The World's Literature in Europe discussion

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali is the first of a five-book series, which we will read this summer. It takes place after Ferdinand and Isabella reclaimed Iberia from the Moors, who cultivated the land to be fruitful, established villages, and increased its wealth. The plot revolves upon the characters of a noble family of multiple generations descended from an illustrious forebear Ibn Farid, whose saber remains in their possession.

I found the story to be a mix of joy and pain, and often suspenseful. It's full of romance, family life, culture, history, wisdom, and foolishness. With Granada ruled by Castilians, inhabitants of a Moorish village on the outskirts attempt to sustain their way of life and practice their religion, according to the treaty made after the Reconquest. Nevertheless, an evil Archbishop rejects it and plans to force non-believers to convert to the Roman Church or face the consequences. The dialogue brings out musings on what actions tend to exacerbate conflict as well as which organization of society debilitates a community. It will be interesting to discover how the remaining books differ.

I read this book several years ago and recall liking it quite a bit. Not sure if I can read the series along with the group but I believe I have it on my kindle so maybe.

These are topics for discussion about this book presented by Nasser at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF4hS...

The five books of the series;

The author;

The coexistence of Moors, Jews, and Christians in the six or seven hundred years before the events in the story;

The superficial conversions, as noted in the chess set pieces;

The attempt to suppress Islamic culture, knowledge, rituals, and daily activities;

The character Al Zindik.

Sue wrote: "...I have it on my kindle so maybe."

Next week, I'll read The Book of Saladin: A Novel .

Is the series to be spread out over the summer or over the next month?

Sue wrote: "...over the summer or over the next month?"

It's three months -- over the summer (July, August, September) -- unhurried. Is that close to the mark or too long?

That sounds good to me though I may be having a rescheduled surgery in the middle of this time. Maybe I can read it during recovery too. I’ve intended to read this for a long time, ever since I read the first book of the series.

My review:
The first book of the Islam Quintet, Shadows of the Pomegrante Tree is a historical novel about the destruction of Grenada/Andalusia after the Christian Reconquest. It begins in December of 1499 with the Christians publicly burning hundreds of thousands of Arabic manuscripts confiscated from the 195 libraries of the city of Gharnata at the order of Archbishop Ximenes de Cisneros, Queen Isabella's confessor and the symbol here for the ignorance and intolerance of the Spanish Christians. Despite the assurances of Ferdinand and Isabella that the Moslems would not be persecuted, the Archbishop is determined to destroy a culture which in its arts and scholarship is far above that of the Christians. Before long, he would progress from burning books to burning Moslems and Jews in the autos-da-fe.

The scene then shifts to the Banu Hudayl, the estate of the noble Hudayl family, who are the central characters of the novel: the parents Umar and Zubayda, and their children Zuhayr, Khultum, Hind, and Yazid, as well as various other relatives and servants. Throughout the book, the more far-sighted characters realize that there are only three real choices for the Moslems: to accept the forced conversions to Christianity, which may or may not protect their lives and property from the greed and fanaticism of the Church and Inquisition, to engage in an ultimately hopeless resistance, or to abandon their lands and flee to the Maghreb (Northern Africa). All three choices are illustrated in the novel, but most of the population chooses the suicidal course of pretending to themselves that the Christians will behave in a civilized manner and leave them alone if they do nothing to provoke them.

Tariq Ali, raised in a secular leftist family in Pakistan, does not idealize the Islamic rulers or the religion; some of the subplots show the rigidity of the feudal code of honor, many of the positive characters are religious skeptics, and it's generally accepted by all the characters that the Sultans brought the disaster on themselves by their corruption and divisions, fighting amongst themselves rather than uniting to defend their lands and people against the Christians.

The novel ends with the situation still in flux, but it leaves no doubt about the ultimate outcome, which we know from history: the Christians triumph and Spain, which was a major center of learning and civilization in the Middle Ages, becomes what it has been for the last half-millennium, one of the most backward and reactionary countries in Western Europe and one of the poorest despite its empire in the New World.


I started The Book of Saladin tonight.

I begin my reading tomorrow. Work keeps getting in the way of reading. So, while I wait for my car to be inspected, I can devote time to reading.

I am enjoying my reading. A fun way to spend my Summer.

Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree is so well composed that I enjoyed reading it despite the heart-breaking story. I am very curious to see how the rest of the quintet unfolds, especially given the personal convictions of Tariq Ali.

