Tag Archives: Literature
The Stone Woman - Islam Quintet III
- Monday, 01 January 2001 21:53
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Published by Verso, 2001
Book three in the epic five volume series of historical novels, The Islam Quintet
Each year, when the weather in Istanbul becomes unbearable, the family of Iskender Pasha, a retired Ottoman notable, retires to its summer palace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. It is 1899 and the last great Islamic empire is in serlous trouble. A former tutor poses a question which the family has been refusing to confront for almost a century: “Your Ottoman Empire is like a drunken prostitute, neither knowing nor caring who will take her next. Do I exaggerate, Memed?”
The history of Iskender Pasha’s family mirrors the growing degeneration of the Empire they have served for the last five hundred years. This passionate story of masters and servants, school-teachers and painters, is marked by jealousies, vendettas and, with the decay of the Empire, a new generation which is deeply hostile to the half-truths and myths of the “golden days.“
Like its predecessors—Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and The Book of Saladin—the power of The Stone Woman lies both in the story-telling and the challenge it poses to stereotyped images of life under Islam.
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A Review of The Stone Woman
- Sunday, 01 October 2000 17:26
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A Stone Woman reviewed by Hugh S. Galford for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1, 2000
“There are always two histories” may be a well-known saying, but how many of us actually take the time to look at an issue from both sides, to learn both stories? In each of the first three books of a planned quartet, English historian, screenwriter and activist Tariq Ali saves us the work involved in such an endeavor. Taking as his subject matter the intersection of Islamic and Western history, Ali presents three familiar episodes—the Reconquista, the Crusades and the final years of the Ottoman Empire—in a distinctly unfamiliar fashion: from the viewpoint of the Muslims.
Written over the last six years, the first three books of Ali’s “Islam quartet” provide not only great reading, but an extremely useful corrective to the general Western misconceptions about Islam and Muslim society. Each work, while fiction, has clearly been thoroughly researched. The openness, tolerance and cosmopolitanism of Islamic society in each period is clearly presented, with accents and touches that ring true. Yet the books also do not whitewash Islamic history. While Westerners are inclined to view Islam as a monolithic entity, Ali brings out the divisions and tensions that existed within the societies of each period. While some of these tensions are minor, in Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and The Stone Woman, others go to the very core of the characters’ Islamic identity, and in The Book of Saladin they nearly destroy the society from within. read more
The Book of Saladin - Islam Quintet II
- Friday, 01 January 1999 21:42
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Published by Verso, 1999
The second installment the epic five volume series of historical novels, The Islam Quintet
A rich and teeming chronicle set in twelfth-century Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem, The Book of Saladin is the fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe, Ibn Yakub.
Saladin grants Ibn Yakub permission to talk to his wife and retainers so that he might portray a complete picture of him in his memoirs. A series of nterconnected stories follow, tales brimming over with warmth, earthy humour and passions in which ideals clash with realities and dreams are confounded by desires. At the heart of the novel is an affecting love affair between the Sultan’s favoured wife, Jamila, and the beautiful Halima, a later addition to the harem.
The novel charts the rise of Saladin as Sultan of Egypt and Syria and follows him as he prepares, in alliance with his Jewish and Christian subjects, to take Jerusalem back from the Crusaders. It is a medieval story, but much of it will be cannily familiar to those who follow events in contemporary Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Betrayed hopes, disillusioned soldiers and unreliable alliances form the backdrop to The Book of Saladin.
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Reviews: Epic India
Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree - Islam Quintet I
- Friday, 01 January 1993 21:29
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Published by Verso, 1993
The first book in the five volume series of historical novels, The Islam Quintet
“Tariq Ali tells us the story of the aftermath of the fall of Granada by narrating a family sage of those who tried to survive after the collapse of their world. Particularly deft at evoking what life must have been like for those doomed inhabitants, besieged on all sides by intolerant Christendom. This is a novel that have something to say, and says it well.”—Guardian
“Tariq Ali captures the humanity and splendour of Muslim Spain … an enthralling story, unravelled with thrift and verve. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree is quizzical as well as honest, informative as well as enjoyable, real history as well as fiction … a book to be relished and devoured.”—Independent
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Book Review: ‘Midnight’s Children’
A review of Midnight’s Children by Tariq Ali for New Left Review, Nov-Dec 1993
Midnight’s Children has been widely acclaimed as a literary tour de force. It has won plaudits for its author, Salman Rushdie, from critics throughout the Anglo-Saxon world and has been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Rushdie has been compared, at different times, to Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose influences, openly acknowledged, are evident in Midnight’s Children. Saleem Sinai, the semi-autobiographical narrator and central figure in the book, has definite affinities with Oskar in The Tin Drum; and it would not be difficult to find the Latin American equivalents of the sub-continent’s generals in Autumn of the Patriarch. However, these analogies are not of prime significance. Danzig/Gdansk and Macondo are not Bombay.
Rushdie’s work provokes comparisons not only with Grass or Marquez, but with other writers who have made India their subject. The reason this has not been done so far is because English critics and commentators have tended to downplay the politics of Midnight’s Children. Whether this is the result of guilt, embarrassment, ignorance or a combination of all three is a matter for speculation. What is beyond doubt is that Rushdie’s novel is centrally an attack on clearly identifiable targets: the indigenous ruling classes in South Asia. His book is not simply a pleasing mosaic of everyday life in the South Asian sub-continent. read more