Customer Reviews

A Sultan in Palermo (The Islam Quintet, Book Four)

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A sultan in palermo was the perfect final book to a wonderfully written series by tariq ali. i thoroughly enjoyed the whole group and was swept along with the main characters in all four of the books. the story of muhammad al-idrisi was supberly written, full of statesmanship, scholarship, and love. i highly recommend the whole series to anyone interested in the history of islam and of europe's encounters with muslims in the past. together these four books are a truly great addition to anyone's person library.

Having completed all the novel of the Tariq Ali's Islam Quintet, I would suggest that anyone starting this series not begin with "A Sultan in Palermo". While I enjoy and appreciate the historical and cultural backgrounds in Ali's novels, this book seemed to become somewhat preoccupied with the romantic and erotic interests of the protagonist Idrisi, to the extent that it becomes an annoying distraction to the historical plot. After Chapter Twelve, I began to find this book somewhat difficult to pick up again. No such problem with the earlier three works.

Taris Ali's quintet series is a telling response to anyone accusing muslims as having no culture and civilization. The series is a sincere attempt by Tariq to convey the magnitude of the contribution made by muslims in the past 1400 years; which has so easily been forgotten. It was the insightful writings of muslim scholars that inspired Europe to greater heights and helped it transgress towards the Renaissance.

Sultan in Palermo revisits the Middle Ages, this time in Sicily, an island conquered by the Aghlabids in the 10th century then reconqured by the Normans in 1092. It takes as its main characters two major historical figures, Sultan Rujeri of Siqillya - or, as he is otherwise known, King Roger II of Sicily, and his protégé, Muhammad al-Idrisi, a cartographer. The book is set at a time where the sultan is at the end of his life and is maneuvering through politics insecuring the throne for his future generations. In a cavalier compromise the sultan had accepted the demands of the barons to persecute General Phillip (sympathetic to the muslims) on trumped up treason. The equilibrium on the muslim-christian nexus gets shifted. A peaceful society so far; is embroiled in tension and is gripped with the anxiety of persecution. In this atmosphere al-Idrisi seems torn between his affiliation with the king and his people.

I felt that "The Sultan of Palermo" failed to meet the penetrating and encompassing story of the earlier three novels. The disturbing fact is that in the perverse environment; where destiny is at the cross roads. Al-Idrisi was expected to be sagacious; exhibiting maturity; intellect and in-tune with his people. Instead he is a disdainful aphrodisiac enamored with the art of love than politics. On the eve of the execution of General Phillip; his gravest concern is whether to spend the night with his wife or his sister in law. There are more bedroom heroics than courtroom guile.

This book is my favorite of the first four of the quintet (I have read Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, Book of Saladin, and Stone Woman). The author is a master of setting time, people and place in the historical context of an Arab Muslim world and a Christian world as they merge and coexist, as seen in a realistic manner from a human viewpoint. This story deals with love, power, loyalty, customs, fate, and the forces that push people towards and into uncertain futures as they continue to live their lives, with critical comments on both religions without bogging down the story or becoming a polemic on religious virtues or vices.
If you like very good writing, or medieval times, or stories about people, or stories of the days when Christians and Muslims almost worked it out to peacefully live together, this is a great book.

This is a review by Kamila Shamsie in THE GUARDIAN:

In A Sultan in Palermo, the fourth novel in Tariq Ali's Islam quintet, the 12th-century geographer al-Idrisi thinks back on his first encounter with the works of the Greek al-Homa (Homer). Al-Idrisi had been told by his father of the 12 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.


This story echoes a tale from Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, the first novel of the quintet, which tells of the soldiers in Granada who are ordered by the archbishop to take all the manuscripts from the library and burn them, so that Moorish culture itself may be incinerated. Some of the soldiers deliberately drop manuscripts on the street, where they are gathered up by the Moors and carried to safety.
It is very much in the spirit of the calligrapher and the soldiers - who ensure that certain forms of knowledge survive the worst demands of the age - that Tariq Ali has written his Islam quintet. Prompted to start it by hearing a comment during the Gulf war that Muslims have no culture, he has gone back through different periods of Islamic history to show times when learning and culture were synonymous with Islam - and appreciated as such by the most enlightened Christians.

Among the most enlightened of these Christians is Sultan Rujeri of Siqillya - or, as he is otherwise known, King Roger II of Sicily. He is the eponymous Sultan in Palermo, and at the start of the novel, in 1153, seems likely to be one of its heroes. Rujeri is al-Idrisi's patron and friend; together they discuss such matters as the wonder of al-Homa, Rujeri's disdain for the Crusades, the weakness of Arab statecraft, and the misfortune of Rujeri's Norman cousins who conquered England - "a land of perpetual winter in the Ocean of Darkness". But Rujeri is also a man at the end of his life, concerned about securing his throne for future generations - which cannot be done, he feels, without the backing of the barons and bishops who want proof of his loyalty to the cross rather than the crescent. The "sacrifice" Rujeri makes to preserve his throne creates a rift between him and al-Idrisi - though earlier their friendship managed to survive Rujeri's decision to take Mayya, the woman al-Idrisi loves, as a concubine.

The tale of Rujeri and al-Idrisi is only one strand in this marvellously paced and boisterously told novel of intrigue, love, insurrection and manipulation. There is also the tale of "the Trusted One", the broken-hearted ascetic who must find a way to transform the rhetoric of rebellion into action; the tale of al-Idrisi's children with their differing fortunes (and three different mothers); the tale of al-Idrisi on an enchanted isle, which may well be the island of the lotus-eaters which Odysseus visited with his crew; and, most compellingly, the tale of al-Idrisi and the two sisters he loves. It is this final tale alone which made me wish the novel wasn't quite so fast-paced: the sisters Mayya and Bilkas could well have done with more attention than they receive, particularly at the end.

Although events move quickly, there is plenty of space for reflection and asides. 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.

As with all the previous novels in the quintet, A Sultan in Palermo stands on its own, with a different location and time period. But the books do echo each other in various ways - and not only for the manner in which calligraphers and soldiers reflect each others' actions through the centuries. Al-Idrisi's reference to Gharnata (Granada) in 1153 inevitably creates a bridge to the Gharnata of 1499 which is the setting of Shadow of the Pomegranate Tree. Both novels are set at moments when Christian rulers choose violence over tolerance in their dealings with the Muslim subjects, resulting in failed and bloody Muslim rebellions. And both have a nostalgia for the time just before that moment, when tolerance was briefly the order of the day and culture and learning flourished.

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".

It should be clear by now that there is, of course, one other story - a story still being written - which A Sultan in Palermo calls to mind. The novel was written between August 2001 and August 2004; no need to state all of import that happened between those dates, or the significance of al-Idrisi's last thoughts in the novel: "He would go to Baghdad, the city that will always be ours. The city that will never fall. The city that will never fall."

I just finished "A Sultan in Palermo," the first among Tariq Ali's "Islam Quintet" that I have read, and absolutely loved it. The scene is 12th Century Sicily, an independent kingdom with an Arab Muslim majority and a tolerant, but dying, Norman Christian ruler. This book convinced me to read the four remaining novels in the Quintet, and possibly Ali's non-fiction works as well. The novel displays Tariq Ali's wonderful historical scholarship, wit, humanism, and story-telling skills. I question some of Ali's political views but I have great respect for him as a writer. I will keep this novel and read it again one day.