I followed up on the history of Hernán Cortés a bit and found this article which may (or may not) be of interest to some of you:
Cortés and Montezuma: the conquering of Tenochtitlan.

I wonder to what extent the book makes a point of the fact of the co-existence of the three religions in al-Andalus before the Reconquest. The prior coexistence is mentioned in the narrative on multiple occasions, but what is the implicit message behind it? Is there one at all?

I also wonder why Tariq Ali picked this specific period as his subject, that is, the time at the very beginning of the Reconquest? It seems that the decades before and after the narrative would make a good subject of a historical novel as well (such as the aftermath of the Reconquest). Presumably there is an intended meaning in this choice of the author, but if so, what is it?

After reading The Book of Saladin, the choice of time frame for the previous book makes perfect sense, given that the social-political conditions of the two connect. I also found this short interview with Tariq Ali on the idea behind the series, where he explained why Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree takes off where it does (the interview is in English, despite the title in French).

As for the superficial details, both books remind me of Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire saga, although I never saw any connection between these. Perhaps it is because of the language and the particular construction of the universe.

I read this book a while ago and liked it very much.
It is a period in history that has always interested me very much.
Several thoughts:
I appreciated that Ali showed how things change in history, that while nowadays many in the West view Islam and Muslim countries are being backward and fanatic, Ali shows that at the time of the reconquest it was the Christians who were backward and fanatic.
Sometimes it seemed like Ali depicted this in a rather heavy handed way. The Spanish are all depicted as inhuman monsters and the Arabs depicted as being all so tolerant and liberal it sometimes seemed over the top.
At the time I read this book the liberal attitude towards sex seemed unbelievable. For example a young women ( I forget her name as it's been a while ) sleeps with her fiancé before their marriage and the mother actually walks in on them and is not upset.
Another example would be when one of the characters ( again I forget all the names ) confesses both to his fiancé and her father that he'd previously had a sexual relationship with another man and both father and daughter react fine with it.
I was going to write this off to the authors imagination, but then spoke to an acquaintance who is a professor of medieval Arab history. The professor confirmed than in Muslim Spain depending on which period they actually were quite liberal sexually and there is a lot of erotic poetry and literature confirming it. From what I've been researching same sex relations were also not uncommon, so I guess this was not Tariq Ali's wishful thinking!

I'm a bit confused; I was totally sure that there were comments here on all the five books and that I had even posted my reviews? Maybe I'm just hallucinating because of the stress I've been under. In any case I will post (or repost) my other four reviews.

The Book of Saladin

This is the second book of the Islam Quintet, which is not a single story in multiple volumes but five separate historical novels about the history of the Islamic world and its relationship to the Christian West. In The Book of Saladin Tariq Ali takes us back about three centuries before the time of the first book and presents the life of the Sultan Salah-ud-Din, known to the West as Saladin.

I remember when I was first learning to read my favorite books were the Landmark series of histories, which like most children's history books were more like historical novels than nonfiction, and one that I particularly remember was about Richard the Lionheart. Later on, I read other books about the Crusades. All were written by Christian, or at least Western, authors, and even when they made an attempt to be "objective" they were all presented from the perspective of the Crusaders and the attempt to control the "Holy Land". Here the same events are presented as the struggle of the inhabitants of the Middle East to defend their lands against a barbarian invasion from the West and regain the cities which were under foreign occupation, particularly of course al-Kuds (Jerusalem).

In an author's note at the beginning, Ali tells us that all the important male characters except the narrator and the old retainer Shadhi are historical; the female characters are all fictional, since the historical sources don't include women. He also gives a little background for those who are unfamiliar with the situation; the novel begins in 1181, just over a century since the First Crusade had occupied Jerusalem and the coastal cities of the Levant. The Moslems are divided between the Sunni Caliphate in Baghdad and the Shiite Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo, both weak, and the major cities are all ruled by separate and rival dynasties.

There are many similarities with the first novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree; in the first novel, al-Andalus had been conquered by the Christians because of the divisions among the Moslem leaders, just as had happened in the Middle East; in both books there is an emphasis on the barbarity, brutality and ignorance of the Christians and much mention of books, libraries and scholarship among the Moslems. From time to time in the second book there is discussion of various Arab and Jewish philosophers and skeptics, many of them from al-Andalus. The most famous of all Jewish philosophers, here called by the Arab name Musa ibn Maymun, but better known to the West as Moses Maimonides, is an important secondary character and begins the action of the novel by suggesting the narrator as a scribe to take down the memoirs of Saladin. Many of the major characters in both novels are religious skeptics, which may be an anachronism reflecting Ali's own views, as undoubtedly is the feminism of the women in both books.

