Books / The Father of Beasts / Front Matter
Disclaimer
This book is built upon real history. It follows the chronicles of the First Crusade; only its characters are imagined. It seeks to honour truth, not senseless violence.
I was unaware of the history of the First Crusade before I started imagining a story set during this time, once I learned it, I was compelled to write about it. Every city, march, atrocity and siege is drawn from the chronicles of Muslim and Frankish writers of the Crusades, these were not inventions. The massacres and rivers of blood were real.
Ahmad — the so-called Father of Beasts— is fiction. His beasts, his Brotherhood — imagined. But the struggle he embodies is not, he is based off of a combination of Muslim historical figures and narrations. His life is a lens, a realistic way to walk the roads of the Holy Land (Bilad al-Sham) in 1098–1099 and see events as they unfolded. He stands for those whose names were never written, though they bore the weight of history.
The purpose of this work is not to change history, but to remember it through the eyes of one man who could have existed there — to walk beside him, and not to forget.
Opening Dedication
For those slaughtered by the cruelty of power.
For those erased by the silence of history.
For those who endured when the world preferred that they had broken.
Opening Author’s Note
I write of true men, and of the cowards who stood in their way.
I write of the innocent who were torn down and betrayed, of a time of weakness and selfishness not unlike our own.
I write so that knowledge and memory be not buried beneath the lies of the powerful.
I write with hope — that men may stand again as they once did, in a time now gone. I write and I pray — that the worst may yet be stopped from repeating itself in the coming years.
This is not just a story, but the cycle of truth and falsehood. It is the echo of the past, warning the present.
I open with the words of Allah:
“Among the believers are men true to what they promised Allah. Among them is he who has fulfilled his vow [to the death], and among them is he who awaits [his chance]. And they did not alter [the terms of their commitment] by any alteration”
— Quran 33:23
Epigraphs
“If you had been there, your feet would have been stained to the ankles with the blood of the slain. It was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.”
— Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain of the First Crusade (1099)
“The Franks came out to your land, and like a raging torrent they poured across the land, destroying, pillaging, slaughtering, and enslaving.”
— Abū’l-Muẓaffar al-Abiwardi, elegy after the fall of Jerusalem (c. 1100–1101)
Preface
In 1095, Pope Urban II called the warriors of Christendom to march east. Tens of thousands answered. They crossed mountains and rivers with one vow on their lips — to free Jerusalem.
By 1098, Antioch had fallen after a bitter siege. The Franks were starving, fever-ridden, half-mad with zeal — yet still they pressed south. Their next prey was not a fortress of kings but a small Syrian city: Ma’arrat al-Nu’man. Behind its walls waited no army, only farmers, hunters, and children.
But the Franks were not alone in their cruelty. The Muslim world was divided, its rulers no less guilty. Seljuks and Fatimids fought each other while their people starved. Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem) changed hands like a coin tossed on a table. To kings and amirs (leaders) alike, cities were wagers, and the currency was the blood of the poor.
This was the real war: not only armies in the field, but betrayals in the halls of power. While peasants sowed and children begged, those in authority bargained away their homes. While prayers rose from mosques and churches, rulers weighed lives against crowns. Every banner, every oath, was stained with contempt for those they claimed to protect.
So when the Franks turned south, Jerusalem was already broken — by hunger, by siege, and by the selfishness of its own lords.
What happened at Ma’arra would echo across centuries — not in glory, not in victory, but in hunger, cruelty, and the shadow of fear that men carried into the Holy Land.
And from the ashes of Ma’arra, one figure would rise.