A Civilizing Influence

Making the boldest time leap in the series, The Stone Woman bypasses the glory days of the final Islamic empire to meditate on its long twilight. The novel, which details the story of a disaffected Turkish aristocrat named Nilofer who returns to her family home outside Istanbul in 1899, is a Chekhovian exercise in philosophical sighs and political inertia. Characters squander afternoons lamenting the retreat of the Ottoman Empire from the Europe that emerged out of the Renaissance. “Istanbul,” one character remarks, “could have been the capital of invention and modernity like Cordoba and Baghdad in the old days, but these wretched beards that established the laws of our state were frightened of losing their monopoly of power and knowledge.” The “beards” are the conservative clergy, who had, for instance, persuaded one sixteenth-century sultan that the printing press would be a threat to stability. Another character summarizes the sentiment among the family: “I think our decline is well deserved.”

The Stone Woman, with its purposeful inactivity and daring foray into the mind of a Muslim woman, is a striking counterpoint to the bustle of the other books, foreshadowing the condition of Islam still another century into its crisis. “Everything is being taken away and nothing is ready to take its place,” Nilofer warns her children. “It is this that turns many ordinary people into madmen and assassins.”

Such prophesy could well have compelled a fourth volume that actualized Nilofer’s darkest worries for 1999 or beyond. Instead, A Sultan in Palermo swings back to the twelfth century, this time in Sicily. First conquered by Arabs in 827, the island was retaken by the Normans in 1091. The majority Muslim population benefited, however, from a ruler, Roger II, who so admired Islam that he both adopted its customs and kept his less-admiring barons in check. As in Moorish Spain and the Damascus of Saladin, the Salerno of the “baptized Sultan” is a multicultural court in which Muslims, Jews, and Nazarenes live and work together. For Ali, these periods of fruitful coexistence are to be noted. History in the quintet isn’t a force above and beyond human agency. Civilizations don’t clash; only individuals do, and they can always resolve otherwise.

A Sultan in Palermo is the first volume to appear since 9/11. For the most part, the book is unaffected by the rising screech of debate in journalism and non-fiction. The tale of the efforts of al-Idrisi, a court scholar and adviser to Roger II, to stave off the disaster of his ruler’s impending death keeps pace in both plot and detail with The Book of Saladin, the finest of the novels so far. That a scholar should fail to stop the Normans from slaughtering Muslims after a change in leadership, thus initiating the erasure of Islam in Sicily, is no surprise: the leisurely wind-down of the Ottoman Empire is a luxury afforded to few Arabs in Europe. Extinction was more the norm.

Only Ali’s portrait of the historic figure of al-Idrisi betrays what may be a post-9/11 frustration with the ways that novels go about revealing truth. When not struggling to save his people or having sex five times in one night with his wife’s sister (called the “Five Obligations”), the fifty-eight year old is pondering scientific and political advances not due to occur for hundreds of years. These include the theories of gravity and natural selection, and the Marxist plan for the fair distribution of land among peasants. He even offers tips on healthy eating.

Idrisi is, in short, a Super Arab, and had T-shirts been the fashion in medieval Sicily, he might have had one printed with “Muslims do it better.” This mild lapse into the megaphone rhetoric of our age, while forgivable given the author’s engagement with politics in addition to literature, should still be cautioned. Even partisan fiction can’t survive too much cheerleading. More important, it is precisely the reserved, measured truths about humanity contained within the Islam Quintet that we “People of the Book” need to be reading right now.

There is a riddle yet to be answered by the series. Tariq Ali has now balanced stories that explore European Islamic societies destroyed by external forces with those brought down by their own internal failings. As such, the fifth novel could be expected to either tip the balance or propose a new dynamic. My guess is that Ali may finally plunge into the early twentieth century, possibly the Palestine of fading empires and competing ambitions and needs. Here, too, he would find a Muslim society at risk of obliteration, and rulers mostly weak but occasionally strong, and instances of clash and cooperation alike, and more than a few passionate individuals who, though determined not to become fragrant memories, may still end up forgotten, history being what it is.