HISTORY
Roots of an ancient conflict
SHALINI UMACHANDRAN
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Tariq Ali's series of historical novels delve into the historical contact between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
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Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree; The Book of Saladin; The Stone Woman; A Sultan in Palermo; Tariq Ali, Seagull Books, Rs. 295.
CLASHES and Crusades. Hard-won treaties and tales of treachery. European history in the Middle Ages is full of romantic images of knights riding forth, pennants flying high, to defend the Crown and the Cross.
But at some level, these are about the secular conflict between the East and the West that, beginning with the wars of Greece and Persia, resumed in the form of the prolonged duel between Christianity and Islam. This "clash of civilisations" — the term coined by Bernard Lewis but used most gleefully by Samuel Huntington — still continues. Though the manner and mode of the conflict has transformed, in essence, it remains the same.
And authors and academics, especially since 9/11, have never found a lack of interest — or publishing advances — when putting out tomes that seek to explain the roots of this conflict.
But among all the rather excited titles is historian and scholar Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet. It is a series of historical novels that goes into this great theme of history — the contact between the Christian and Islamic worlds. Though set in the past, each novel has a touch of the contemporary.
The first is Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree set in 1499 in al-Andulus during the time of Queen Isabella's reconquista of Spain. The book begins with the famous bonfire of the books at Granada (or Gharnata as the Moors called it), ordered by Archbishop Ximenes de Cisernos. Collections on mathematics, science, astronomy, philosophy and medicine, and handcrafted copies of the Quran, are set aflame in an attempt to wipe out the Moors by destroying their culture and learning.
The Banu Hudayl, an aristocratic clan that lives outside Granada, symbolises Moorish Spain and the issues confronting a population that sees itself under siege. The burning of the books becomes a symbol of a fire that will consume their way of life, and Umar, the head of the family, sees it as he ponders the future of his family and the village. The decision is soon taken out of his hands as a bloody attack is launched on the Banu Hudayl.
The eldest son, Zuhayr, characterises the alienation and anomie that seems to have gripped present day Islamic youth in the West, those for whom jihad is as much a personal search for identity — though they may not realise it — as a fight for their religion.
With The Book of Saladin, Ali steps back three centuries to trace the rise of Salah al-Din, or Saladin as he is better known in European history, as Sultan of Egypt and Syria. Set in Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem, the story is told through Ibn Yakub, a Jewish scribe Saladin hires to write his memoirs. Yakub gets unprecedented access to secret meetings, courtly gatherings, family retainers, palace eunuchs and even the women in the harem. The world Ali recreates seems completely authentic — full of intrigues and schemes, petty politics and grand plans. It's an advanced age where Jews and Christians live in perfect harmony with Muslims and their help is enlisted — and willingly provided — to take back al-Kuds, the Holy Land of Jerusalem, from the Crusaders.
Saladin comes across as a heroic but very real man who can plot brilliant military manoeuvres with as much prowess as he can debate questions of philosophy and religion. But sometimes the banner of Islam's secular nature is flown a bit too high — Saladin was among the exceptional examples of a just, wise king, but he is as rare, or as familiar, to Islamic culture as such kings are to any other.
The pace flags a bit by the third book, The Stone Woman, though one would expect a book dealing with the world of the Ottoman Turks to be the most vibrant and flamboyant, given the fables surrounding the Empire.
Set in 1899, during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, the book chronicles a summer that Iskander Pasha's family spends at their palace near the Sea of Marmara. It's a heavenly place, and the family's lifestyle is lovely, laid-back and luxurious. There is even the execution of a traitor to the cause but it all seems secondary to the intrigues and histories of their lives.
Every member of the family faithfully makes his or her way to the stone woman — a weathered stone statue that could once have been a pagan goddess — to pour out their secrets. From the state of marriages, affairs and friendships to dreams, nightmares, lustful longings and memories, the stone woman — and the reader — silently suffer all the minutiae of the Pasha family's high jinks. It is rather difficult to take any of the heated debate about Empire and revolution seriously with all the distractions at the summer palace. But the book reflects the decadence and indifference of the age, which was the primary cause of the slow decline of the last great Islamic Empire.
Ali then moves to 12th century Sicily under Norman occupation to write A Sultan in Palermo. He chooses the famous — and very real — cartographer and geographer al-Idrisi (who, by the way, has GIS and Image processing software named after him) as his narrator. Idrisi is best known for his Al-Kitab al-Rujari (The Book of Roger), one of the most detailed geographies of the world at the time. Ali's novel starts with Idrisi contemplating how to begin the book that would become his magnum opus. The book melds fact and fiction to create a compelling image of life under the Normans and the choices and uncertainty facing a conquered, but still proud, people.
Throughout the series, Ali has dwelt on the tolerance of medieval Muslim society and, without explicitly saying so, indicates that Islam has lost some of these qualities. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree is the most vibrant of the books, raising many issues that still confront Islam today while explaining that the religion, like any other, has its tolerant and liberal face, which has been obscured by those that preach a single-minded approach and see things only in black and white.
The Quintet threads different geographies and time periods together with the idea of Islam. Ali is obviously making a case for the Islamic Enlightenment that he believes should accompany genuine reform in thinking. Each of these books can stand alone, or be read in conjunction with one another, to ask the same question: why and how did Islam, once so pluralistic, progressive and tolerant, atrophy and ossify into a religion that is so far-removed and in conflict with the Europe it helped to civilise?
In an interview, Ali has said the last book of the quintet will be a modern novel set in the late 20th or early 21st century. No prizes for guessing which aspect of Islam and Empire he'll be dealing with there considering al-Idrisi's last thought in A Sultan in Palermo is "He would go to Baghdad, the city that will always be ours. The city that will never fall. The city that will never fall."
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