Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (...), better known simply as Salah ad-Din or Saladin (...), was a Sunni Muslim Kurd who became the first sultan of both Egypt and Syria, founding the Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin led the Muslim military campaign against the Crusader states in the Levant. At the height of his power, his sultanate spanned Egypt, Syria, the Jazira (Upper Mesopotamia), the Hejaz (western Arabia), Yemen, parts of western North Africa, and Nubia." [Wikipedia]