Fourth book of the internationally acclaimed Islam Quintet
TARIQ ALI is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics--including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome--as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.
A richly woven tapestry that merits comparison with Naguib
Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy.
*Kirkus Reviews*
A twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi had been told by his father
of the twelve calligraphers
who transcribed Arabic translations of al-Homa's poetry, working
under conditions of such
secrecy that if they were even to reveal the nature of their work,
'the executioner's scimitar,
in a lightning flash, would detach head from body'. But one of the
calligraphers, undaunted,
copied out parts of both al-Homa's poems and sent them to his
family in Damascus, along
with the information that the complete manuscripts were in secret
compartments in the
library of Palermo. Generations later, al-Idrisi finds himself in
the library at Palermo and,
of course, discovers the secret compartment. .Whether the subject
is heretical poetry, the
disunity of the Arabs or the threat that laughter poses to those in
power, these digressions
only add to the richness of the novel's texture. A marvellously
paced and boisterously told
novel of intrigue, love, insurrection and manipulation.
*Guardian*
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