Critics have viewed Tariq Ali as a dissenter for whom dissent (from orthodoxy) is a valorous activity
All of these novels spotlight a turning point in Muslim history when ‘a cosmopolitan but predominantly Islamic culture is on the verge of collapse or defeat’ excepting of course The Book of Saladin but even there it is implied that the Muslim conquests will soon be reversed
Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (Islam Quintet 1)
The Book of Saladin (Islam Quintet 2)
The Stone Woman (Islam Quintet 3)
A Sultan in Palermo (Islam Quintet 4)
5. Night of the Golden Butterfly (Islam Quintet 5)
Author: Tariq Ali
Published by: Ilqa Publications (An Imprint of Readings),
Main Boulevard, Gulberg 2, Lahore
Pages: 263, 358, 260, 228, 254 – Price: Rs.495/- (for each of the five volumes)
Tariq Ali (b.1943) is a well-known politico-literary figure. A scion of an acclaimed Pakistani lineage ascending to Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan (the Unionist Prime Minister of the Punjab – 1937-42; 1892-1942), Mazhar Ali Khan (a socialist intellectual and veteran journalist: 1918-93) and Begum Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan (a noted Pakistani women’s rights activist: 1924-2015), Tariq Ali is an expatriate Pakistani writer, journalist, and filmmaker, based in England. He has written several books, on geo-politics, religion, culture, history, post-colonialism, and literature. He has inherited his socialist leanings from his learned parents and is currently a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso (a biannual Spanish journal seeking to review the activities of a social reformist group of trans-national intellectuals/activists combating the tyrannical economy of capitalism).
The Islam Quintet is a serialised set of five novels (as mentioned in the caption) that were published between the years 1992 and 2010. The first four in the series ‘tell the story of how the Islamic Empires rose and fell in a non-Eurocentric manner’. The focus of the story is on the Moors, not on the Europeans. The fifth and the last one viz., Night of the Golden Butterfly is set in the modern world and it seeks to complete ‘an epic panorama that began in fifteenth century Moorish Spain’, and moves ‘between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing’. It reveals Tariq Ali in ‘full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating’.
Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree has been classified as ‘a novel of the deep roots of the clash between the West and Islam’. It narrates a family saga of ‘those doomed inhabitants, besieged on all sides by intolerant Christendom’, who tried to survive after the fall of Granada. The story is focused on the Hudayl clan, who after migrating from Damascus, settled in a village on the outskirts of Granada for many generations.
The Book of Saladin is a rich chronicle triangularly set in Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem. The fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem (1187), is transcribed here by a Jew named Ibn Yakub. The narrative bears an intermixture of stories ‘brimming over with warmth, earthy humour and passions in which ideals clash with realities and dreams are confounded by desires’.
The Stone Woman is a family drama ‘staged’ outside Istanbul in the twilight era of the Ottoman Empire. Its distinctive features are the artistic texture of the narrative and ‘the challenge it poses to stereotyped images of life under Islam’. The history of the retired Ottoman notable Iskender Pasha’s family reflects ‘the growing degeneration of the Empire they have served for the last five hundred years’.
Thus the rise and fall of Muslim history as a narrative of impersonal forces, is transformed by the novelist into a story of individuals and their near ‘eccentric trajectories’
A Sultan in Palermo is a mythic novel featuring the life and loves of the medieval Muslim geographer Muhammad al Idrisi at the court of Roger II, the Norman king ruling Sicily in the 12th century AD which was a period of La Convivencia when believers in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism lived together in peace and harmony. It is a novel of intrigue, love, insurrection and manipulation.
Night of the Golden Butterfly is the only novel of the series that is set in the present. It moves between the cities of the 21st century – Lahore, London, Paris, and Beijing. Here the narrator is a Pakistani novelist named Dara which echoes his namesake in Mohsin Hamid’s novel Moth Smoke. The novel is partly set in ‘the bohemia of 1960s Lahore, a café culture where art and politics are mixed with obscene jokes and where Ali himself obviously feels at home’.
All of these novels spotlight a turning point in Muslim history when ‘a cosmopolitan but predominantly Islamic culture is on the verge of collapse or defeat’ excepting of course The Book of Saladin but even there it is implied that the Muslim conquests will soon be reversed. A persistent spirit of factionalism is the root cause of the civilisational decline (cf. Ibn Khaldun) affecting the Muslim history of the time spans relevant to these novels.
Critics have viewed Tariq Ali as a dissenter for whom dissent (from orthodoxy) is a valorous activity. His writings are characterised by wit also which serves to hone their ‘combativeness’, rooted in his pro-Leftist political creed inspired by the conventions of Reformation and Enlightenment. Thus the rise and fall of Muslim history as a narrative of impersonal forces, is transformed by the novelist into a story of individuals and their near ‘eccentric trajectories’.