In this book, however, the outcome is different; Saladin, a Kurdish warrior in the service of one of the Sultans, conquers first Fatimid Egypt where he becomes the Sultan, then returns to capture all the major Islamic cities and unify them under his leadership. He then drives the Christians out of Jerusalem (which despite many later Crusades they were never able to retake until the British imperialist conquests of the nineteenth century) and most of the coastal cities with the exception of Tyre. At the end of the novel, it is the divisions of the Christians between Philip of France and Richard the Lionheart which cause the failure of the third crusade, shortly before Saladin's death.

The Stone Woman

The third book in the Islam Quintet is set in 1899, in the last decades of the tottering Ottoman Empire. It deals with the family of an Ottoman nobleman, Iskander Pasha, of ultimately Albanian descent. (When I read this I was startled to realize that this novel is set in approximately the same time and place as Kadare's Palace of Dreams which I read a few weeks earlier, because there is no resemblance at all between the imaginary Empire of Kadare and the realistic Empire of Ali.) The first person narrator is Iskander's daughter Nilofer, who ran away to marry a Greek schoolteacher when she was thirteen and has just returned nine years later with her young son Orhan to the family's summer palace a short journey from Istanbul. A few days after her return, her father suffers a stroke which deprives him of speech. The other siblings also return, the oldest Salman who was also estranged from his father and has been a diamond merchant in Alexandria, the younger brother Halil who is a general, and the older married sister Zeynep. Iskander's brother Memed and his lover the Baron have also returned from Berlin, and near the end of the book the other brother Kemel, a seagoing merchant, also arrives. The "stone woman" of the title is a rock, perhaps originally a pagan statue, to which the family members confess their secrets in chapters which are not in the voice of Nilofer; this is a structural device to let the reader know things that would not be otherwise revealed without flashbacks.

The narrative seems focused at first on the domestic and romantic history of the family, but as the book progresses we learn of a conspiracy against the Sultan. In the beginning, the political discussions seem somewhat detached from the plot of the book, but later they are illustrated by events in the plot. I thought that structurally this book was weaker than the first two books. There is much discussion of the coming collapse of the Empire, the need to modernize and eliminate the influence of the "beards", the Islamic clergy who are considered responsible by the characters for the decline of the Empire and its weakness in the face of the British, French, Germans and Russians. Note that the characters are more anti-clerical than anti-religious, although there is some discussion of Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed that Ali, as a Marxist, has not tried to illustrate the economic causes which underlay the decline, but perhaps he has simply chosen to show us the ideas of the opponents of the Sultan at the time. There are forebodings of the Armenian massacre in the village of the servant Petrossian. We also see the influence of Western events through a journal Iskander wrote in Paris during the Commune.

One of the blurbs on the back compares the three first books to Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy; if we leave aside the fact that Ali is not as accomplished a writer as Mahfouz, I think there are resemblances. I would say this is a worthwhile book and series to read.

A Sultan in Palermo

The fourth book in the Islam Quintet, A Sultan in Palermo returns to the period just before the second book, the middle of the twelfth century, in Siqilliya (Sicily). The main character is a historical person, although one about whom not a lot is known: the cartographer and geographer Muhammed al-Idrisi, who made one of the most accurate world maps before the modern period, and accompanied it with a descriptive geography. He is completing the writing of his books at the court of the dying King Roger, also known as the Sultan Rujari, a descendant of the Normans who conquered the island from the Moslems. In the same style as the earlier novels of the Quintet, the loves and domestic affairs of al-Idrisi take place against the background of the conflict between the Moslem population and the Christian barbarian overlords.

Night of the Golden Butterfly

The fifth and last novel of the Islam Quintet is set in the present, probably not too long before the book was written. The premise is that Plato, a painter from Pakistan, commissions the narrator, Dara, an old friend from Lahore living in exile in London, to write a novel about his life. The book then describes the narrator's relationship with Plato and various other friends from the Partition of India and Pakistan through the present in flashbacks. (Dara is the same age and has much in common with Tariq Ali himself.) The foreground is occuppied by the personal relations of the characters, but the background describes the political and social realities of the country. The climax of the book is the unveiling of a symbolic painting by Plato, which defines the four "cancers" of the country: America, the military, the mullahs, and corruption. A character called Naughty Lateef satirizes the Westerm media's use of women "victims" from the Islamic countries to justify hatred for Moslems and by extension the foreign policy of the Western powers. Plato's girlfriend Zaynab, a real victim ("married to the Koran" to deprive her of an inheritance), emphasizes that the problem is not Islam but the backward economic structures, which use Islam as an excuse -- not much different than the "Christian" Right here. "So they're all doing religion, I thought to myself. And France, like Italy, despite pretensions to the contrary, is a Catholic country. The veneer of the Enlightenment is wearing off very fast."

