served at Tikrit, Baalbek and Damascus before joining his son in Cairo. The Ayyubid dynasty took its name from him.

Black-and-white view of Baalbek ruins with stone walls, steps and columns beneath distant snow-covered mountains
Baalbek in 1950, photographed by Willem van de Poll, Nationaal Archief 255-6476. The later view provides context for Ayyub’s governorship; the surviving masonry is not all attributed to him. Willem van de Poll / Nationaal Archief · CC0 1.0.

A family from the Dvin district

Najm ad-Din Ayyub ibn Shadhi died in 1173. He was Saladin’s father and Asad al-Din Shirkuh’s elder brother. R. Stephen Humphreys traces the family to the Dvin district and identifies Shadhi with the Rawadiyya branch of the Hadhbani Kurdish grouping. [1] A regional Kurdish lineage is a historical description of the family, not evidence that every later Ayyubid subject shared one ethnicity. Nor should a reliable birth date be invented from the better-known dates of his sons.

Tikrit and the move into Zengi’s service

Before Zengid service, Shadhi commanded Tikrit through the Seljuq official Bihruz. Ayyub succeeded his father; the brothers joined Zengi in 532 AH/1138. [1] Baalbek was not Ayyub’s first administrative post.

Baalbek, then Burid Damascus, then Nur al-Din

Ramazan Şeşen’s TDV history places Zengi’s grant of Baalbek to Ayyub in 534 AH/1140. It says that after Zengi’s death in 1146 Ayyub entered the service of Damascus’s Burid rulers, while Shirkuh supported Nur al-Din in Aleppo. Only after Damascus came under Nur al-Din in 549 AH/1154 does it identify Ayyub as its governor. [2] The years from 1146 to 1154 therefore should not be described as uninterrupted service at Nur al-Din’s Damascus court. The two brothers occupied different positions before their careers converged.

A named foundation, not just inherited praise

Ibn Khallikan says he personally saw the Najmiyya Sufi establishment at Baalbek and identifies Ayyub as its founder. He also attributes a mosque and cistern outside Cairo’s Bab al-Nasr to Ayyub, reporting an inscription dated 566 AH/1170–1171 that he had seen himself. [3] These are the medieval biographer’s observations, not a new inspection of surviving buildings. They give Ayyub an identifiable institutional history beyond general claims that he taught Saladin every virtue.

Cairo and death after a riding accident

Ibn Khallikan records Ayyub’s arrival in Cairo in Rajab 565 AH/April 1170, after Saladin became Egypt’s vizier. Nur al-Din provided travel support, and the Fatimid caliph al-Adid welcomed him. It dates his fatal riding accident outside Bab al-Nasr to late July 1173, followed by death in August while Saladin was campaigning. [3] He died in Cairo, not Damascus in December. The biographer also records later transfer of his and Shirkuh’s remains to Medina.

A dynasty’s namesake, not its founding sultan

The name Ayyubid derives from Ayyub, but Saladin established the ruling dynasty’s power. Şeşen distinguishes the Egyptian vizierate of 1169 from the abolition of the Fatimid caliphate in 1171. [2] Humphreys describes the subsequent Ayyubid system as a family confederation: leading princes held their own territories, and seniority did not automatically create central control. [1] Ayyub’s governorships, court connections and foundations deserve attention in their own right; they need not be recast as personal rule over all his descendants’ later lands.

Sources and further reading

  1. R. Stephen Humphreys, Ayyubids, Encyclopaedia Iranica III/2 (1987), pp. 164–167; origins, Tikrit and family confederation.
  2. Ramazan Şeşen, Eyyûbîler, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (1995), political history; Baalbek, Burid Damascus, 1154 and the Egyptian succession.
  3. Ibn Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary, translated by Mac Guckin de Slane, vol. I (Paris, 1843), pp. 243–247; Ayyub’s biography, foundations, arrival in Cairo and death.
  4. Willem van de Poll, Baalbek, 1950, Nationaal Archief 255-6476; CC0 1.0, Wikimedia Commons.