The Islam Quintet

The fourth volume in Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet is out; sounds like it's an interesting revision of history.

Chris Foran in The Walrus:

Among those publishing at maximum volume since 9/11 has been the historian and essayist Tariq Ali. Both his The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity and Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq give from the international Left at least as good as they get from the American Right.
But that same Tariq Ali has also nearly completed the sort of quiet writing project seemingly out of step with our loud age. A Sultan in Palermo is the fourth volume in the Islam Quintet, a series of historical novels that probe the lengthy encounter between Islam and Western Christendom. The series is revisionist in impulse, wishing to suggest that the dominant history of Europe in the last millennium, if not quite the lie told by the winner, as Napoleon Bonaparte once quipped, has certainly involved obscuring the truth about those who "lost" the continent. "If things go on like this," a character says at the start of the first novel, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, "nothing will be left of us except a fragrant memory."

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

It is worth noting that Ali chooses to set his "Islam" novel of 1153 in a Sicily ruled by a Christian Hauteville rather than in an Andalusia ruled by a Muslim al-Muwahiddin (Almohad). It is not Muslim military and political power that interests him so much as the co-mingling of religious cultures (Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Olympian) and all that was lost when the religions pulled violently apart from one another. For this, it is not only the Christian leaders who are to blame. Al-Idrisi recalls, with sadness, the Muslim "rebels with long beards belonging to sects that preached the virtues of purity and abstinence ... [who] burnt the books of learning, outlawed philosophical discourse, punished scholars and poets, thus beginning the process that would allow the enemy to enter through the pores of our weaknesses and destroy everything".