Not Light in Terms of Protection

The [Mamluk] trooper was protected by a knee-length chain-mail shirt that extended up to the neck as a coif; Saladin was once saved from an Assassin’s knife stroke by his coif as he sat watching a siege near Aleppo. The hazagand, a jerkin of leather and mail that was commonly worn by Islamic troops in Syria is definitely not light in terms of the protection it affords but it is light in terms of the Syrian summer. It was taken up by the Latins of Outremer and spread to Europe as the [hauberk jazerant]. Turkish and Islamic armour was designed this way for mobility and because of the climate in which men fought. There was, however, another reason why the armour of the East never moved toward the total body coverage with plate that was a feature of the Western knight in the later medieval age—the technology and techniques of Islamic metalworking. Ibn Sina (d. 1037) describes three types of iron being produced within the Islamic lands but al-Biruni (d. 1048 [C.E.]) tells us that the crucible steel or ‘wootz’ used to create weapons was imported from India. This steel was perfect for blades but it could not be formed into plates any larger than twenty-five centimetres, which meant that even into the Ottoman age Islamic troops would have been wearing lamellar armour….

— The Knights of Islam, Chapter 3