‘Unity! Unity between all the inhabitants of our lands!’

Across the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and comfortably into the early twentieth, major changes in political and cultural life across the Near East offered the region's many interested parties tremendous scope to look back to, and to draw upon, their memories of the crusades. The emergence of further newspapers in the late nineteenth century saw continued references to Saladin. Theatre became an especially powerful medium in the Near East towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1914, however, Antun wrote a more serious piece, 'The Sultan Saladin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem', a work that engaged with contemporary issues, social and political, and reflected a growing sense of originality and nationalist activism in the theatrical community. Antun's play ends with a cry: 'Unity! Unity between all the inhabitants of our lands!' A crowd floods onto the stage to acclaim this call, rallying around a theme that would become ever stronger down the decades.