It's worth adding, as a PS, that Scott’s positive portrait of the nobility and civilised excellence of Saladin was part of a larger discursive context. Jonathan Phillips notes: “François-Louis-Claude Marin published the first western language Histoire du Saladin (1758), a serious scholarly attempt to evaluate the sultan. In the context of Enlightenment criticism of ‘fanatical’ religions, and a view of Muslim rulers as cruel and ruthless despots, Saladin emerges remarkably well, governing through moderation, generosity and clemency. The author was unconvinced by the stories of Saladin’s various romantic adventures in the West, although he indicated his belief that the sultan had been dubbed a knight. ‘Finally,’ Marin concluded, ‘an astonished Europe admired in a Muslim, virtues unknown to the Christians of that century.’” [Jonathan Phillips, The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Yale University Press 2019), 326]
Phillips also points out that Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has positive things to say about Saladin, and that Lessing’s drama Nathan der Weise (1779) styles him as a ‘hero’.
I also read a really interesting article about adaptations of The Talisman in the Arab world [Samuel England and ةمجرتلا جاتنإو ةضهنلا ىلإ ةيسورفلا نم, ‘An Ayyubid Renaissance: Saladin, from Knighthood to Nahḍa’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 38 (2018), 37-61] that points out how popular this particular Scott novel was: ‘Salah alDln al-AyyUbi, Najlb äl-Iiaddäd's adaptation of The Talisman, debuted in 1893 at Egypt's Royal Opera House’, later touring with a newly-formed and influential theatrical troup (‘its members chose to call their new company al-Ādāb al-'Arabiyyah. Ādāb, the plural of adab, is used most commonly in the moral, behavioral register of possible meanings, thus we might think of the name as the Arab Values Troupe’).
The article notes that Arab writers ‘felt compelled to fictionalize the Crusades because they noticed the productive ways in which European writers had fetishized the protracted battle for Jerusalem. Those fetishes centered around chivalry, and [the way] Scott's Talisman memorably put them into service for English sovereignty, which he depicted as badly tested, both by other European kingdoms and by Richard Lionheart's immoderate shows of bravery. When the novel was first translated and published by SarrQf in the Egyptian press during the years 1886-1887, al-Had dad and Antan appreciated how much language Scott dedicated to praising knights, the intricate depiction of their physical comportment, and the diplomatic abilities of a great knight like Saladin, whose persona in The Talisman models the intercultural sensibility of an idealized, cosmopolitan translator.’