I was a bit surprised and a little disappointed that, as with the earlier books, there wasn't actually much about those economic issues, especially given Ali's background, but the central organizing theme of all five books is the relations between the Islamic world and the West. (Maybe I shouldn't say "West", since one of the most interesting parts of this volume is the story of Jindié's ancestors in the nineteenth-century Moslem revolt in Yunnan against the Manchu dynasty, a historical event I hadn't ever heard of before.)

Other major characters are Plato and Dara's old friends Zahid (husband of Jindié), who became a famous doctor in the United States, joined the Republican Party, and then was caught up in the reaction after 9/11 and moved to London, and "Confucius" (Hanif), Jindié's brother, a once dogmatic Maoist who suffers from total amnesia (obviously symbolic.)

James wrote: "...I was totally sure that there were comments here on all the five books and that I had even posted my reviews?..."

It seems I'm more occupied than ever and wish I better organized the time I do have!

James wrote: "The Book of Saladin

This is the second book of the Islam Quintet..."

I like several characters in the story and wonder about depicting figures such as Saladin and Marcus Aurelius with honesty. The author made them very human in their contradictions and, at times, nobility. The narrator (scribe) used a lot of internal dialogue, informing about his temperament and the situation around him. His conversational exchanges (relationships) with Saladin, Aurelius, Shadhi, and female characters were the key to unlocking their fictional personalities. Simultaneously, the book moves without much action during the talking about and preparations for the campaigns. I find your factual background for the novel and series to be helpful.

Gustave Doré. "Saladin the Victorious"

Jalilah wrote: "I read this book a while ago and liked it very much.
It is a period in history that has always interested me..."

I also like "Shadows of the Pomegranate." The saying that 'the more things change, the more they remain the same' is not universally true. If it were so, there would be no theory of cyclical history. A reason for studying history, science, or any subject is to change your perceptions toward the truth. It may not be so much the learning from the past to not make similar mistakes but taking us out of our stagnation with our immediate surroundings.

Aleksandra wrote: "...both books remind me of Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire saga,..."

Martin's series "A Song of Ice and Fire" of which 'The Game of Thrones' is the first book, followed by several others, could be the basis for comparative reading with the Tariq Ali quintet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hun...

Listening to the video of Tariq Ali, I gather that the theme of the quintet is the clash between the Christian and Islamic civilizations. It was interesting to me his comments about his friend Edward Said's books.

Aleksandra wrote: "...Cortés and Montezuma: the conquering of Tenochtitlan..."

The deeds of conquest through aggression and worse are unfortunate aspects of history, especially as a state of co-existence is doable as history proves. The disruption and ensuing pain follow a fanaticism for ideology justified by a corrupt doctrine of religion or wealth carried out by humans' dark side.

James wrote: "The Stone Woman
...Ali, as a Marxist, has not tried to illustrate the economic causes which underlay the decline, but perhaps he has simply chosen to show us the ideas of the opponents of the Sultan at the time...."

According to Ali's words during an interview with Talat Ahmed, the Ottoman Empire's economy was the dominion of one family. It isolated itself from capitalism emergent in other countries.

"The period of the Ottoman Empire coincided with the growth of capitalism in western Europe," says Tariq, "but the Ottomans were completely sealed off from it." The demise of the empire can be attributed to the social and economic structure of the state, which, according to Tariq, "was totally centralised. None of the regions or cities was allowed the autonomy necessary for capitalism to grow and function.

"Merchant trade was highly developed but the transition from merchant trade to capitalism proper never took place in Ottoman lands because of the ways social, economic, cultural, political and religious power were concentrated in the hands of one family."

--http://socialistreview.org.uk/311/int...

A very good interview. That's what I was hoping for more in the novels themselves. I'm currently reading a collection of Ali's essays, which are very interesting. He interprets Don Quixote as a hidden attack on Catholicism from the viewpoint of the persecuted Jewish conversos which makes me want to re-read a book I wasn't in a position to really understand in high school.