A Civilizing Influence

Regardless, September 11, 2001, put an end to warm-and-cuddly book ideas. Since the twin towers fell, the times have demanded blunt tomes with aggressive titles and subtitles that could, in different hands, double as recruitment slogans for one jihad or another. Historian Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong and The Crisis of Islam have swollen to bestsellerdom in part, one suspects, on the inflammatory nature of their monikers. If Lewis has any regrets about the names chosen, it may be because the real banner he wished to run across both dust jackets—the now-axiomatic “clash of civilizations,” which he coined in an earlier essay—was usurped by Samuel Huntington for his more nuanced The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Lewis has had to be content with subtitles that are locked and loaded: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and Holy War and Unholy terror respectively.

Forget some waffling about forgotten cultural interactions or shared ancestries, and disregard the foreshadowings of history—say, the infamous razing of the library of Alexandria in ad 391 so that it could be converted to a church. The only acceptable narrative at present is the conflict between civilizations, one modern and righteous and the other in the throes of the terror and crisis that comes from being, so to speak, wrong. This may be a largely rhetorical clash, but when oppositional forces meet, whether in reality or in the media, the noise can be deafening. Among those publishing at maximum volume since 9/11 has been the historian and essayist Tariq Ali. Both his The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity and Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq give from the international Left at least as good as they get from the American Right.

But that same Tariq Ali has also nearly completed the sort of quiet writing project seemingly out of step with our loud age. A Sultan in Palermo is the fourth volume in the Islam Quintet, a series of historical novels that probe the lengthy encounter between Islam and Western Christendom. The series is revisionist in impulse, wishing to suggest that the dominant history of Europe in the last millennium, if not quite the lie told by the winner, as Napoleon Bonaparte once quipped, has certainly involved obscuring the truth about those who “lost” the continent. “If things go on like this,” a character says at the start of the first novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, “nothing will be left of us except a fragrant memory.”

The quintet begins in 1499 in al-Andalus. Queen Isabella is solidifying the reconquista of the land that Christians call Spain from the dark-skinned heathens who have been occupying parts of it for six centuries. Amid the slaughters, expulsions, and conversions-by-inquisition, one act of savagery stands out. Ximenes de Cisneros, the Catholic archbishop in charge of the dirty work, has sent soldiers into the libraries and private homes with book collections around the city of Granada, ordering that all Arab-language titles be collected for burning. Like many such gestures, Cisneros’ involves a backhanded compliment: these people care enough about books to be devastated by their loss.

Indeed, among the texts are several thousand copies of the Koran, many exquisitely crafted, along with “rare manuscripts vital to the entire architecture of intellectual life in al-Andalus.” The collection is both a testament to the sophistication of Moorish Spain and the envy of scholars in the rest of Europe. The priest is convinced that Muslims can be eliminated as a force in the Iberian Peninsula only if their culture is erased. He signals the torch-bearers to light the bonfire, then listens, unmoved, as helpless onlookers offer their faith’s timeless assertion of fidelity: “There is only one Allah and he is Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet.”

Moorish Spain, as embodied by the fictional aristocratic clan, the Banu Hudayl, whose mansion outside Granada was first constructed in ad 935, three years after the family left Damascus for the western outpost of Islam, is about to be eradicated. Literally nothing and no one will survive the fanaticism of the overlords, who are, by the by, primitive by comparison with those they exterminate. The last survivor of the Hudayls, an eleven-year-old child, has a knife plunged into his chest by a sociopathic teenage army captain. The epilogue, which jumps ahead twenty years, further darkens this compelling, if not always seamless, first effort at rendering history through narrative. The captain, revealed as Cortés, is shown entering the great city of Tenochtitlan, or presentday Mexico City, where king Moctezuma is naïvely waiting to greet him.

By beginning in Spain, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree goes straight for the heart of Muslim grievances about their legacy in Europe. Ali may have chosen al-Andalus as his inaugural canvas because the story is reasonably well-known, especially the bonfire at Granada. His decision with the next volume, The Book of Saladin, to shift three centuries back to the region from which the Hudayl family originally fled, suggests a twofold ambition for the series. First impressions of the early novels are likely to focus on their portraits of Islamic societies in Mediterranean Europe. These sketches, vivid and warm without being idealized, have the freshness of images recently discovered beneath the paint of other representations. Much of the pleasure of reading Ali’s fiction lies in his detailing of daily life, both high and low, and daily appetites, including sexual and culinary—appetites and lives that have been too long hidden. As a novelist, he is possessed with a fine historical intelligence and a storytelling impulse that owes as much to Arabian Nights as it does to Tolstoy. Admirers of tales replete with scheming eunuchs and harem intrigues, women of complex lusts, and men who love women and men alike, won’t be disappointed.

But a more cerebral ambition underpins how history unfolds in the books. When lined up beside each other, the novels constitute a compare and contrast of the fates of those societies. As well as excavating the secret Islamicization of Europe, Ali is posing a question: why did Islam, once so pluralistic and intellectually progressive, ossify and withdraw to such a degree that it wound up isolated from the continent it helped civilize? In Moorish Spain, he identifies the force and animosity of external enemies as the principal cause. In other cases, the fault is largely internal.

The Book of Saladin finds the culture at perhaps the peak of its achievements. Salah al-Din, or Saladin, the legendary Kurdish Sultan of Syria and Egypt, arrives at the Cairo house of the Jewish scholar Ibn Yakub, who he hires as his personal scribe. Though Jerusalem was lost to the Christians in the First Crusade of 1099, Saladin’s rule over the cities of Cairo and Damascus has allowed for the evolution of an urban civilization far in advance of anything in continental Europe. His caliphate is also tolerant, welcoming Jews and Christians to dwell alongside Believers. All are People of the Book, sharing much of the Old and New Testament and many of the prophets. Saladin himself is revered for his generosity and fairness: a good ruler, as rare in the Islamic world as anywhere else.

The Sultan’s vow to retake Jerusalem, known to Arabs as al-Kuds, is within his military reach, so long as he can maintain unity among his emirs. History records Saladin recapturing the city in 1187, only to be confronted by still another wave of crusaders, including the English King Richard the Lionhearted. Ostensibly the victor in the Third Crusade as well, Saladin was worn down equally by battles with Christians and with his own fractious tribes. History also records that Islam did not achieve prominence again in the Holy Land until the rise of the Ottomans centuries later.