In her life of Saladin, Anne-Marie Eddé notes that Saladin's physicians were often highly cultivated men of letters, and mentions in particular the Andalusian emigré ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Jilyani (531–602 or 3/1136–1206), regretting the loss of his ‘book on Saladin's conquests’.

We do not know much about al-Jilyani as a person, even though his extant writings are to some extent ego-documents in which his self-evaluation looms large; and in spite of his auto-bibliographies and Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a's list of works based on them, our picture of him as an author and cultural actor lacks focus. To touch selectively on his output, throughout most of his adult life he composed mystical sayings, which he collected in Kitab adab al-suluk. They are unpublished and have not been studied, and we do not know how they relate to his other writings. He wrote poetic descriptions of Saladin's battles, dated from 565/1169–70 to 587/1191, which are reasonably well known because they are quoted by the historian of medicine Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a and the political historian Abu Shama. They are cited in twentieth-century Arabic scholarship on the poetry of the Counter-Crusade, and in a new English study of anti-Crusader poetry.

He was also known for picture-poems, mudabbajat, literally ‘brocaded’ or ‘figured’ pieces – the term is apparently his own invention. In Arabic literary criticism, verse was often compared to woven stuffs, but al-Jilyani's mudabbajat were a new departure. He dedicated mudabbajat to Saladin, and other Ayyubids, in celebration of his achievements and to glorify his new dynasty. An untapped source for the ideology and propaganda of Saladin's regime, they survive in manuscripts whose contents and titles vary.

Brief extracts from the Uppsala and Paris MSS of mudabbajat were published by K. V. Zetterstéen in 1927. Further extracts based on these plus the Manchester John Rylands and Damascus Zahiriyya MSS were incorporated into ‘Abd al-Jalil ‘Abd al-Mahdi's reconstruction of al-Jilyani's collected ‘Poems of good tidings and of Jerusalem’ (Diwan al-mubashshirat wa-l- Qudsiyyat) – the book on Saladin's conquests that Eddé had in mind. A full edition of the Manchester MS by Kamal Abu Deeb, which will be described presently, appeared in 2010 under the title Diwan al-tadbij, prefaced by a preliminary literary and codicological study.