Seven Oaks Magazine.

There exist roughly two stale, suffocating versions of the history of Islamic civilizations competing worldwide for the mantle of capital-N ‘Narrative.’ The first is rooted in the callous, obliterating hubris of the American empire and its allies, seeking to negate the grandeur of Islamic history in order to facilitate (re)colonization; these are the interests who took great pains to immediately secure post-Hussein Iraq’s vast oil resources, while leaving looters and pirates to freely pillage the unfathomable and unguarded cultural reservoirs of Baghdad, a city once at the centre of the intellectual world. It was one of the representatives of this current who, in a form, provided the impetus for Tariq Ali’s monumental, five-novel undertaking in historical fiction, The Islam Quintet, by so enraging the author with the imperious and solipsistic pronouncement that ‘The Arabs are a people without a culture.’

The second current vying to define Islamic history within its own parameters is also, paradoxically, rooted in the machinations of American imperialism: The obscurant fundamentalists who’ve taken Washington’s rigid religiosity and opposition to socialism, spinning it into a contrarian conservatism reliant – like its Christian, Jewish and Hindu cousin fundamentalisms – on the myths of a wholly imagined, puritanical past.

Ali’s Islam Quintet is a powerful, simultaneous negation of both of these bankrupt pseudo-histories. The project – which began as a single, stand alone novel about the fall of Muslim Spain (the beautiful and horrifying Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree) – took on a new scope at the insistence of the late Edward Said, and with this week’s Canadian publication of the fourth instalment, A Sultan in Palermo, Ali comes a step closer to completing an undertaking which has already been compared favourably to Naguib Mahfouz’s sublime Cairo Trilogy.

A Sultan in Palermo tells the story of Sicilian Islam through the life of Muhammad al-Idrisi, the iconic cartographer and physician. This instalment of the Quintet works to establish Muslim intellectual history as a Mediterranean fact, outlining the ways in which the intellectual labour of Muslims – in this case, specifically the Arabs of Sicily – provided both the metaphorical and literal link between the intellectual histories of the ancient Roman and Hellenic worlds and the Europe that emerged after the Dark Ages through translations of (and elaborations upon) Platonic, Aristotelian, mathematical and astrological texts.

Far from the static, conservative and fanatical version of the Islamic world embraced by Taliban and Republican alike, the 12 th century world described by Ali is one of ribald, bawdy poetry, sensuality, sex of all kinds, wine, weed and class conflict. His prose is sumptuous without depending on the kinds of incessant, ornamental similes that have prevented some of us from sharing in the otherwise universal delight drawn from the fiction of Salman Rushdie or Ali’s fellow political progressive (and brilliant essayist), Arundhati Roy; this writing is flowered, without being flowery.

A Sultan in Palermo is tastefully charged with politics, dealing with the delicate questions and grey areas presented by occupation, collaboration, rebellion, self-sacrifice, and the role of the intellectual. Without moralizing or reducing the dimensions of his work, Ali has laced the story with commentary of great relevance to contemporary political realities; the perils of – and, ultimately, tragedies wrought by – disunity in Islamic Europe are of huge significance this week, when, according to the Guardian Unlimited, U.S. officials are looking into talks with “ factions which could be coaxed away from violence and into mainstream politics.”

Also refreshing is Tariq Ali’s loving touch with the English language, in a week when the stammering butcher Donald Rumsfeld told reporters: “ The fact is that if you look at the context of [Vice President Dick Cheney’s] remarks, last throes could be a violent last throe, just as well as a placid or calm last throe. Look it up in the dictionary.” A loving touch with language and – also unlike Rumsfeld, whose infamous photo shaking hands with Saddam Hussein is available anywhere on the net – a long, understanding view of history.

Disclosure: Two members of Seven Oaks staff, including this writer, have been volunteering help with the redesign and administration of Tariq Ali’s website, tariqali.org.